Reimagining Intervention in Young Lives: Work, Social Assistance, and Marginalization

Karen R. Foster · Dale C. Spencer

Aug 2012 · UBC Press

About this ebook

Poverty and unemployment are on the rise among Canadian youth. Clearly something needs to change, but current social-assistance models are based on problematic assumptions about the lives and possible trajectories of “risky” young people.

Reimagining Intervention in Young Lives explores the difficulties many marginalized young people encounter with the “support system” available to them, as well as the social forces that push them to the margins in the first place. Drawn from interviews with forty-five patrons of a youth drop-in centre, this important work resituates the nexus of the problem from the identification of individual “risk factors” to the recognition of the contradictions and barriers contained in the very social-aid structures that are meant to bring their target populations back in to the fold of “normal” society.

Intervention is indeed necessary, but more to challenge the prevailing structures that incorrectly presume how youth themselves interpret risk, poverty, and, most important of all, their own potential.

About the author

Karen R. Foster is Banting Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Management Department of the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax. Dale C. Spencer is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manitoba.