Aims: Participatory action research (PAR) is a research methodology that uses collective and endemic knowledge to inform action and address social concerns. The aim of this study was to understand how one PAR team (comprised of university and community researchers) navigated power dynamics, especially considering the team's power differentials. Methods: Drawing upon phenomenological and case study methodologies, this qualitative study used loosely structured interviews and journaling with all members of the PAR team (N = 5) to explore explored how the team navigated power throughout the PAR process. Findings: This study found that PAR team members navigated the PAR process using values as a constant guide, especially in negotiating power and resource realities and when distinguishing equity from equality. Conclusion: This paper offers a set of power and values mapping practices which may guide power-diverse PAR teams by addressing power and values realities in their own unique and contextually bound PAR processes.

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The aim of this study is to explore how peer support workers (individuals with similar lived experiences employed to provide support) conceptualize change work with young people experiencing homelessness. The present study used participatory qualitative methods, including semistructured interviews and journaling with peer support workers and program supervisors and administrators, to understand how peers understand change work with young people experiencing homelessness. This study found that peers center self-directed growth among young people experiencing homelessness, rather than change that prioritizes meeting program-directed outcomes such as obtaining housing or gaining employment. Peer relationships invite possibility and create containers of hope when supporting young people experiencing homelessness, regardless of their paths. Lastly, peers recognize that growth happens in seasons, and embrace such seasons as checkpoints on youths' journeys. Such findings may guide service providers beginning peer programming or those considering models for engaging young people experiencing homelessness in relationship-supported growth.

Objective: Mutual aid has been a longstanding practice among communities who experience short term crises (such as natural and human-made disasters) as well as long term crises (such as systemic marginalization and poverty). It has proliferated as a widespread practice during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way for individuals and communities to share resources when government and non-governmental services have failed. Our study aims to understand: What values and beliefs underly mutual aid practices in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic? Methods: Our qualitative study uses phenomenological methods to interview mutual aid organizers and participants (N=25) across the state of Colorado in the early months of the pandemic. Results: We find that values underlying mutual aid include reciprocity, shared humanity, and community-driven care and redistribution of resources. Yet, participants recognize that to realize these values requires a generative and active community which is responsive to needs. Conclusions: These findings may inform how mutual aid organizers, social workers, and scholars alike understand how mutual aid, as an (old yet) emerging practice, may uniquely respond to the ongoing pandemic and compounding crises, like economic distress and climate change, as government systems fail to keep up with surmounting needs.

Many young people who experience social marginalization (such as young people of color, who identify as LGBTQ, and who have experienced housing instability, among others) have often faced significant trauma exposure and social oppression and may endure subsequent adverse impacts on their well‐being. Conversely, many such young people exhibit adaptive responding—the ability to maintain well‐being through and despite such contextual constraints. This theoretical paper illustrates a conceptual model for how third places—public settings which offer sociability and community connection—may foster adaptive responding through the mutually constitutive (i.e., mutually reinforcing and interrelated) mechanisms of psychological sense of community and social capital. As prior work on third places has not considered the social marginalization which many young people face, especially in public settings, this theoretical model also considers how social policing in third places potentially moderates the mutually constitutive relationships between participation in third places, social capital, and psychological sense of community. This paper ends with a proposed research agenda, which may empirically test this theoretical model and its assumptions through future model development. Lastly, key considerations for policy and practice are offered, with particular attention to how young people may be affirmed and welcomed in third places rather than socially policed.