Community engagement is considered a cornerstone of health promotion practice. Yet engagement is a fuzzy term signifying a range of practices. Health scholarship has focused primarily on individual effects of engagement. To understand the complexities of engagement, organizations must also consider relational, structural, and/or organizational…

This essay offers a broken narrative concerning the early history of anti-oppressive practice as an approach in the U.K. to youth and community work and the struggles over this in the context of UK higher education between the 1960's and the early 2000's. Educating informal educators as youth and community workers in the UK has been a site of…

Extension administrators discussed the competencies and characteristics of Extension professionals as they explored how Extension will need adapt to changing clientele, both in who they are and how they want to receive information. Extension education curriculum is not fully preparing future Extension employees in all required competencies,…

In this article, we explore the pedagogies of (de)liberation promoted in the sports-based intervention Midnight Football (MF), carried out in a suburban and socio-economically disadvantaged residential area in Sweden. Based on interviews with coaches and managers and on-site observations, we examine how socio-pedagogical rationalities and…

Youth participation in sport is associated with positive developmental outcomes. The development of life skills is especially important for urban youth of color who are often underserved and face poor long-term outcomes. To service the needs of underserved youth, community youth sport programs have begun to utilize sport-based positive youth…

Bullying and mental health problems are pressing concerns for adolescents. Given their burden, we need to find efficacious ways to prevent these experiences. However, existing prevention programs tend to be single-issue and may not focus on the universal capacities required to reduce these problems among youth. To this end, we evaluated the…

Too many young people cycle in and out of prison, jails, and detention centers and face probation and parole conditions that keep them locked out of opportunity. These interactions with the criminal justice system demand the need for both equitable practices and programs that support second chances and large-scale investments in decarceration.…

This evaluation report explores the evolution of the Youth Leadership Institute (YLI), an annual convening of youth leaders, youth organizers, adult allies, and educators from across New England. The report closely examines the first several years of YLI, tracking its growth and challenges through the eyes of youth, adult allies, and Nellie Mae…

On a given day, more than 43,000 youths who largely identify as students of color and are disproportionately male are held in residential placement facilities as a result of involvement with the juvenile justice system. More than two-thirds of youths living in placement facilities who participated in a national survey shared aspirations to…

It is no surprise to educators and prevention specialists that for more than two decades, the majority of evaluation studies of individual psychosocial prevention strategies not only in substance-abuse prevention but in all of social science research have failed to find sustained positive outcomes (Feldman, 1983; Kreft & Brown, 1998). Many…

Succeeding at learning, and at life, takes more than academic ability. Studies on the importance of qualities like "grit" grabbing headlines, help to foster a growing conviction that encouraging the right mindsets and social-emotional skills in students will lead to better school achievement and post-secondary success. Policymakers are…

The lack of physical activity is an epidemic problem among American youth today. In order to combat this, many schools are incorporating youth running programs as a part of their comprehensive school physical activity programs. These youth running programs are being implemented before or after school, at school during recess at the elementary…

First authorized by Congress in January 2014, P3 allows a limited number of local projects that are focused on youth to align and better coordinate federally-funded programs and services. Although focused on a particular subset of youth -- those who are disconnected or at risk of becoming disconnected from education or the workforce -- the program…

This study examined the contribution of mentor support to the following aspects of high-school dropouts' lives: the personal (self-esteem, and the process of becoming less religious [BLR]), social (societal conditional positive and negative regard) and psychological (well-being and loneliness). The study, conducted among Ultraorthodox Jewish…

Foster youth are among some of the nation's most underserved students in higher education. Of the more than 430,000 youth in the foster care system, only about 50% will graduate from high school and as little as 3% will ever earn a bachelor's degree (Pecora, 2012; Wolanin, 2005). While critically important for smoothing students' transition from…