ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- During a recent national gathering of hardscrabble youth organizers here, veteran youth worker Rudy Chavez casually noted that his 30-year-old community-based youth services agency has an annual budget of $20 million. That's when the shoe dropped.

Chavez, chief operating officer of Youth Development, Inc., had invited organizers (ages 15 through 25) from six groups, in town to network and strategize, to a pizza-and-soda lunch presentation lauding the good works of his organization. A hand belonging to 20-year-old youth organizer Fernando Abeyta shot into the air. Abeyta -- wearing a black beret and fresh from a months-long youth-led campaign of marches, rallies and protests over the number of teens allowed to be together at an Albuquerque mall -- questioned YDI's "relevance" to the "very political" problems faced by today's teens. He labeled organizations like YDI, which provides temporary shelter, free meals and counseling, as proverbial "bandaid groups" that don't provide solutions to long-festering problems, but are only in business "to perpetuate themselves."

For many of today's adults, it is a teenage nightmare that would have scarred them for life: There you stand on the high school stage, telling a packed auditorium that you're a virgin. You star in a play about it. And declare that you won't have sex for God knows how long.

Danae Marquez started doing just that when she was 15. Three years later, the Portland, Ore., teen still talks about virginity on stage, and carries a card bearing her signature under a pledge that she's "saving sex until marriage." "Nowadays people don't put as much faith in promises, but they do mean something to me," Marquez says. "If I made a promise to be abstinent, I'm going to keep that promise."

Since 1993, several million youth have signed such cards and made such pledges. Virginity pledges and virgin clubs have drawn applause and derision. But do they appreciably help kids abstain from sex?