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The purpose of this paper is to examine the economic cost and social benefits of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) set up some years back by the Federal Government of Nigeria.

The paper combined qualitative and quantitative information to substantiate the clarion calls by some scholars and concerned social commentators for a review of the NYSC. Based on the objective stated above, a sample size of 200 respondents was selected and administered copies of structured questionnaires in order to elicit information from a cross‐section of Nigerians. At the end, out of the 200 respondents, only 150 respondents returned their questionnaires on the basis of which recommendations and conclusions were based.

The main policy thrust of the scheme is to serve as a catalyst for sustainable development in Nigeria after the Nigerian civil war. However, on the strength of the survey, the authors found that the scheme has failed in many respects in accelerating the socio‐economic development of Nigeria, when the relevance of the scheme is measured by Eight‐Scale Perception Index developed by the authors.

The paper cautions that despite the setback of the NYSC, it would be absurd to advocate that the scheme be scrapped completely. What is rational is for the policymaker to initiate a process for the reform of NYSC scheme in order for it to meet the contemporary expectations and challenges.

The results of this paper support the structural‐agency framework in sociology. The relationship between structure and agency is seen as a dialectical one because society forms the individuals, who in turn create better society by forming a continuous loop. NYSC was laudable at inception, but humans made it crooked; it is therefore expedient that the scheme be revitalized by humans in order to meet contemporary challenges.

The purpose of this study was to identify and understand the barriers and enablers to the implementation of youth peer support in a clinical mental health service. The development of a lived experience workforce in mental health is a key component of policy at both the state and the federal level in Australia. Implementing a peer workforce within existing clinical services, however, can be a challenging task. Furthermore, implementing peer support in a youth mental health setting involves a further degree of complexity, involving a degree of care for young people being invited to provide peer support when they may be still early in their own recovery journey.

This paper reports on a formative evaluation of the beginning stages of implementation of a youth peer workforce within an existing clinical mental health service in Melbourne.

The project found that it was feasible and beneficial to implement youth peer support; however, significant challenges remain, including lack of appropriate training for young people, uncertainty amongst clinical staff about the boundaries of the peer role and the potential for “tokenism” in the face of slow cultural change across the whole service.

Very little evaluation has yet been undertaken into the effectiveness of implementing peer support in youth mental health services. This paper offers an opportunity to investigate where services may need to identify strengths and address difficulties when undertaking future implementation efforts.

Multiple forces that shape the identities of adolescents and young adults also influence their subsequent career choices. Early work experiences are key among these forces. Recognizing this, youth service programs have emerged worldwide with the hope of shaping participants’ future trajectories through boosting engagement in civically oriented activities and work. Despite these goals, past research on these programs’ impact has yielded mixed outcomes. Our goal is to understand why this might be the case.

We rely on interview, archival, and longitudinal survey data to examine young adults’ experiences of a European youth service program.

A core feature of youth service programs, namely their dual identity of helping others (i.e., service beneficiaries) and helping oneself (i.e., participants), might partly explain the program’s mixed outcomes. We find that participants focus on one of the organization’s identities largely to the exclusion of the other, creating a dynamic in which their interactions with members who focus on the other identity create challenges and dominate their program experience, to the detriment of a focus on the organization and its goals. This suggests that a previously overlooked feature of youth service programs (i.e., their dual identity) might prove both a blessing for attracting many diverse members and a curse for achieving desired outcomes.

More broadly, our results suggest that dual identity organizations might attract members focused on a select identity, but fail to imbue them with a blended identity; thus, limiting the extent to which such organizations can truly “redirect” future career choices.

Two major reform movements have shaped child and adolescent mental health services over the past quarter-century: the Systems of Care movement, and more recently, the movement toward evidence-based practice. Results from several studies indicate that youth served in traditional residential or inpatient care may experience difficulty re-entering their natural environments, or were released into physically and emotionally unsafe homes (Bruns & Burchard, 2000; President's Commission on Mental Health, 1978; Stortz, 2000; Stroul & Friedman, 1986; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1999). The cost of hospitalizing youth also became a policy concern (Henggeler et al., 1999b; Kielser, 1993; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1999). For example, it is estimated that from the late 1980s through 1990 inpatient treatment consumed nearly half of all expenditures for child and adolescent mental health care although the services were found not to be very effective (Burns, 1991; Burns & Friedman, 1990). More recent analyses indicate that at least 1/3 of all mental health expenditures for youth are associated with inpatient hospitalization (Ringel & Sturm, 2001).

