Solid and resilient democracies rest upon an informed citizenry capable of critiquing societal issues and reimagining alternative scenarios. Traditional school-based civic and social justice education, however, often falls short of addressing the diverse needs of today's youth, often relying on instructionist pedagogies focused on factual…

4-H provides meaningful opportunities for all youth by connecting them with caring adult mentors and programs to develop relevant life skills to make changes in their own lives and communities. As the opportunity gap widens for youth and their needs change, the goal is that the 4-H system's 3,500 professionals and 500,000 volunteers will be…

Apprenticeship programs can be the one key solution to preparing young people and adults with the skills to earn a good income without acquiring high long-term student loan debt. A strong apprenticeship program is desirable because of its possible ability to reduce youth unemployment, improve the transformation from school to career by elevating…

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…

Out-of-school time (OST) initiatives, defined as programs that operate in and out of school settings, serve young people, their families, and the communities around them. These initiatives are often created to close opportunity gaps that can exist for at-risk students and to meet the needs of previously assessed concerns for communities. For 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…

Rural, economically disadvantaged students in Southern Appalachia experienced numerous situations that could negatively affect them socially, emotionally, behaviorally, and academically. Educators who routinely worked with rural, economically disadvantaged students should understand the difficulties these students experienced, as well as employ…

This qualitative research aimed to identify factors contributing to the formation and development of effective partnerships that foster positive youth development. The study involved interviews with eight adult military mentors and nine youth cadet mentees to gain various perspectives regarding mentoring relationships within the youth leadership…

This evaluation study addressed the need to increase the participation of teenagers in the Youth Service Agency ABC (YSA ABC). ABC offers positive, powerful, and empowering experiences for area teens. These programs help them with character development, financial literacy, emotional intelligence, healthy well-being, and many other skills and tools…

This qualitative study combined critical youth participatory research and ethnographic methods to investigate rural youth relationships to race and racism, which are currently undertheorized. The research question guiding this inquiry was: How do rural youth describe the salience of race and racism in the United States (U.S.) for themselves…

The spring of 2020 began with an event that would change lives in every corner of the world. The COVID-19 pandemic created a "public health emergency of international concern (World Health Organization, 2020a), and began to alter the social, economic, and political structures in nations big and small. With such change came many challenges and…

Volunteer engagement is critical to achieving the mission of volunteer organizations (Boone et al., 2002). Fogarty et al. (2009) found that 4-H volunteers are a mediating factor in achieving positive youth development outcomes and are responsible for teaching at least 50% of the life skills youth gain from participation in the organization. For…

Although coaching has a long history guided in the apprenticeship or mentorship model (Taylor & Garratt, 2013), research has primarily focused on the athlete, rarely on the coach, and almost never on whom the coach is serving as an apprentice to, or being mentored or supported by. Internationally, this role has been termed a 'coach developer,'…

This dissertation examines the impact of Skyhawks Sports Academy camps on youth participants' social-emotional learning (SEL) competencies using an intrinsic case study approach. The study utilizes both quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative data were gathered through SEL competency surveys administered on the first and fifth days of…

Volunteer-led programming is the heart of the 4-H program. The Wyoming 4-H program relies heavily on volunteers to deliver programming directly to youth. Shrinking budgets and limited staff makes volunteer retention and recruitment key in building and maintaining a 4-H program in Wyoming focused on youth education. Understanding what motivates…