Background: For a majority of the world's children, despite substantial increases in primary school enrollment, academic learning is neither occurring at expected rates nor supplying the basic foundational skills necessary to succeed in the 21st century. The significant lag in academic achievement tells us that simply making formal education…

The theoretical fathers of social capital (Putnam, Coleman and Bourdieu) are criticised for seeing children as passive recipients of parental social capital rather than active producers, and recent literature and debate has attempted to correct this earlier imbalance. We contribute to this work by using social capital as a lens through which to…

The work of Atkins and his colleagues (2003) have provided a wonderful beginning to the development of models that broaden the role of community and school psychology as well as the role of intervention research in the schools. Unfortunately, this work is not easily supported by institutions of academic psychology where more control of extraneous…

Although our society has made substantial investments in research and programs based on the idea that communities affect families and children, significant questions have emerged about the validity of the link between communities, children, and families. This book, presented in four sections, focuses on how communities undergird or undermine human…