Youth Engagement

Iwasaki, Y. (2015). Youth Engagement—Engaging for Change: Changing for Engagement. Journal of Community Engagement & Scholarship, 8(2), 26-43.

The Participatory Action Research (PAR) was developed to collaborate with leaders and communities to bring forth positive changes from engagement with youths. Engagement is the core of this research study to facilitate change. This article describes the various challenges of engaging with youth, especially youths with high-risk behaviors in society. High-risk youths are those suffering from homelessness, poverty, and addictive behaviors causing various challenges in society including violence. This study wishes to utilize, “strategic youth and partner collaboration” to engage with youth and develop

Some youths participate in drugs, street sex, violence, and other high-risk behaviors because they want a place to sleep or to have food. This article examines different strategies and programs that include community engagement as a crucial role to alter behaviors in youths who are participating in violent behaviors. This is done by implementing a plan, conducting evaluations, evidence-based programs, and leadership to pursue preventing youth violence. Depending on the amount of community collaboration and engagement determines the amount of effort put into altering behaviors and preventing youth violence. Youth violence is one of the main unresolved health problems all over the world. Thus, the main point of this article is the importance of implementing evidence-based programs to combat youth violence. These programs are people-oriented and work specifically to counter youth violence in society with community engagement at it’s core. This topic relates to communities because when the implementation of evidence-based programs has been done correctly, they are grounded in community life to bring forth change with

Youths at high-risk are vulnerable to violent behaviors because of poverty, homelessness, and substance abuse. These problems they suffer from are the root of violent behaviors on the streets. This article argues how power causes various levels of engagement in communities to be different due to community partners and researchers arguing over who has power. Communities can have engagement that reduces youth violence but without collaboration, there is not a lot of engagement that can be done. Without collaboration with community partners, it makes it unclear what program should be utilized with researchers to combat youth violence in communities. This article highlights how complex collaboration is between community partners and researchers can be even when researchers know what needs to be done. Researchers should reflect upon their own goals and strive to have partnerships because partnerships are essential to community life and engagement in