This article describes and reflects on the first six meetings of a newly established Autistic community council, founded to steer a participatory, longitudinal qualitative study investigating the reproductive health of Autistic people with wombs. The two key aims of these initial six meetings -- involving four Autistic community leader members and…

Community leadership development programs (CLDPs) purport to train and equip individuals for leadership role participation in 5,500 communities across the United States. These communities seem to see value in these programs, yet there is little accountability for what graduates are actually doing in the community after program completion. The…

Positive youth development (PYD) is a strengths-based approach to youth programming which has been tested with success in largely higher income settings with mostly White youth. This study aims to identify the extent to which organizations who work in an urban context serving predominately African American youth incorporate PYD principles into…

Despite the colonizing dynamics of educational institutions and the extractive research paradigms of academia, we argue that family- and community-centered research partnerships can foster collective care, cross-racial solidarities, and more just educational ecosystems. Drawing from a long-term community research collaboration, the authors (a…

Pulling from a participatory action research project with human rights activists in Myanmar, this article builds on post-colonial, decolonial and third world feminist theories (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Mahrouse, 2014; Mohanty, 2003; Mutua, 2001; Said, 1993; Weissman, 2004) around inherent power imbalances in international human rights work by…

This dissertation explores community-based learning (CBL) in university Spanish education. Although Spanish education continues to construct Spanish as a foreign language (Leeman, 2014), recent trends such as changing demographics in the US have led to calls for Spanish education to focus more on US Latinx communities (e.g., Torres, Pascual y…

The collective power of community members has the potential to shape education reform efforts through activism and community organizing. In this article, we present two cases where community organizers exhibited key leadership strategies designed to influence district decision-making about school closures in Chicago. Employing a mix of interviews,…

This study examined the influence of traditions and customs on community development in Nkanu West and Nkanu East Local Government Areas of Enugu State. The study was carried out with three objectives and three null hypotheses. The research adopted descriptive survey design with a population of 2,125 members of community Based Organizations in the…