Wyman's Teen Outreach Program (TOP)

Wyman's Teen Outreach Program (TOP) is an evidence-based, national youth development program designed to prevent adolescent problem behaviors by helping adolescents age twelve through eighteen develop healthy behaviors, life skills, and a sense of purpose. TOP uses volunteer community service to reduce teen pregnancy, school failure, and school suspension rates among middle and high school students. The program targets males and females who enroll voluntarily into the program in school, after-school or community-based settings.

Wyman's TOP has an explicit developmental concentration which focuses the adolescents on establishing their competence and autonomy in a context that maintains their sense of their relationships to important adults, which helps teens understand and evaluate their life options. TOP accomplishes this in three interrelated elements:

• 1) supervised community service learning
• 2) weekly group discussions and experiential activities which use the TOP curriculum, Changing Scenes, and
• 3) consistent guidance and support of adult facilitators.

TOP providers ensure a minimum dosage of one session per week for nine months. Each session lasts 1-2 hours. Providers place at least one trained facilitator for each group of teens and a minimum of 20 hours a year of volunteer service for each participant. Volunteer activities are intended to respond to the needs and capacities of both students and local communities.

TOP is made available in communities through organizations or schools that contract with and are trained by Wyman to replicate the program in their city, state or sector. These entities are TOP certified replication partners, who take responsibility for the training, fidelity monitoring, and technical assistance of local providers of the program.

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