Climate change is a critical crisis of our time and a difficult challenge for museums to address in their respective communities. The Wild Center's Youth Climate Program offers an example of how one museum is working with high school students as partners to advance climate change action in schools and communities to build climate resilience.…

Research has demonstrated that systemic transphobia and cissexism harms transgender youth in terms of social, educational, and health outcomes. All too often, research and policy emphasizes vulnerability among trans youth in a way that denies their capabilities as agents of change or active participants in their liberation. This article analyzes…

The purpose of this study was to explore potential effects of a 12-week therapeutic mentoring program targeting social, emotional, and behavioral concerns in 52 children and adolescents between 11 and 17 years of age. Self-reported scores on a norm-referenced behavioral questionnaire were tracked across the span of a mentoring program, and then…

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…

Community and youth work (CYW) practice has been articulated as striving towards a more socially just and equal society and is theorised as a catalyst for social change that seeks to overcome power differentials. Yet, despite these claims, there is limited empirical evidence to inform knowledge about the extent to which 'equality work' is featured…

This dissertation consists of two chapters that examine the impact of educational and positive youth development programs on students' academic and behavioral outcomes. In the first chapter, I evaluate the effect of the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) program, a school meal provision allowing schools meeting the eligibility requirements to…

The purpose of this study was to describe community partners' (CPs) perceptions of an out-of-school swimming program (OSSP) for under­served children and youth. Participants were four CPs associated with the OSSP during three consecutive summers and parents of the children and youth who participated in the program. We employed a theoretical…

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…

Objectives: Drug education is delivered by a broad spectrum of multi-disciplinary practitioners within the fields of health promotion, drug prevention and treatment, social care, and community and youth work. However, drug education is often misunderstood or conflated with drug information and/or drug prevention. This ambiguity of understanding is…

Most people meet insects with fear and disgust, even though few insects pose health risks; in fact, many are beneficial and their absence would adversely affect human life. Such misunderstandings lead to insect conservation being important but unpopular. We addressed these concerns as part of a broader effort to establish an ongoing outreach…

This study assesses the impact of five years of community level activities in the Pomona Youth and Family Master Plan (PYFMP) on four school-related risk and protective factors including academic failure, low school commitment, school opportunities for prosocial involvement, and school rewards for prosocial involvement. The intervention and…

This case study of a community youth theatre project interweaves reflective descriptions of practice, data excerpts and analysis to examine young people's exploration of cultural identity through theatre in a regional city in Australia. The process undertaken to create this work is theorised in relation to concepts of cultural difference and…

Culturally grounded therapeutic services orchestrated to meet the needs of African American youth remain sparse. The authors address this gap in the areas of scholarship and clinical practice by detailing Future 4 Teens (F4T), an integrated community therapy and education service model targeting African American youth ages 12-21 years old. Based…

The Exploring Making Through Mobile Emergent Technologies (EMMET) program sought to disrupt the trajectory from rural high school to factory floor by introducing STEM and computational thinking (STEM+C) skills through mentorship training and hands-on activities involving creative production--often referred to as "making." The program…

During a sabbatical semester in Fall 2018, "Community Literacy Journal (CLJ)" co-editor Paul Feigenbaum volunteered as a "Scholar-in-Residence" at Youth Enrichment Services (YES), a nonprofit established in 1994 that is based in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Guided by its mission "to create hope out of…