Liesette Brunson

Creating Settings for Youth Empowerment and Leadership: An Ecological Perspective

Youth development programs are increasingly focusing on youth empowerment and leadership, a shift which often requires adult staff to adopt new roles and practices. This article explores staff practice in the context of a multisite initiative designed to engage marginalized youth in social change through youth-led grants. Interviews with youth workers and managers revealed practices at multiple ecological levels. Individual-level practices supported youths’ capacities to participate. Group-level practices fostered social interactions and activities that actualized the youth-led approach. Setting-level practices created structures that supported and protected group activities while organization-level practices promoted a favorable environment for youth leadership. Analyzed from an ecological and activity settings perspective, these results contribute to understanding the multifaceted and complex nature of youth work in power-sharing practice models. Practice implications include identifying training needs to help practitioners navigate across multiple ecological levels and suggesting reflection questions for practitioners.

Transforming Social Regularities in a Multicomponent Community‐Based Intervention: A Case Study of Professionals’ Adaptability to Better Support Parents to Meet Their Children's Needs.

This paper presents an in-depth case study of the dynamic processes of mutual adjustment that occurred between two professional teams participating in a multicomponent community-based intervention (CBI). Drawing on the concept of social regularities, we focus on patterns of social interaction within and across the two microsystems involved in delivering the intervention. Two research strategies, narrative analysis and structural network analysis, were used to reveal the social regularities linking the two microsystems. Results document strategies and actions undertaken by the professionals responsible for the intervention to modify intersetting social regularities to deal with a problem situation that arose during the course of one intervention cycle. The results illustrate how key social regularities were modified in order to resolve the problem situation and allow the intervention to continue to function smoothly. We propose that these changes represent a transition to a new state of the ecological intervention system. This transformation appeared to be the result of certain key intervening mechanisms: changing key role relationships, boundary spanning, and synergy. The transformation also appeared to be linked to positive setting-level and individual-level outcomes: confidence of key team members, joint planning, decision-making and intervention activities, and the achievement of desired intervention objectives.