Enabling youth to make positive life choices
The America’s Rising Stars Process is designed to help today's youth develop their personal leadership skills and begin to set goals and directions for their lives beginning at an earlier age. Leadership is essential in enabling youth to develop character, confidence, and values that promote the understanding of healthy behavior.

A Formula For Success
Rising Stars is an innovative and unique inside-out self-development process. This research-based approach focuses on three critical elements that promote personal leadership, healthy behaviors, and the skills employers identify as essential. These elements are developed, applied, and reinforced throughout the process and through a follow-up process to strengthen and perpetuate successful behaviors.

Outcomes:

Healthy Behavior (protective)

• Drug-free
• Non-violent
• Law-abiding
• Social confidence
• Abstain from early sexual activity

Thriving (enhancement/personal optimism)

• School success
• Affirmation of diversity
• Compassion for others
• Leadership
• Choosing a healthy lifestyle (nutrition and exercise)

  
Resiliency

• Capacity to rebound in the face of adversity
• Participant successfully applies skills from their assessment
• Seeks out options from diverse alternatives
• Able to make goal-oriented informed decisions
• Communicates effectively in diverse situations (socially confident)
• Demonstrates leadership in various situations
• Team player and/or leader
• Provides a vision and purpose to a cause
• Uses influence to obtain planned outcomes 

Outcomes of the pilot participants

• Graduates had a 40% grade point increase
• Graduates had a 56% reduction in school disciplinary/truancy incident
• College attendance within one pilot site increased from 5% to 75%

 “For the first time in the history of this country, young people are less healthy and less prepared to take their places in society than their parents. Moreover, this is happening at a time when our society is more complex, more challenging, and more competitive than ever before.”
- a recent American Medical Association report

©2009 Resource Associates Corporation & Performance Development Strategies, LLC