Each section -- reviewing geographic responsibility, comprehensiveness, accessibility, continuity of care, responsiveness to community needs, and funding -- presents an evolutionary perspective along with information about the current status of runaway centers. Runaway centers, begun without professional ideology, serve a specific population and maintain the kind of responsiveness to people's problems which the founders of the community mental health center had envisioned. Almost every center provides its 10- to 17-year-old population with all five of the basic services which were originally mandated for community mental health centers as well as several of the additional services which have more recently been prescribed -- emergency services 24-hours-a-day, inpatient and outpatient services, partial hospitalization, consultation and education, screening services, followup care, transitional services, and alcohol and drug abuse services. Runaway centers incorporate mental health professionals in their programs and often use a 'therapeutic' model without adopting an 'illness' model of diagnosis, treatment, and cure and without stigmatizing those who come to them for help as mentally ill. They continue to serve 'a group that nobody wants' and to expand and change their services to meet the changing needs of this group and their families. The chapter includes 21 references.