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This article makes a case for the importance of brokering future learning opportunities to youth as a programmatic goal for informal learning organizations. Such brokering entails engaging in practices that connect youth to events, programs, internships, individuals and institutions related to their interests to support them beyond the window of a specific program or event. Brokering is especially critical for youth who are new to an area of interest: it helps them develop both a baseline understanding of the information landscape and a social network that will respond to their needs as they pursue various goals. The paper aims to describe three critical levers for brokering well in informal settings: creating learning environments that allow trust to form between youth and educators and enable educators to develop an understanding of a young person’s interests, needs and goals; attending to a young person’s tendency (or not) to reach out to educators after a program is over to solicit assistance; and enabling potential brokers to efficiently locate appropriate future learning opportunities for each young person who approaches them. The authors also include a set of program practices for providers who wish to increase their brokering impact, as well as recommendations geared primarily toward organization leaders. The authors hope that this paper brings clarity and enhanced significance to the practice of brokering as a strategy to support youth pathways toward meaningful futures.

Insights presented here are the result of a participatory knowledge building and sharing process with a community of after-school providers known as the Mozilla Hive NYC Learning Network. The topic of discussion was how these providers might continue to support young people in their intensive project-based programs after the program was over. The authors of this article, acting as embedded research partners to Hive NYC, contributed insights to these discussions based on ethnographic fieldwork and case studies of high-school-age youth in the Hive NYC context.

The authors articulate a set of brokering practices and a conceptual model that communicates how brokering might lead to valued long-term outcomes for youth, including increased social capital.

The intent is that information and perspectives from this article will inform youth-serving practice and serve as a catalyst for further conversations and activities geared toward promoting youth pathways of learning and identity development.

Recent figures show that half the world’s refugees are children, with young people now representing more than 50 percent of victims of global armed conflict and displaced persons. Increasing numbers of refugee youth are entering their host nations’ compulsory and postcompulsory educational systems having experienced frequent resettlements and disrupted education, which in turn, pose major barriers for educational and future employment. The consequences of these experiences raise pressing equity implications for educators and educational systems. However, the picture is not uniformly bleak. Employing Bourdieu’s thinking tools of habitus, field and capital, Yosso’s concepts of community cultural wealth and photovoice methods, this chapter draws on studies of refugee youth of both genders from diverse ethnic and faith backgrounds, conducted in regional Australia. It examines how everyday spaces for learning, for example, church, faith-based and sporting groups and family can play a crucial role in enabling young people to build powerful forms of social and cultural capital necessary to successfully access and negotiate formal education and training settings. Its findings suggest first that everyday spaces can act as rich sites of informal learning, which young refugee people draw upon to advance their life chances, employability, and social inclusion. Second, they suggest that how one’s gender and “race” intersect may have important implications for how refugee youth access social and cultural capital in these everyday spaces as they navigate between informal learning and formal educational settings.

The aim of this paper is to help in understanding the relationship between the construction of the male identity and how social violence may be “reproduced” (using the concept of habitus after Pierre Bourdieu), in poor and socially excluded contexts. The paper aims to inform debate and policy making.

The paper draws on empirical data collected in 2008, in the form of life‐history interviews with male youths – including members and non‐members of gangs – from two poor and very violent neighbourhoods in Medellín, Colombia's second largest city.

Masculinities alone do not account for urban violence, but they play an integral role why violence is reproduced. In socio‐economically excluded contexts the gang becomes an attractive vehicle for “doing masculinity” for boys and young men. Youths who did not join gangs tended to have family support to develop a “moral rejection” of gangs, crime and violence during childhood, which contributed to them finding non‐gang pathways to manhood. Youths who joined gangs were less likely to develop this “moral rejection” during childhood, often due to family problems; and were more likely to admire older gang members, and perceive the gang as an attractive pathway to manhood.

As the sole researcher a limited number of 32 individuals were interviewed.

There is a lack of research on masculinities and gang affiliation in the UK and across the globe. This paper provides new conceptual ideas for understanding why young men make up the vast majority of violent gang members, whilst providing an original data set from a very violent urban setting.

A positive perception of work helps counteract the stress and psychological loss because of non-optimal working conditions. This paper aims to hypothesize two pathways through which social-psychological resources in the workplace contribute to positive work perception: one pathway is direct and the other is through the mediating mechanism of youth’s internal resource.

Filipino working youth from a government program for out-of-school poor youth, or working students enrolled in a free night high school, completed pertinent scales of the Multicontext Assessment Battery of Youth Development.

Co-workers’ endorsement of work values and their joint exercise of resilience-building skills build youth’s positive work perception. Youth’s personal initiative contributes to their positive work perception by its direct influence and also by its mediating mechanism.

The cross-sectional survey of this study does not allow for a definitive temporal progression from resources to positive work perception as does a longitudinal study.

For poor working youth, the threats of a financially bleak future can be tempered by an attitude that recognizes work not only as financially necessary but also as beneficial to one’s growth. The social-psychological resources in the workplace and the youth’s emerging personal initiative jointly contribute to a positive perception of work.

The current research shifts the focus of analysis from disadvantageous employment conditions to the affective and motivational aspects of employment and uses the conservation-of-resources theory to plot the flow of resources from the workplace to the worker.

