Social skill development is emerging as an important issue for educators and practitioners in their work with adolescent youth. This presentation will use the results from two ongoing research projects to examine the relationship between adventure-based programming and social skill development in the lives of diverse youth. The first project is the Project Adventure, Inc. RESPECT program, a 3-year comprehensive school reform initiative utilizing adventure-based programming as the core methodology. This project is being implemented in four urban Boston public middle schools. The second project is an evaluation of the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension's 4-H Bear Hill summer camp programming over the past two summers. The 4-H Bear Hill camp is located outside of Manchester, New Hampshire, and serves a variety of youth from the greater Manchester and Seacoast areas of New Hampshire.