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This chapter examines the educational barriers that homeless youth face in one large urban area. The text reviews the McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act and discusses how California has attempted to follow the federal mandates, and the implications for Los Angeles. The chapter utilizes interviews with 120 homeless youth and 45 policymakers, school counselors, and after-school program coordinators in Los Angeles to understand how youth experience the education system. The authors identify aspects of the federal mandate that impede the educational progress of homeless youth. The findings highlight that homeless youth are not a homogenous group and educational supports need to be designed recognizing the diversity of their needs. Implications for policy and program implementation are discussed as they pertain to one large city in order to generate future research that might support, contradict, or expand upon the findings.

This chapter will explore, from a practice and a personal perspective, multidisciplinary strategies that promote successful transition from middle school to college among male refugees in urban settings. These best practices are based on the combined experiences of the authors as they have formally and informally worked together to help these young people navigate becoming young adults in the United States. This opening section will highlight the value of collaborative, formal, and informal networks, comprised of community-based organizations, K-12 institutions, and healthcare providers, which support refugee transition into adulthood and higher education in the urban setting. Last, this chapter will focus on the role of sport, social media, and mentors as a framework of support for refugee students as they navigate their way through higher education access, financing, and retention in the United States.

This study builds on existing research to explore how transgender and non-binary people navigate complex terrain when it comes to strained and ambiguous relationships with families of origin. This chapter draws on 23 in-depth interviews with trans and non-binary adults (ages 19–41) to examine the ways that respondents navigated ambiguous and complex family relationships marked by mixed messages and contradictory behaviors from parents regarding their sexual and gender identities. I find that respondents engage in a range of strategies – correcting, conforming, and concealing – to bargain for belonging within families of origin through their work to preserve family ties. Beyond experiencing the emotional costs of ambiguous parental support, I find that some respondents also experience financial strain and inadequate housing, stemming from unstable, distressing relationships with their parents. This chapter demonstrates that ambiguous support from family and complex familial relationships may contribute to a cycle of precarity for trans and non-binary adults. Finally, I show that for respondents, connections to local queer and trans communities and supportive partnerships buffered the negative impacts of familial ambiguity. However, not all respondents had access to community support, intensifying their experiences of marginalization. This chapter contributes to the literature working to destabilize the support versus rejection binary used to characterize LGBTQ experiences and has implications for better understanding the pathways into poverty that trans and non-binary people experience.

This chapter reconsiders commonly held views on the ownership and management of private property, contrasting capitalist and simple property, particularly in relation to how a firm shareholder governance model has shaped society. This consideration is motivated by the scale and scope of the modern global crisis, which has combined financial, economic, social and cultural dimensions to produce world disenchantment.

By contrasting an exchange value standpoint with a use value perspective, this chapter explicates current conditions in which neither the state nor the market prevail in organising economic activity (i.e. cooperative forms of governance and community-created brand value).

This chapter offers recommendations related to formalised conditions for collective action and definitions of common guiding principles that can facilitate new expressions of the principles of coordination. Such behaviours can support the development of common resources, which then should lead to a re-appropriation of the world.

It is necessary to think of enterprises outside a company or firm context when reflecting on the end purpose and means of collective, citizen action. From a methodological standpoint, current approaches or studies that view an enterprise as an organisation, without differentiating it from a company, create a deadlock in relation to entrepreneurial collective action. The absence of a legal definition of enterprise reduces understanding and evaluations of its performance to simply the performance by a company. The implicit shift thus facilitates the assimilation of one with the other, in a funnel effect that reduces collective projects to the sole projects of capital providers.

Because forsaking society as it stands is a radical response, this historical moment makes it necessary to revisit the ideals on which modern societies build, including the philosophy of freedom for all. This utopian concept has produced an ideology that is limited by capitalist notions of private property.

The shift in undergraduate student demographic composition, particularly for the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, has been coupled with an ever increasing need for faculty to be more culturally aware and responsive. Traditionally, higher education has relied on the professional development programs of disciplinary societies and associations to meet such needs. However, designing professional development for STEM faculty in ways that awaken awarenesses about racial differences and their impact on academic success requires more than the conventional faculty development offerings, which, more often than not, only give cursory nods to difference or limit programming to “cookbook” protocols of do's and don'ts. Indeed, today's STEM faculty professional development must be met with more sophisticated paradigms that foreground personal reflection and development. Safe brave spaces represent an ideal mechanism for supporting not only personal reflection but also the grappling with and letting go of the destructive values and beliefs that negatively impact undergraduate STEM student success. The chapter offers the reader a view into our perspective as conveners of safe brave professional development spaces. In it, we also share the words of a safe brave space occupier, demonstrating how the power of reflection can influence the value of safe brave spaces. As a result, the reader is left with a different lens through which STEM faculty professional development programs can and should be considered – whether it is who is in them, who is missing from them, or what is required to facilitate more productive interactions within them. Admittedly, there is more work yet to be done. Understanding that this work requires safety and bravery is a necessary next step.

Despite millions of dollars funding increases in the California Community College system, statistics show that less than 50% of students complete their two-year degree in six years. The 114 colleges that serve over two million students have, therefore, been mandated to implement student success programs under the Chancellor’s Vision for Success strategy. Dr. Ortiz Oakley’s plans to decrease attrition and graduation time while improving equity entail additional responsibilities for the instructors because one of its measures ties a percentage of funding to quantifiable increases in success rates. Such connection was one of the reasons for a no confidence motion voted against the Chancellor by the Faculty Association. Though circumscribed, this case calls attention to the general question of accountability in the classroom. Can instructors be held responsible for students passing their classes? In face of rates of failure that are rare in other professional fields and unacceptable given Community College students’ vulnerability and the vital importance of degrees to enter the workforce and earn living wages, this chapter examines how weaving a social justice component into instructors’ mission of knowledge dissemination leads to the constitution of a beneficial civil society but generates conflict among the Colleges’ leaders.