Implementing School Based Youth Courts in a Rural Context: The Impact on Students’ Perceptions of School Climate,Individual Functioning,and Interpersonal Relationships

The Youth Court in Schools Project was implemented in two low-income, violent, racially/ethnically diverse rural counties. This study examined if the presence of Youth Court impacted students’ perceptions of school danger, individual functioning, and interpersonal relationships. Data were gathered from 3454 youth; following multiple imputation, data were analyzed using paired samples t tests. Results indicated that perceptions of school danger increased significantly and self-esteem decreased significantly in the control schools pretest to posttest. Violent behavior, anxiety, friend rejection, and bullying victimization decreased significantly in the Youth Court intervention schools pretest to posttest, but did not change significantly in the control schools. Findings provide preliminary evidence that Youth Court is an effective way of improving school climate, individual functioning, and interpersonal relationships.     

Ideals and Reality: Perceptions of Healthy and Unhealthy Relationships Among Foster Youth

Exploring romantic relationships is a hallmark of adolescence. As dating relationships are often new during this development trajectory, learning how to be in a relationship (e.g., learning healthy communication skills, etc.) is necessary to facilitate positive partnerships during the transition to adulthood. However, foster youth are a group routinely overlooked within the literature on developing positive and healthy relationships. This formative, exploratory study utilizes focus groups and in-depth interviews to understand foster youth perceptions of healthy and unhealthy dating relationships through a social learning theory lens. Findings explore foster youth perceptions of ideal relationships, the realities of their lived relational experiences, as well as the lessons learned that they would like to impart on future generations of foster youth. Implications for research, practice, and policy (e.g., the need for communication skill building, comprehensive sex and relationship education, as well as screenings for dating violence) are also explored.     

Conducting Successful Memory Interviews with Children

Practitioners interview children in a range of settings to assess their wellbeing and to make decisions about their care. These interviews often have a significant memory component. Interviewing children about their past experiences, however, is a challenging task. It requires practitioners to be sensitive to children’s developmental capacities and vulnerabilities, to understand how to facilitate effective retrieval and reporting of information, and to set aside the usual dynamics and expectations of how adults and children communicate. Managing these challenges requires constant evaluation, self-reflection, and professional development. Fortunately, several decades of research into children’s memory and narrative development has provided a robust platform on which to base practice. Here, we provide a framework for devising a general approach to memory interviews with children that is both evidence-based and practical.     

Precarity and structural racism in Black youth encounters with police

Youth experience increased surveillance by and involuntary contact with police officers compared with other age groups. Studies that explore the experiences of youth during these encounters are scant and focus on youth with criminal histories. This research aims to explore the experiences of college-attending youth between 18 and 24 years old in two southern states. The study was designed and conducted according to the tenets of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Twelve Black youth were recruited and interviewed between April 2015 and April 2016. Three superordinate themes (and subthemes) were identified: (1) negative feelings towards the police; (2) precarity of police encounters (subthemes: police as a threat to welfare; it could be me; steps to follow during police encounters; behavior is irrelevant) and; (3) police response is part of structural racism (subthemes: racism is everywhere; media contributes to racism). The importance of these findings for social work practice and research will be discussed.     

Directions in a Post-aid World? South–South Development Cooperation and CSOs in Latin America

The architecture of international aid to developing and emerging economies is undergoing significant change. Post-aid world conditions will reshape relationships between international aid actors including donors, civil society organizations (CSOs), governments, and other institutions. These trends draw attention to South–South Development Cooperation (SSDC) as a promising direction in regions like Latin America. CSOs’ participation in SSDC might challenge and divert the dependency and power asymmetries in traditional North–South aid. As potential adaptive strategy for CSOs, SSDC diversifies the actors involved in aid and the resources exchanged, and produces different development discourses. The article outlines SSDC as an alternative development model and specifically considers the participation of CSOs. It provides a case of CSOs’ participation in SSDC in the region of Latin America. As research on CSOs in SSDC is limited, the article contributes to its further understanding and provides further avenues of research.     