Recent years have seen significant policy and practice interest in how to best respond to the impact of childhood maltreatment and adversity on young people’s contact with youth justice systems. In Australia, this has resulted in increasing pressure to implement trauma-informed practice, although this is a term that has different meanings for different stakeholders, and little is known about the perspectives of justice-involved young people. This paper aims to review what is currently known about co-production in youth justice and discuss ways in which young people can be meaningfully involved in the development of trauma-informed practice frameworks.

A narrative approach is used to present a contextual overview of youth justice in Australia, introduce key concepts underpinning trauma-informed practice and consider the barriers and facilitators of co-production and participatory approaches to the development and implementation of trauma-informed practice.

Youth justice in Australia is widely viewed as in urgent need of reform, with broad interest in developing more trauma-informed practice in these systems. Co-production and participatory approaches are fundamental to the reform process and can help to ensure that the views and aspirations of the children for whom these systems are responsible are embedded in efforts to implement trauma-informed practice.

This paper presents an argument for implementing trauma-informed practice in Australian youth justice that is based on consultation and collaboration with young people. It does not present evidence about the potential effectiveness of such an approach.

This paper has direct implications for youth justice practice, in terms of both service philosophy, design and delivery.

The work discussed in this paper offers possibilities for new and different ways of responding to youth crime and maintaining community safety.

Whilst the need to re-imagine youth justice is widely recognised, there are few resources available to support efforts to co-produce trauma-informed practice. This paper synthesises what is known about these approaches and offers some suggestions and possible ways forward.

Coming of age in the United States as an undocumented immigrant alters traditional rites of passage such as “completing school, moving out of the parental home, establishing employment, getting married, and becoming a parent” (Gonzales, 2011, p. 604). Yet, the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012 began to reconcile some aspects in the life, educational, and occupational trajectories of nearly 800,000 youths. It is in the context of moving out the parental home or relocating that this chapter explores the decisions or processes that DACA beneficiaries encounter. Considering how “illegality,” place, and family impact the individual, this chapter demonstrates how different immigration statuses, attitudes, behaviours, and structures disparately, yet unequivocally, continue to frame coming of age processes. Drawing from seven interviews with undocumented Mexican youth benefiting from DACA along the Texas–Mexico border, this chapter introduces the term mixed-status familism. Mixed-status familism provides a nuanced approach to understand the ways in which the mixed-status nature of a family, their attitudes, behaviours, structures, and the place in which they reside continue to frame newly obtained individual opportunities in general and transitions to adulthood like relocating in specific. While most literature points to the benefits that DACA has provided for individuals and a few explore how these have transferred to the family, this chapter captures how family buffers both the impact of an undocumented status and the benefits of a temporary legal protection.

This chapter uses discourse analysis to explain why entrepreneurship has become a primary response to Africa’s youth employment challenge. It analyses almost 20 years of academic literature and publications from one of the world’s foremost authorities on entrepreneurship: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). The study found that youth were positioned within a discourse of entrepreneurial essentialism; where entrepreneurship was narrativised as the only option for youth employment; and youth were framed as entrepreneurship being the natural solution for them. Youth were concurrently framed within numerous contradictory entrepreneurial discourses which were used to elevate and legitimise entrepreneurship as the key pathway for addressing Africa’s youth employment challenge. An important finding in this study was that the dominant model of entrepreneurship being promoted by GEM to address the challenge is a mainly skills-based pathway to self-employment and low-growth microenterprise development. This is concerning for two reasons: firstly, global evidence does not demonstrate much support for such an approach, and secondly, it undermines other responses to youth unemployment, particularly those which seek to address more structural, demand-side barriers to employment.

Growing interest in the use of digital technologies and a Putnam-inspired debate about youth engagement has drawn researchers from outside of the study of social movements into research on the topic. This interest in youth protest participation has, in turn, developed into a substantial area of research of its own. While offering important research contributions, we argue that these areas of scholarship are often not well grounded in classic social movement theory and research, instead focusing on new media and/or the relationship between activism and other forms of youth engagement. This chapter seeks to correct this by drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a moderately sized southwestern city to examine whether traditional paths to youth activism (i.e., family, friends, and institutions) have changed or eroded as online technology use and extra-institutional engagement among youth has risen. We find that youth continue to be mobilized by supportive family, friends, and institutional opportunities, and that the students who were least engaged are missing these vital support networks. Thus, it is not so much that the process driving youth activism has changed, but that some youth are not receiving support that has been traditionally necessary to spur activism. This offers an important reminder for scholars studying youth and digital activism and youth participation more broadly that existing theory and research about traditional pathways to activism needs to be evaluated in contemporary research.

This paper demonstrates the impact of recognition and valuation of youth interest on potential career trajectory and future pathway choices.

This paper presents data from two ethnographies. The first ethnography is of an online professional wrestling fan community, which took place between October 2012 and May 2013. The second ethnography is of the online Scratch community, Scratch is a free online coding program. Observations of the community took place between October 2014 and October 2015, with interviews ongoing as of the writing of this paper.

This paper details the importance of valuing youth learning and the impact that receiving recognition and valuation can have on youths’ future choices.

This research focuses on two online communities and presents four examples of the phenomena of valuation and recognition described in the paper. To draw broad conclusions, a wider sample would be required.

This paper can offer examples to practitioners and researcher alike as to what the impacts of valuing youth learning in interest-driven contexts can be for youth long-term learning and career trajectory and forms that the valuation of interest to support growth and interest can take.

The paper demonstrates the importance of valuing learning in all parts of youths’ lives and the impact that the valuation can have on the future pathways and career trajectory of youth.