The Lemuel Shattuck Hospital Youth Service Program adopted a public health approach to address the mental health needs of incarcerated juvenile offenders in Massachusetts. The program, which operated for 6 years, provided psychiatric care and neuropsychological assessment to delinquent youth as well as training for psychiatry residents, neuropsychology fellows and Massachusetts Department of Youth Services’ staff. The program recognized and attempted to address the health care disparity of limited access to quality mental health services for incarcerated youth, particularly those from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. The program was a collaborative venture among the Massachusetts Departments of Public Health and Youth Services, and Tufts-New England Medical Center. The scope of the problem of mental health care for incarcerated youth will be first outlined, followed by a history and evaluation of the program from a public health and system integration perspective.

Youth violence victimisation impacts on health, mental health and future risk trajectories. A London hospital emergency department (ED) outreach youth service provides a unique intervention opportunity to support adolescents involved in violence. The purpose of this paper is to describe the set‐up of the service.

Young people (YP) targeted were aged 12‐18, from two London boroughs and attended ED with injuries from a violent incident. They were referred to Oasis youth workers for a mentoring/youth work intervention. Lifestyle and symptom scales were used to assess risk profile. Hospital staff questionnaires determined service awareness in the first six months, and interviews/focus group identified potential barriers to service uptake.

By 12 months, the service was operating smoothly. Of the first 505 YP attending ED, a third were referred, a third ineligible and a third non‐contactable/refused. Detailed analysis of the first 30 attending found most were male (87 per cent), equal White or Black ethnicity (40 per cent) with 20 per cent “Other” ethnicities, with only a third living with both biological parents. This was similar to the full population attending. Nearly half (49 per cent) had been assaulted, 30 per cent had injuries self‐generated through poor anger management, the remainder injured in fighting. Over half (57 per cent) had disorder, mostly behavioural, correlated with lifestyle risk scores. Barriers to service use/implementation included YP mistrust and fear of reprisals, problems with service visibility in the busy hospital environment and ineffective staff communication with YP, all countered during the running of the service. Gauging outcome at follow‐up is the second evaluation stage.

The youth violence project is an important initiative for intervention in youth violence.

The purpose of this article is to determine the types of collaborative activities public youth services and school librarians in rural locations engage in and to ascertain whether there are methods that youth service librarians believe can be employed to improve collaborative activities with public school librarians.

A mixed method design was implemented with an online self-administered survey. The survey contained open and closed-ended questions.

The findings indicate that many public librarians serving youth in rural locations find it important to collaborate with school librarians. Yet, they struggle to build strong collaborative relationships. Factors such as time, a lack of school librarian administrative support, and a lack of understanding about the roles of school librarians and public librarians, are collaborative barriers.

The study was limited to a purposive sample of 80 public librarians serving youth in rural areas in the United States.

Librarianship training programs can help school librarians and youth services librarians learn how to form collaborative partnerships through mentorship programs, requiring pre-service school and youth services librarians to collaborate on projects, and educating them about the similarities in their goals. School and public librarians can also benefit from training to teach them how to build community partnerships.

The results provide evidence that public librarians serving youth in rural areas favor building stronger collaborative relationships with school librarians. Building these relationships can improve the quality of education for youth in these locations. This article also includes proposed strategies for improving these relationships.

This study sought to gain a better understanding of the general life experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) newcomer youth, situated within the broader context of their lives post-migration. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of various forms of oppression experienced by LGBT newcomers and offers recommendations for transforming services to better serve the complex needs of this marginalized population.

The Teens Resisting Urban Trans/Homophobia (TRUTH) project was comprised of ten focus groups with 70 youth (aged 14-29) living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Another three focus groups were conducted with 13 GTA service providers and teachers working with LGBT youth, in addition to one key informant interview. For this paper, the authors drew from a subset of the data including four newcomer-specific focus groups in which there were 39 youth who identified as refugees or immigrants, as well as key informant interviews with four youth (three of whom also participated in focus groups) and one service provider. Participants were asked about “what homophobia and transphobia meant to them”, “where they experienced it”, “in what forms”, and “how it impacted their daily lives”.

