Reducing inequality summer by summer: Lessons from an evaluation of the Boston Summer Youth Employment Program

Many U.S. cities have implemented Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEPs) with the hope of improving long-term behavioral, academic, and economic outcomes among program participants, particularly inner-city, low-income, and non-white youth. While recent empirical studies show positive impacts for some outcomes, little is known about program mechanisms and the potential to reduce inequality across groups. Using an embedded randomized control trial, this study evaluates improvements in short-term outcomes for the Boston SYEP based on survey data collected for both treatment and control groups during the summers of 2015, 2016, and 2017. Participants reported increases in community engagement and social skills, job readiness skills, and college aspirations that were significantly different from the control group. In most cases, the largest gains were observed for non-white youth suggesting that the program may have the capacity to reduce inequality across groups. Our hope is that this article will serve as a resource for those seeking to understand how summer jobs programs work and for whom, and to use these findings to strengthen and target the SYEP intervention. We also provide practical lessons learned regarding the development and deployment of our survey instrument to both the treatment and control groups among the youth population.     

How fair are unemployment benefits? The experience of East Asia

Despite an increasing emphasis on active labour market measures, unemployment benefits still remain a focal point of employment protection. This article takes the cases of four East Asian economies – China, Japan, Republic of Korea, Taiwan (China) –, which are often characterized as having welfare states with a strong developmental and productivist orientation, to investigate whether, as is sometimes argued, unemployment benefits are restrictive and exclusionary. In doing so, it examines the logic behind the design of unemployment benefits and argues that they are in fact progressive in design and fair when they pay out. Nonetheless, low effective coverage and low benefit rates weaken their redistribution and compensation objectives.     

The economy of smiles: affect,labour and the contemporary deserving poor

This paper examines the affective dimensions of new forms of informal entrepreneurial work carried out in spaces of unemployment. Situating the analysis within contemporary scholarship on deservingness and on affect and labour, I shed light on the forms of entrepreneurial labour that rely upon affect‐driven economies of exchange underpinned by moral judgements of deservingness, value and worth. In particular, this paper draws on a multi‐city (Melbourne, London, San Francisco) study of homeless street press sellers (The Big Issue and Street Sheet) to explore the ways in which contemporary practices of charity and care are carried out through individualized market‐place exchanges. Sellers’ accounts of their work reveal how smiling and being (or looking) happy is a performative expectation that must be managed in the face of poverty and precarity.     

Strategic self-management: the new youth challenge

Individualization has been a much debated topic in youth research for decades now. Getting a good education and choosing the right one is one of the manifold ways young people deal with late-modern individualization challenges. Based on in-depth interviews with 12 young students aged 17–20 years in the Danish Gymnasium we investigate how young people make sense of, and deal with, these challenges by focusing on how they handle and reflect on their educational biographies. We employ The General Activity Theory to sensitize our contextual understanding of individualization in relation to the youth perspective. Based on our data analysis, this study contributes theoretically by further-developing the concept of ‘strategic self-management’ in an educational context. We conclude that this concept is suitable for encapsulating how young people make sense of, and deal with, their educational biographies facing the new youth challenges. The study thus contributes with an enhanced sensitivity in relation to understanding some of the contemporary challenges of young people whose choice about education echo into their future work life.     

Strengthening child and youth programs: A look at inter-organizational mentoring strategies

Community-based non-profit organizations rarely have access to research or evaluation evidence to inform their programs and often lack the capacity to gather or use this information independently. In 2016, Wisdom2Action—a network of knowledge mobilization (KMb) experts, policy makers and service providers across Canada—launched an inter-organizational mentorship program to facilitate the implementation and sharing of best and promising practices within community-based programs for young people. This article outlines the findings from a developmental evaluation of eight mentoring relationships. Drawing on the Promoting Action on Research in Health Sciences (PARiHS) model of KMb, we look at mentoring as a type of facilitation that supports the increased use of evidence and evaluation information by non-profit organizations and identify key themes that support effective organizational mentorship in this sector. Findings reinforce the importance of establishing connected relationships and understanding context in mentoring relationships, creating adaptive and responsive work plans, ensuring consistent communication, and maintaining a focus on capacity-building if knowledge mobilization is to occur.     

From the ‘cape of despair’ to the Cape of Good Hope: letters of the emigrant poor in early nineteenth-century England

This article draws on an unusually rich archive to explore the motives and mentality of poor English emigrants in the early nineteenth century. In 1819, the Colonial Department advertised a subsidized emigration scheme to South Africa; 2000 people wrote letters of application preserved in the National Archives. In studying the emigrant poor, historians have been primarily dependent on numerical data derived from passenger lists. The letters of application of 1819 allow more nuanced conclusions about the circumstances and the aspirations of the poor emigrant at a time of severe economic distress. The correspondence shows which trades were particularly drawn to emigration, particularly the framework knitters and the weavers who had lost not only their regular income but their trades. The letters also shed light on the gender tensions which lay beneath the surface of what was promoted as family migration. Most telling of all, the letters show that among the poor there was more to the decision to emigrate than fatalism and passivity. Poor emigrants expected to have to work for their living, but with the reward of greater security, enhanced prosperity, and – in the case of the male majority – the achievement of ‘independence’.     

Search and Rest Unemployment

This paper develops a tractable version of the Lucas and Prescott (1974) search model. Each of a continuum of industries produces a heterogeneous good using a production technology that is continually hit by idiosyncratic shocks. In response to adverse shocks, some workers search for new industries while others are rest unemployed, waiting for their industry's condition to improve. We obtain closed‐form expressions for key aggregate variables and use them to evaluate the model's quantitative predictions for unemployment and wages. Both search and rest unemployment are important for understanding the behavior of wages at the industry level.     

论高校共青团在和谐校园建设中的作用

高校作为社会的重要组成部分,在构建社会主义和谐社会中肩负着重要的使命。校园文化是和谐校园建设的重要内容,要使大学校园具备和谐校园的条件,一个重要途径就是营造良好的校园文化氛围,这就需要高校共青团在和谐校园建设中发挥着导向、教育、组织、指导、维护、监督的作用。     

关于新时期做好独立学院共青团工作的几点思考——以东华理工大学长江学院为例

经济社会的深刻变革,高等教育改革的全面深入,使当代青年和青年工作发生了深刻变化,正确认识面临的新形势、新任务,全面把握时代要求,找准工作定位,提升工作实效,熟悉工作规律,是推动独立学院共青团事业创新与发展的重要基础,是更好地服务大局、服务青年、服务社会的重要前提,也是新时期做好独立学院共青团工作的重要保证。     

文物价值和史料价值俱珍的重要历史文献——中国人民大学博物馆藏“陈独秀等致胡适信札”刍议

2009年入藏中国人民大学博物馆的"陈独秀等致胡适信札",具有较高的文物价值和史料价值。这批陈独秀早期文稿真迹的发现,在一定程度上和一定范围内填补了陈独秀文本研究的空白,进一步扩充了诸如《新青年》、马克思主义在中国的传播、陈独秀与胡适关系等中国近现代历史研究领域的具体内容,从一个侧面反映了陈独秀从民主主义的文化救亡转向共产主义的政治救亡的思想轨迹。