Reimagining Intervention in Young Lives

de Karen R. Foster, Dale C. Spencer

"Poverty and unemployment are on the rise among Canadian youth. Clearly something needs to change, but current social-assistance models are based on harmful assumptions about the value of interventionist approaches with ?high-risk? young people. Reimagining Intervention in Young Lives explores the difficulties many young people encounter with the ?support system? available to them. Drawn from interviews with forty-five youth, this important work resituates the nexus of the problem from the presumption of incorrigible youth to the recognition that the existing social-aid structures make it almost impossible for poor and homeless youths, no matter how hard they try, to surmount adversity. 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." --Back cover.