The experiences of LGBT newcomer youth in this study involved a complex negotiation of multiple systems of oppression. Youth described experiences of homophobia and racism within interpersonal relationships, in the LGBT community, in their respective diasporic communities, in social service encounters and during the immigration/refugee process. Barriers for LGBT refugee youth included difficulties finding work and accessing health care, as well as the additional burden of proving their sexual orientation during refugee claimant hearings.

While the combination of focus groups and key informant interviews is a strength in this study, it also presents challenges for analysis. In focus groups, it is not always clear who is speaking; because of this, the authors were sometimes unable to differentiate between refugee and immigrant youth (or those without status) in our focus groups, making it often unclear which perspective or experience youth were speaking to. Another limitation was the dominance of the “cisgender gay male voice” in our conclusions. Lesbian and bisexual women were present in fewer numbers and the sample only included three trans youth.

The findings reveal systemic discrimination on the basis of race and sexual orientation that illuminate injustices within Canadian society and systems that can enhance the efforts of those working in policy and service environments. Focused anti-homophobia and anti-racism training, and the implementation of policies designed to enhance accessibility, could improve service provision for newcomer LGBT youth. Furthermore, in order to facilitate a more just settlement process, a broader understanding of sexual identity, gender identity, and gender expression is required of the refugee claimant system.

This study examines the experiences of youth in a large and complex, multicultural, and gay-friendly urban centre, thus providing timely and current data about the well-being of newcomer LGBT youth. As such, it is one of the first studies to offer some insights into the life issues and challenges post-migration of Canadian LGBT newcomer youth.

Since January 2015, the Dutch youth care system has been under construction. Its focus has shifted from the problematic to the normal development of children. Emphasis on the capacities of both youths and parents, on customized care and on better cooperation between professionals should decrease the use of specialized services. This reconstruction of the youth care system not only appeals to the competencies and skills of professionals, but also requires innovations in terms of leadership. The purpose of this paper is to describe the struggle managers face when working to transform the youth care system, and to provide some suggestions for how managers can be supported.

This paper is based on the results of two empirical, qualitative studies that were recently conducted by the Research Institute Youth, which is part of the Health Care and Social Work Research Centre of Windesheim University of Applied Sciences in Zwolle, the Netherlands. Over the course of a preliminary study, executive managers of five youth care organizations were interviewed on the ongoing transformations of their organizations and the changing roles and needs of managers within these transformations. Subsequently, 13 middle- and first-line managers of 3 youth care organizations were interviewed about their experiences and the ways in which they have handled the new roles they have taken on in transforming their organizations.

The management of youth care organizations is responsible for facilitating professionals in taking on and shaping their new roles, thus affecting not only the structure but also the culture and practices of youth care organizations and of management itself. This research shows that managers are struggling with these changes in their own ways. While youth care managers are struggling with their new roles and responsibilities, the intended transformation of the youth care system lags behind. Appropriate support of managers is essential, but is currently lacking. This paper provides some suggestions for how managers can be supported.

This paper identifies and explains the challenges that top-, middle- and lower-level managers face in current transformation processes in social service organizations, and provides some suggestions for how managers can be supported in these processes.

Purpose – At the turn of the 21st century, popular claimsmakers made a series of claims about the benefits of volunteer work for youth: that volunteering would reduce youthful self-absorption with peer groups, introduce youth to people different from themselves, foster macro-level understandings of social problems, and connect youth to the community. This article examines youths’ experiences of volunteer work in order to determine which claims are realized and how.

Methodology/approach – I conducted in-depth interviews with 45 youth, aged 15–23, who engaged in volunteer work with a wide variety of organizations.

Findings – Youth did not always realize these claims and when they did, many did so through mechanisms different than those suggested by popular claimsmakers.

Research limitations/implications – Because this is an exploratory study which uses a purposive sample, the findings provide direction for future researchers to more fully investigate how youth realize the benefits of volunteering and under what conditions.

Practical implications – In order to make volunteering a valuable experience for as many youth as possible, volunteer coordinators need to be cautious of uncritically absorbing public claims.

Originality/value of paper – Youth speak for themselves about the value of volunteering and challenge popular claims made about youth and volunteerism.