Leveraging After-School Programs to Minimize Risks for Internalizing Symptoms Among Urban Youth: Weaving Together Music Education and Social Development

Abstract

This study examined a university-community partnership, focusing on mental health promotion within an after-school music program. We pursued two goals: a) supporting staff around student engagement and behavior management; b) integrating social-emotional activities into the curriculum. We assessed youth’s mental health needs and examined feasibility of social-emotional activities delivered. One-hundred sixty-two youth participated in activities, while a subset of youth (n = 61) and their parents provided information on mental health need. Rates of anxiety and depression symptoms were high, and youth reported high satisfaction with the activities. Results suggest promise of this model for mental health promotion for urban youth.

Improving Youth Access to Mental Health Support through a Youth–Adult Partnership

“…HOPE peer leaders and adults worked together to conceive, implement, and sustain an effective solution. Interestingly, the HOPE model enacts what the field increasingly recognizes is needed: the integration of mental health support into natural settings for youth, such as schools, online, and community-based youth development organizations (Atkins & Lakind, 2013;Frazier, Capella, & Atkins, 2007;Hedemann & Frazier, 2017;Rickwood, Mazzer, & Telford, 2015;Salerno, 2016).…”

Promoting healthy trajectories for urban middle school youth through county‐funded, parks‐based after‐school programming

“…After-school programs offer substantial opportunity to mitigate risk and build resilience by focusing explicitly on social-emotional learning goals, especially in disinvested and under-resourced urban communities (e.g. Roffman et al, 2001;Tebes et al, 2007), where benefits for elementary and/or middle school students have been documented for academics (Lindo et al, 2018), physical health (Cuy Castellanos et al, 2019), mental health (Hedemann & Frazier, 2017), and SEL (Gordon et al, 2016). Frazier et al (2015) examined a model for fusing SEL content with after-school recreation for middle school youth in economically disadvantaged and marginalized communities (N = 3 parks, 46 youth, 100% African American).…”

Grupos comunitários juvenis: promoção da saúde mental e desenvolvimento de capacidades

“…The community has been recognized, in various investigations, as a privileged setting for intervention in the promotion of mental health, based on participation in artistic, recreational, sports, occupational and religious activities, which are not explicitly offered as therapeutic actions, but which are articulated as community-based initiatives. In this sense, interventions based on art are recognized as music groups (Clift, Manship, & Stephens, 2017;Hedemann & Frazier, 2016), dance, art therapy and creative expression (Ruiz-Casares, Kolyn, Sullivan, & Rousseau, 2015), writing, visual arts (Bridger, Emmanouil, & Lawthom, 2017) and traditional games in the public space (Bang, 2014b); also, occupational training activities such as training in agriculture (Shields-Zeeman, Pathare, Hipple Walters, Kapadia-Kundu, & Joag, 2016), shoe store and carpentry (Wilson, Cordier, Parsons, Vaz, & Buchanan, 2016), tribal history and jewelery making (Langdon et al, 2016), community cooking and English as a second language (Ruiz-Casares et al, 2015).…”

“…Three types of objectives were recognized in these interventions which focused on the promotion of mental health: on the one hand, some were aimed at the decrease in psychiatric symptoms, symptoms such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and distress (Clift et al, 2017;Hedemann & Frazier, 2016;Johnson et al, 2017); others addressed the construction of personal resources for individual and social empowerment (Bridger et al, 2017;Sundar et al, 2016); Finally, they focused on the construction of community skills, skills such as the consolidation/development of social networks, community participation and the recovery of public space (Bang, 2014b;Hurley et al, 2017;South et al, 2016).…”