For over 100 years, youth mentoring has grown to be an evidenced based prevention strategy for youth, demonstrating positive youth outcomes through strong relationships with caring adults. While trusting relationships are the mainstay of the positive impacts achieved through mentoring, the difficulty in recruiting volunteer adults has not met the…

Within our rapidly changing and growing global society, adolescent development into adulthood remains a pervasive issue that youth serving institutions and youth engagement practitioners across the world must address. While literature shows that there are numerous factors that contribute to the physical, mental, and social-emotional development of…

As the youth mentoring field has expanded and diversified in America over the last 30-plus years, many adults who care about getting these valuable relationships to more young people have asked questions about the scope and scale of mentoring in American society. In 2014, MENTOR first started to examine these societal level trends in a seminal…

This article argues for youth and community work (YCW) to be recognised for its critical role in working alongside young people to enhance their well-being. We supply amalgamated vignettes as evidence from student's placement practice and explore the value of informal education practices in YCW in more formal settings. We assert that it is…

Youth development programs often provide young people with science learning experiences. We argue for reframing youth science learning from a focus on individual scientific literacy to an emphasis on collective scientific literacy--"community science"--to support young people in using science to address issues in their lives and…

Researchers examined social and emotional learning (SEL) ratings for two samples of 559 and 406 predominantly elementary-age youth of color, who were enrolled in out-of-school time (OST) programs serving communities mostly of high socioeconomic need in Palm Beach County, Florida. Covering the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years in the context of…

We present a dialogue between two community-based scholars in Tio'tia:ke/Montréal, who are examining the experiences of low-income Black families and youth, and gender-diverse, homeless youth. We argue that success must be understood differently in light of the systemic discrimination many youth navigate in schools and explore how research may…

Perceptions of program safety for youth might include such features as physical safety, psychological safety, and social-relational safety. A holistic sense of safety, or one that inclusively encompasses and integrates features of, and relations with, the ecology in which youth develop, could be engendered through programmatic designs that attend…

Youth in communities across the world are exposed to adversity and trauma at high levels. In this article, we describe a research-informed, resilience-promoting framework that can be incorporated into a variety of touch points for youth (e.g., school, family, community, extra-curricular activities). The PEEPS Framework is relational in nature and…

4-H youth development programs throughout the United States can be planned and delivered more effectively in their states by assessing demographic data and following research-based theories and models of positive youth development. A review of the research literature determined current youth development theories and models to effectively guide…

This paper explores young people's aspirations and the influence of community drama in shaping these arts-focussed aspirations. Research was undertaken using creative drama methods with young people who attend a youth drama group. The young people identified career and personal aspirations, recognising the hard work and support that it can take to…

Nature journaling is a practice embedded within the principles of environmental education and experienced a resurgence as a therapeutic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using sociocultural theories of learning to understand when and how people learn in out-of-school, outdoor settings, this study explored the perceived benefits and learning…

While research abounds on the outcomes of out-of-school time programs for youth, most studies focus on programs with similar profiles or within the same program category, leaving a notable gap in examining youth experiences across programs with different delivery modes. The current research investigated the perceived experiences of youth in two…

In dialogue with science education and learning sciences research, in this article we develop a disciplinary-specific view on youth and community agency for community-based technology education. Cultivating agency is a central principle in our design and empirical study of the Young People's Race, Power, and Technology Program (YPRPT), a program…

Measurement-based care (MBC) is an evidence-based practice (EBP) focused on regularly administering outcome measures to clients to inform clinical decision making. While MBC shows promise for improving youth treatment outcomes, therapist adoption remains low. Clinical consultation is one strategy that improves MBC implementation, but our limited…