Nearly a decade after "Social Justice Art," innovative arts educator Marit Dewhurst returns with a new edition offering further guidance for developing meaningful, justice-centered art programming. Reflecting on a growing interest in the field and its place within larger movements that uses creative strategies to drive social change,…

Background: This practice paper exemplifies a systematic approach used to learn about existing mental well-being programs for youth 11-14 years to inform curriculum development for after-school settings. Methods: We reviewed 3389 mental well-being programs from publicly accessed databases and conducted a content analysis using inductive and…

This study sought to understand the influence of participation in a physical activity-based, social and emotional learning-focused after-school. Undergraduate students (N = 25) from a variety of ethnic backgrounds participated in semi-structured interviews and regular journaling. Data were analyzed inductively and deductively through the lens of…

Research across multiple fields finds that adult-youth relationships are key influencers of development; however, professional learning about relational practice is limited. This suggests the need for targeted, efficient ways to help adults improve relational practice. We present a randomized controlled trial of Simple Interactions, a…

More than 1.6 million children and youth in the United States attend 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLCs), which are federally funded after-school programs available in each state, particularly for students who attend high poverty and low-performing schools (US Department of Education, 2020). These 10,125 centers are intended to do…

Programs that seek to engage participants in arts-based programming may be drawn to creative youth development (CYD), a youth-focused, holistic approach to learning through creative expression. As the Creative Youth Development National Partnership (2018) defines it, "'Creative youth development' is a recent term for a longstanding theory of…

For 20 years, Prime Time Palm Beach County, a nonprofit organization in Florida, has supported local out-of-school time programs with professional learning, capacity building, and other resources. One of the organization's most popular and longest-running professional learning offerings is called Bringing Yourself to Work, which helps…

The Promise Fellow Program is an intervention designed to prevent dropout amongst students in grades 6-12 in Minnesota that show early warning signs of school disengagement. The program is led by interventionists known as Promise Fellows and provides three research-based supports that align with the National Dropout Prevention Center's "Basic…

While data for the 2020 edition of America After 3PM were collected pre-pandemic, to accompany the data and determine how the pandemic has affected families' needs during the hours after school, the Afterschool Alliance commissioned a nationally representative follow-up survey of parents in October 2020. The follow-up survey found that nearly half…

This qualitative study draws on concepts from Self-Determination Theory (SDT) within a positive youth development framework to postulate that participants in an after-school program will derive a sense of enjoyment and challenge in program activities when they perceive that the program supports their psychological needs for competence, autonomy,…

More than one million U.S. students experience homelessness (National Center for Homeless Education, 2019). These youth, most of whom live in poverty, tend to face a variety of educational challenges. Community-based out-of-school time (OST) programs, which often have more flexibility to innovate and meet local needs than traditional schools do,…

This article is situated within the intersection of education for social transformation (EST) and ecojustice education (EJE). We have described the benefits of youth participation in an after-school science program offered to socio-economically vulnerable populations in São Paulo (Brazil). More specifically, we explored participants' changing…

Little work examines the nexus of student homelessness and afterschool provision. This critical ethnographic case study of organizational culture draws from observation, documents, and interviews with youth experiencing homelessness, staff, and volunteers at a community-based afterschool center for youth experiencing homelessness. It explores how…

MENTOR's newest resource takes the cornerstone best-practice guide for mentoring, the "Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring™," and offers research-backed and practice-based tips specifically for STEM mentoring programs. "The STEM Supplement to the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring™" provides additional…

This article describes ROCKETS, an after-school program for at-risk youth, and how the university students became involved in this service-learning project. The article discusses the steps that were taken to start the program, what is being done to continue the program, and the challenges that faculty have faced. This program is an authentic…