Workforce Support for Urban After-School Programs: Turning Obstacles into Opportunities.

Workforce Support for Urban After-School Programs: Turning Obstacles into Opportunities. Am J Community Psychol. 2019 Apr 19;: Authors: Frazier SL, Chou T, Ouellette RR, Helseth SA, Kashem ER, Cromer KD Abstract Organized after-school programs can mitigate risk and build resilience for youth in urban communities. Benefits rely on high-quality developmental experiences characterized by a supportive environment, structured youth-adult interactions, and opportunities for reflective engagement. Programs in historically disenfranchised communities are underfunded; staff are transient, underpaid, and undertrained; and youth exhibit significant mental health problems which staff are variably equipped to address. Historically, after-school research has focused on behavior management and social-emotional learning, relying on traditional evidence-based interventions designed for and tested in schools. However, after-school workforce and resource limitations interfere with adoption of empirically supported strategies and youth health promotion. We have engaged in practice-based research with urban after-school programs in economically vulnerable communities for nearly two decades, toward building a resource-efficient, empirically informed multitiered model of workforce support. In this paper, we offer first-person accounts of four academic-community partnerships to illustrate common challenges, variability across programs, and recommendations t...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: research