This case study of New Haven's Residential Youth Center (RYC) dramatizes the need for an alliance between social activists and the clinician in the arena of community action. A neighborhood-based, self-helf center oriented for "hard-core" inner-city youths, the RYC was funded in 1966 as an experimental and demonstration program by U.S. Department of Labor, administered by the local community action agency, and conducted in conjunction with the Yale Psycho-Educational Clinic. Its original clients were 20 young men, aged 16 to 21, with histories of social, vocational, educational, and personal failures. The setting translated pyramidal organization theory into human terms by developing a "horizontal" structure for sharing clinical, administrative, and decision-making responsibilities. Not the symptoms but the institutional and psychological sources of poverty were the target. The staff was composed of restless and committed "indigenous nonprofessionals," recruited from the ranks of the poor and educated in the process of surviving the ghetto. The author was the sole professional. Evaluative research, while paying heed to the difficulties of scientific control in a volatile setting, indicated statistically significant differences in residents' behavior and attitudes as compared to a control group and considerable impact on local conditions and national policies. (Author/JM)