Most of the existing body of research on formal youth mentoring has focused on programs in the United States, with few inquiries into how mentoring programs have taken shape in other contexts. In this article, we compare and contrast programs in the United States and continental Europe to investigate how context shapes the ways in which programs are conceived and implemented. Concerns about inequality and delinquency have been major drivers of program expansion in the United States, while concerns about the influx of migrants into linguistically and culturally homogeneous communities have fostered the expansion of programs in continental Europe. Through a series of program comparisons, we explored differences in volunteer characteristics, target populations, and how programs and benefits are construed. Implications for implementation and future research across both contexts are discussed.

In the last decades, many higher education institutions have developed practices of internationalization of curricula aiming at developing intercultural competences among the non-mobile majority of students. Some of them have developed service-learning activities focusing on working with underserved communities from different cultures. This article shows some challenges on how intercultural competence of college students participating in a community-based mentoring program could be assessed. Outcomes are based on mixed-method research from a survey given to a treatment group that participated in a mentoring program ( n = 95) and a control group ( n = 71), and on 10 daily life stories from university students who were enrolled and participated in the mentoring program. Paradoxically, results show scarce differences between groups in Attitudes, Skills, Comprehension, and Desired Internal Outcomes in favor of the control group. But, on the other hand, some slightly significant differences in favor of the treatment group are observed with regard to Dominance Orientation and Symbolic Racism. These results bring new hypotheses and discussions helpful for scholars and administrators, especially coming from the learnings that students showed, particularly in qualitative data.

This article focuses on the relation between mobility and assimilation among the Roma. Quantitative results from UNDP research in four Central and Eastern Europe countries provide new data and show the need for a new conceptualization of the evidence. These results demonstrate that there are no significant data to confirm the existence of a straight-line process of assimilation in the Roma case. Thus, they question the canonical theory of assimilation by demonstrating that middle-class Roma tend not to leave their identity behind. I propose the need for a segmented theory of the different upward mobility paths that Roma people tend to follow. In a complementary way, the observed results also point out the need to take into account some variations in Roma ethnic identity depending on the source of ethnic data, how they are collected and the implications for research in the different national contexts explored

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Mobility is a fundamental and important characteristic of human activity: it fulfils the basic need of going from one location to the other in order to partake in employment, kinship, and education [...]

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Durante los últimos años ha emergido un renovado interés por los referéndums y las consultas ciudadanas, tanto en ámbitos nacionales como locales. Se trata de formas de democracia directa que han sido poco estudiadas hasta el momento. Este artículo propone un marco conceptual para analizar cinco estudios de caso, experiencias locales que han permitido destacar las fortalezas y las debilidades de las consultas ciudadanas. Las fortalezas se centran en su flexibilidad y en su capacidad ayudar a los gobernantes a tomar decisiones en situaciones difíciles. Las debilidades tienen que ver, sobre todo, con las dificultades de situarlas en un contexto de debate e información pública y, también, con el poco interés que ha logrado despertar entre la ciudadanía.

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