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

Poverty and unemployment are on the rise among Canadian youth.Clearly something needs to change, but current social-assistance modelsare based on problematic assumptions about the lives and possibletrajectories of "risky" young people.

Reimagining Intervention in Young Lives explores thedifficulties many marginalized young people encounter with the"support system" available to them, as well as the socialforces that push them to the margins in the first place. Drawn frominterviews with forty-five patrons of a youth drop-in centre, thisimportant work resituates the nexus of the problem from theidentification of individual "risk factors" to therecognition of the contradictions and barriers contained in the verysocial-aid structures that are meant to bring their target populationsback in to the fold of "normal" society.

Intervention is indeed necessary, but more to challenge theprevailing structures that incorrectly presume how youth themselvesinterpret risk, poverty, and, most important of all, their ownpotential.