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Young people transitioning from foster care to college experience unique identities and circumstances that make being successful in college especially challenging. We used qualitative survey data from 248 college graduates who were formerly in foster care to explore the strengths, challenges, and supports they experienced while in college that affected their success. A qualitative content analysis of responses to 3 open-ended survey questions revealed 7 global themes related to participants’ college experiences: positive self, overcoming, interpersonal relationships, finances and logistics, academic orientation, physical and mental health, and independent living skills. Subordinate themes are identified and participant quotes are provided to help illuminate participants’ postsecondary experiences. A primary goal for this study is to increase awareness of this hidden population on college campuses and provide a better understanding of their unique circumstances and needs. This information can be used by colleges and advocates to improve support services for these youth.

Permanency is a key child welfare system goal for the children they serve. This study addresses three key research questions: (1) How do older youth in foster care define their personal permanency goals? (2) How much progress have these youth made in achieving their personal permanency goals and other aspects of relational permanency, and how does this vary by gender, race, and age? and (3) What transition-related outcomes are associated with relational permanency achievement? Surveys were conducted with 97 youth between the ages of 14 and 20 currently in care. Over three-fourths of participants had an informal/relational permanency goal; however, only 6.7% had achieved their goal. Of eight additional conceptualizations of relational permanency assessed, the one associated with achievement of the highest number of key transition outcomes was Sense of Family Belonging. The transition outcomes with the most associations with permanency achievement were physical health and mental health. Relational permanency is a highly personal part of the transition process for youth in care, warranting personalized supports to ensure individual youths' goals are being addressed in transition planning. Permanency achievement may also provide a foundation for supporting youth in achieving other key transition outcomes.

The Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring as a university-community partnershipUniversity-community partnerships are designed to address pressing social problems by combining the goals and resources of colleges and universities with those of community stakeholders.Ideally, partnerships develop as symbiotic projects that empower community organisations, enrich the community, and provide unique sources of data for research and evaluation. Partnerships take many forms and have a wide range of goals, from promoting health, to developing sustainable neighbourhoods, to improving public education. They may involve university students serving an under-resourced area of the community, or community members entering the university to participate in dialogue, planning and research. Universities and community partners may also work together to make research findings accessible to the wider community, increasing the chances that important advancements in scientific knowledge are applied in practice.Likewise, partnerships provide a forum for professional knowledge to shape the direction of academic research. With so many variations, locations and goals -and because securing funding for partnership projects is increasingly difficult (US Department of Housing and Urban Development 2010) -it is important for partnership researchers to identify commonalities present in the most effective university-community partnership models.Researchers have recently begun to define the characteristics of successful university-community partnerships.Following a review of recent developments in the literature, this article explores the utility and flexibility of one of the more comprehensive partnership frameworks by applying it to a distinctive university-based summer institute designed to foster the exchange of knowledge between researchers and practitioners in the field of youth mentoring. One aim of the study reported here was to evaluate whether factors typically considered important for these partnerships would translate across contexts and provide a relevant conceptualisation for the summer institute model.Another goal was to learn how partnership criteria might be

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