National Consortium on Leadership and Disability for Youth (NCLD-Youth) is a youth-led resource, information, and training center for youth and emerging leaders with developmental disabilities, housed at IEL and funded by the Administration on Developmental Disabilities. NCLD-Youth is taking a positive development approach to working with the next generation of disability community leaders, and developing materials to better prepare them for the transition to adulthood, and leadership, rather than focus on the negative statistics one hears so often about youth with disabilities.

We have decided to use the five areas of youth development and leadership, learning, connecting, thriving, working, and leading to guide our work. These five areas correspond with 7 of the 8 areas of emphasis listed in the Developmental Disabilities Act (employment, education, housing, recreation, health, childcare, quality assurance, and transportation).

To look at youth with disabilities as an example, one could argue that it is no longer sufficient to say that simply because a young person with a disability knows what self-determination is, that they are a leader. Self-determination is certainly a very important set of skills to have, however, if he or she lacks competency in the five areas of development where self-determination would be utilized, it renders the set of skills ineffective.

NCLD-Youth is dedicated to helping the next generation of young leaders with disabilities understand how to gain the knowledge, skills and content they need to continue the next leg of the disability rights movement through three objectives:

• Identify and develop high quality, disability specific curricula around the give areas of youth development and leadership;
• Test, refine, and disseminate instructional materials throughout Florida, New Hampshire, and Washington DC to build networks of national, state, and local level partnerships of peer mentors, adult advisors and Councils of youth and emerging leaders;
• Develop, train, and mentor youth and emerging young leaders with developmental disabilities in each of the three partner states to influence state and local-level youth development and leadership public policy.