Rather than viewing youth as an isolated and alienated subculture, it is more useful to view the needs of youth as largely determined by where and how they live, and to recognize that they differ from one another just as adults do. Professionals and volunteers in community youth programs need to understand how the youth they work with experience the contextual differences of their environments, and how the services they provide can be facilitated or confounded by community differences. Each community's unwritten set of expectations and standards is its "youth charter." The community's charter must empower significant adults in youth's lives to provide needed services and supports. A youth program must take a multidimensional approach in an expanded social network to provide social support to community youth. Moralistic, compensatory, medical, and enlightenment models of helping can all be appropriately applied to given circumstances. An ecological approach to youth services can lead to the more effective use of the individual and network resources already in the community. (SLD)