Comparing NGO Resilience and ‘Structures of Opportunity’ in South Africa and Zimbabwe (2010–2013)

African non-governmental organisations undergo various shifts in order to cope with diverse challenges. This article takes a longitudinal case study approach to analyse the identities and resilience of a small sample of NGOs in South Africa and Zimbabwe between 2009 and 2013. This article will rely on time period and the nature of the state in each site as independent variables. The nuances brought on by the different time periods and each organisation’s profile, and the two countries where the NGOs are set, are significant for contributing to the literature on the fluid and adaptive nature of African NGOs in their bid for survival. Through exploring these four diverse NGOs in the two states and time period where new challenges and opportunities are presented, the article will also highlight the variety of challenges and strategies each NGO engaged with when confronting crises specific to their settings and the identities each NGO adopted when developing and shifting their agendas.     

Making Civil Society Sustainable: The Legacy of USAID in Croatia

What makes civil society sustainable? This paper examines USAID “Legacy Mechanisms”—programs designed to support a stable civil society after USAID withdraws aid—in the context of post-war Croatia to reconceptualize civil society sustainability in terms of resilience. Rather than examine whether specific legacy mechanisms remained intact, this paper looks at how Croatian civil society organizations adopted, adapted, and dropped these legacy programs to respond to novel crises and a changing political and social environment once USAID exited Croatia. Drawing on archival data from USAID’s time in Croatia and interviews conducted between 2008 (the year after USAID withdrew) and 2016, this paper shows that the long-term impact USAID had on civil society lay not within the formal institutions and organizations it supported, but in the resilience, creativity, and cooperation it fostered in the civil society sector.     

Ebenezer Obadare: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Humor,Silence and Civil Society in Nigeria</Emphasis>

This is a book review of Ebenezer Obadare’s “Humor, Silence and Civil Society in Nigeria.” It examines conceptual issues around the role of civil society in Nigeria, the nexus (or lack thereof) between ngo’s and civil society, and the roles that humor and silence play as roles of agency in how a population responds to oppression and the suppression of dissent.     

The Co-production of a Community: Engaging Citizens in Derelict Neighbourhoods

In order to deal with “wicked problems” like inequality and social exclusion, one needs the support of committed citizens (Brandsen et al. in Manufactured civil society: practices, principles and effects, Palgrave, London, 2014). A promising setting to examine to what extent this is the case is that of community development projects in derelict neighbourhoods where the largest representation of ‘marginalised’ citizens can often be found (Head in Community development: theory and method of planned change, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1979; Needham in Personal co-production, 2009). In this article, we examine to what extent citizens are actually involved in local co-productive community development projects (in the city of Ghent, Belgium), and how professional field workers influence this engagement. We focus on three different potential effects of co-productive community development (inclusion and empowerment of citizen co-producers and the equity in the benefits they receive), and whether professional support can influence these effects. We find that co-production in community development projects may lead to more inclusion, empowerment and equity. Moreover, it is posited that the presence of professionals in their different roles does have a positive impact on co-productive community development.     

Participatory Spaces of Mental Health Service User Organizations in the Post-deinstitutional Era: Mapping Roles and Challenges

By applying the concept of participatory spaces, this article maps and analyzes current research on mental health service user organizations (MHSUOs). We have analyzed research literature from 2006 to 2016 to examine how the role of and challenges facing MHSUOs are formulated in the post-deinstitutional era. The current situation is marked by MHSUOs parallel presence in invited, claimed and popular spaces for participation. The post-deinstitutional era is characterized by a shift in focus from gaining access to such participatory spaces, to critically examining the political opportunities available in these. We further argue that the dominance of psychiatry-specific spaces could prevent MHSUOs from fully exploring their potential for participation in broader social issues.