In 1979, three teenage brothers from Southern California — Shawn, Mark, and Adam Stern, who had a band called Youth Brigade — decided that punk rock had an image problem. So they formed an ad hoc committee called the Better Youth Organization, with the idea of giving punk rock a good name. This was a fairly new idea, since punk’s bad image was widely considered to be part of the point; but in Washington, DC, and elsewhere, bands like Minor Threat and Dead Kennedys were beginning to reimagine punk as a youth movement driven by a new moral sanctimony. If the original punk explosion of the mid ’70s had been a reaction to the larger pop mainstream, in the ensuing years punk would survive as a series of reactions to itself.

" The whole idea of BYO came about because I was sick of seeing the press mutilate what punk rock was, " says Shawn Stern over the phone from BYO headquarters in LA. " They sensationalized everything, saying it was just a bunch of crazy kids sticking safety pins in their cheeks and going around creating mayhem. We just thought there were a lot more positive things happening. "

BYO came into its own in 1982: it released the seminal So Cal punk compilation Somebody Got Their Head Kicked In (featuring Youth Brigade, Social Distortion, and Bad Religion), and that summer, Youth Brigade and Social D set out in a converted school bus on a makeshift cross-country tour that was captured in the film Another State of Mind, which remains one of the all-time great punk documentaries. (One of the filmmakers, Adam Small, went on to create the TV shows In Living Color and Mad TV.) Two decades later, for reasons that have little to do with BYO, punk no longer needs an image makeover, and BYO’s youthful idealism has been tempered with an entrepreneurial pragmatism. But the organization is still with us, and this Saturday, Youth Brigade headline a 20th-anniversary showcase at the International Community Church in Allston.

" I’d like to think we’ve been able to put forth the idea that you don’t have to grow up, " Stern explains, " which in my view is about giving up. " Youth Brigade have soldiered on and off for two decades, and the group’s last recording, a 1999 split EP with the Swingin’ Utters, found Stern wrestling with nostalgia for the good old days and with the contradictions inherent in prolonged adolescence, fighting his own urge to romanticize both the past and the present, and, yes, trying to figure out how to grow up without giving in. " To a certain extent you’re making compromises your whole life. I guess that’s something that I’m struggling with. "

There are four Stern brothers in all. In 1991, the three youngest, Mark, Adam, and Jamie, formed a jump-blues band called Royal Crown Revue and began playing to burned-out punk-rockers. Quite by accident, they touched off the swing revival of the mid ’90s, and for this they’d like you to know they are all very, very sorry. These days, Adam does animation for film and television and Jamie is an actor and director of music videos. Shawn Stern’s main concern is the running of the BYO label, whose highest-profile signing is the Bouncing Souls. The label also scored a coup this year with a one-off split EP pairing Rancid and NOFX.

When BYO was founded, there was only a handful of independent, artist-run punk labels — Alternative Tentacles, Dischord, SST, Touch & Go were all in their infancy. Over the past decade, however, Stern has found it difficult to compete with mega-indies like Epitaph and Lookout. " Back in the ’80s, you never had to sell yourself to a band. My pitch to bands these days is, ‘Look: I’m not gonna tell you we’re gonna sell a million records or get you to the top of the charts. But what I can tell you is that we know how to make a living playing punk-rock music, because we’ve been doing it for 20 years, and we can show you how we’ve done it, and hopefully you can do it, too.’  "

Youth Brigade, Oxymoron, the Beltones, and Pistol Grip play this Saturday, August 31, at 6 p.m. at the International Community Church, 557 Cambridge Street in Allston. Tickets are $10; call (800) 477-6849.