This article describes some of the obstacles encountered and the successes achieved in building university-community collaborations and local partnerships that met both community and university needs at many levels while the developmental needs of youth were being met through the interventions designed. The YDP succeeded in both testing existing human-development theories and in providing direction for their revision and/or development of new and integrated theories that provide a better fit for the empirical data derived from a "real-world" setting. One of the distinctive contributions of the YDP is its development of instruments that reliably measure subjective responses that reveal positive changes in perceptions of self and identity that lead to behavioral change. A technique for coding and analyzing such responsive data in the course of evaluations was also developed. To date, no external public funding has been used to support the project (e.g., Federal or State grant or contract funding). All of the support needed for the development, implementation, and evaluation of the project and its programs has been obtained from public and private resources available locally in the community. 17 references