Suchergebnisse

1. Becoming a youth worker -- 2. Learning to "read" : cultivating ecological intelligence -- 3. Navigating inexperience : how reflection guides practice for a novice youth worker -- 4. Balancing high expectations, program structure, and youth realities : making kids fit the program or the program fit the kids -- 5. Balancing conflicting values from home, a youth organization, and the community : keeping youth well-being at the center of youth work -- 6. Youth worker and organizational responses to risky behavior and dangerous situations -- 7. Balancing youth privacy with the youth worker's need for information : the importance of organizational support in dilemma resolution -- 8. Activating personal knowledge to balance the needs of high-risk youth with the safety of others in the program -- 9. "When I heard who it was, I knew it wasn't a real gun" : "reading" the context to maintain safety -- 10. "Do they think we're not in charge?" : addressing dilemmas that arise in a social justice youth development approach -- 11. Cross-cutting themes and implications for youth worker professional development.

Gretchen Brion-Meilsels, Jessica Tseming Fei, and Deepa Sriya Vasduevan's At Our Best: Building Youth–Adult Partnerships in Out-of-School Time Settings brings together the work of over 50 youth and adults to build a youth–adult partnership praxis centered around ideas of trust, problem-solving methodologies, democratic participation, and collective action. The book, focusing on youth–adult partnerships for the purpose of social change, explores a set of field-expanding questions such as, "What do youth–adult partnerships look like in practice?" and "What are the relational and organizational practices that enable youth–adult partnerships to exist?" In addition to youth workers and youth development organizations, other groups of adults would benefit from reading the chapters' rich exploration of dilemmas and strategies, such as funders, K-12 educators, and evaluators. Ultimately, this book honors young people and youth workers as important actors in social change and elevates the importance of their joint efforts. The deep relationship between youth work and a strong democracy clearly emerges, challenging us all to be "at our best."

This article presents an in-depth case study of the Healthy Options for Prevention and Education Coalition's Teens Tackle Tobacco initiative, a 3-year community-based participatory research (CBPR) project about the distribution of tobacco vendors and tobacco advertising in Worcester, Massachusetts. Using two theoretical frameworks, positive youth development (PYD) and social justice youth development (SJYD), the case reveals personal and community conditions that drove youth to get engaged in this project, how CBPR guided the group's research and action strategy, and results of the work to date. Analysis of this case highlights factors that facilitate and pose barriers to active youth involvement in a long-term, tobacco-related community change initiative. Specifically, to affect oppressive community conditions, a blend of PYD's focus on individual skill building, participation, and empowerment— joined with SJYD emphasis on community organizing and building youth's self-awareness of how race, class, and other dimensions of power affect their lives on a daily basis—is needed.

Mental and behavioral health disorders are major issues facing young people in the United States; yet, the majority of youth who need support do not get help. Young people tend not to get help for 2 interacting reasons: system barriers that prevent youth from seeking help, and personal reasons that can influence them to forgo treatment. Youth–Adult Partnerships (Y-APs) have the potential to improve mental health programming and increase service utilization because they create space to blend youth and service provider knowledge and experience. This article provides a detailed case study of a youth–adult partnership's 2-year community assessment and strategic planning process that led to the development of an innovative mental health model that has been sustained for 15 years. This article highlights the practices that contributed to adult transformation and the importance of adults' roles as boundary spanners in the implementation and sustainability of an intervention that addresses both system barriers and personal reasons youth forgo mental health treatment.

AbstractThe Worcester, Massachusetts, district‐community plan for reinventing high schools shows how learning can be enhanced and transformed through intentional connections to community.

Community-engaged scholars grapple with power asymmetries in community-university partnerships, generally working from the assumption that deliberate practices are required to moderate the researchers' power vis-a-vis that of the community. In this article, we suggest that this dyadic framing masks the complexity of power dynamics within communities, of which the university is just one part, and examine how power is negotiated in the boundary zones of a partnership. We use Third Generation Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as a conceptual framework to analyse the structural and cultural dimensions of the boundary zone in which research, learning and action in our partnership occurred (Engeström 1996). A brief story sheds light on our boundary work which uses research and data to span, broker and shake institutional boundaries for the purpose of youth violence prevention and intervention. Our analysis illuminates the potential and limitations of our power to foster transformational change. It also allows us to show that underestimating power differentials and the diversity of values and cultures within an organisation and between a university and a community partner, and certainly across multiple institutions in the case of a cross-sector partnership, can slow down and even thwart work to address societal problems.

<h1><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;">This article explores dilemmas that arise when using a participatory, experiential neighborhood problem-solving and planning program in settings that have different expectations and beliefs about youth and adults partnering in organizational and community decision-making. Using Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecology of human development and Wong, Zimmerman, and Parker's (2010) pyramid of youth participation, a series of dilemmas are explored. These dilemmas include: negotiating challenges of power; scaling up youth-adult partnerships into organizational decision-making and governance; reconciling tensions between practices, principles, and values when disseminating a program from one organization to another; dealing with organizational events that occur outside the youth program; and succumbing to pressure to achieve funder-derived outcomes. Two insights emerge from the analysis of these dilemmas. First, young people embrace adult-provided structure when adults and young people are not ready to work in emancipatory youth-adult partnerships. Second, as we move toward emancipatory youth-adult partnerships, the developmental sphere of youth programs has to expand to include the activities, relationships, and roles that traditionally have been limited to organizational leadership and governance. Likewise the developmental sphere of the governing body has to incorporate the activities, relationships, and roles of what has typically been the youth program.</span></h1>

As universities attempt to expand their relevance by engaging with local and regional societal challenges, various kinds of partnerships are emerging. A broad range of stakeholders, from both the university and the community, are typically engaged in and influence the development, implementation and perpetuation of these partnerships. This paper juxtaposes analysis of three community-university partnerships in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, paying particular attention to the partnerships' stakeholders, and to their relative importance. This research builds upon current understandings of critical factors in partnership sustainability, as these three partnerships have different goals, involve different university and community stakeholders, and are at different points in their organisational history. The fact that they share the same context – the same city – offers a unique opportunity for comparative case study analysis. The theory of stakeholder salience is used to explain findings about partnership sustainability and to make suggestions for strengthening existing partnerships. Specifically, we argue that stakeholder power and legitimacy, along with stakeholder urgency, are key factors in sustaining community-university partnerships.

Keywords
Community-university partnerships; economic development; community development; stakeholder salience