While at the California Health Research Foundation in the late 1980s, Maureen Sedonaen saw first-hand that none of the major programs addressing youth-related social issues had young people at the table in determining goals and strategies. Back then, a program called Friday Night Live was primarily a drunk driving prevention program, born of the dark and very real statistics about how many young people were dying in drinking driving accidents, most of which occurred on Friday nights. As time went by, practitioners saw two themes emerge.

First, they started to recognize that an issue can not be effectively addressed in isolation, that drinking and driving could not be directly addressed without looking at the full range of youth experience, from school and peer relationships, to home and civic environments, to alcohol industry targeted advertising and beyond. Second, they started to imagine the possibilities for young people if the programs that served them were interested in more than just prevention, if programs wanted to help youth develop and contribute their time, energy and talents in the present instead of merely preventing them from making "bad choices."

In response to these revelations while working as a consultant to the Friday Night Live program, Maureen Sedonaen founded the Youth Leadership Institute to develop young leaders and advocate for their involvement in community and organizational governance. YLI quickly started building an organization that would engage young people in examining the issues that were important to them, that would give them real power to make real change, that would be about promoting their ideas. The underlying goal was social change and justice for young people and for communities.

Soon, YLI operated four programs in Marin County, which together offered young people a wide range of options for getting involved in their communities. The vision of the Institute began bursting at the edges, and spilling into neighboring counties, throughout the state, and across the nation. As YLI became more involved with youth movements and development efforts around the state, we began to see the possibilities and the potential for a new kind of institute, one that possessed the expertise and talent of a credible research institute while maintaining a vibrant connection to young people through community-level work.

Today, the Youth Leadership Institute is a "community-based institute" a term that we coined to describe our hybrid structure and practice. YLI has been recognized nationally as a key leader and advocate for creating communities and systems that support positive youth development.

These dimensions of YLI work in tandem to share and promote best and promising practices in the field of youth development in general, and specifically in our three areas of expertise: drug and alcohol abuse prevention, youth philanthropy, and policy and civic engagement. Our programs give us a unique and direct connection to young people in our local communities, which serve as learning laboratories for us in our three discipline areas. We provide training and technical assistance to practitioners, youth and systems all over the country, as we have been doing for years. In addition, we develop and research model practices for replication in similar local communities, craft policies and organizational practices that ensure youth engagement and lead to greater social justice for youth, and actively advocate with and for young people in issues that affect them at the local, state and national level.

The real life experiences that happen in our community-based programs are our constant reality check — they are the lifeblood of our training and social change work.