Foster Care in California: Achievements and Challenges

Examines changes in California's foster care policies, processes, and practices; progress since 2000 in reducing the number of children in foster care; contributing factors; and remaining challenges, including issues of payments and aging out

Seen But Seldom Heard: Creative Participatory Methods in a Study of Youth and Risk

This paper presents a discussion of the methodologies used in a small scale ‘popular education’ project involving young people in creative activities. The goal of the project is to explore their experiences and feelings about risk and safety and their ‘connectedness’ to their local community. A number of different methods are discussed as ways of empowering marginalised young people, including the use of visual methods, and new media in the form of blogs and Twitter Scripts, within an overarching participatory methodology. Arts-based and multimedia activities are powerful tools to enable young people to collectively question the nature of their historical and social situation and have the potential to raise sensitive issues, therefore, encouraging wider debate, producing new understandings, and facilitating social change. Building on insights gained in earlier research, which suggested that young people felt that they were not listened to or had enough influence in their neighbourhoods, this paper discusses the use of multimedia and creative means to develop a more accessible and effective arena in which young people can learn new skills to enable them to tell their story. In keeping with Bourdieu’s General Theoretical Framework, consideration is given to the ways in which such participatory and arts-based approaches can demonstrate value for the social and cultural capital of young people. Keywords: youth, risk, empowerment, co-production, creative media, Bourdie

Preparing transition from child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS): evaluating a creative participatory approach

Researchers sought to jointly develop a preparation programme for transition from child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) with young service users and recent leavers from three NHS mental health trusts. Creative research methods were used within two day-long sessions of exercises, discussions and games, and the approach independently evaluated. This article reports these evaluation findings. In the main, we found that creative and participatory methods offer a safe and relaxed yet fun and stimulating environment, conducive to thinking ‘differently’ about future mental health support. Young people were able and keen to have a voice in identifying important preparations, mechanisms and processes in transitioning from CAMHS. Challenges to working in this way within a relatively short timescale included institutional and procedural delays affecting recruitment, and resulting in smaller than intended group sizes. The research team endeavoured to minimise the impact of these challenges. Collaboration with NHS partners was a main strength in this project, enabling research findings to contribute directly to a review of policy and practice.National Institute for Health Research (CLAHRC East of England programme)This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Social Research Association via http://the-sra.org.uk/journal-social-research-practice

Preparing transition from child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS): evaluating a creative participatory approach

Researchers sought to jointly develop a preparation programme for transition from child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) with young service users and recent leavers from three NHS mental health trusts. Creative research methods were used within two day-long sessions of exercises, discussions and games, and the approach independently evaluated. This article reports these evaluation findings. In the main, we found that creative and participatory methods offer a safe and relaxed yet fun and stimulating environment, conducive to thinking ‘differently’ about future mental health support. Young people were able and keen to have a voice in identifying important preparations, mechanisms and processes in transitioning from CAMHS. Challenges to working in this way within a relatively short timescale included institutional and procedural delays affecting recruitment, and resulting in smaller than intended group sizes. The research team endeavoured to minimise the impact of these challenges. Collaboration with NHS partners was a main strength in this project, enabling research findings to contribute directly to a review of policy and practice.National Institute for Health Research (CLAHRC East of England programme)This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Social Research Association via http://the-sra.org.uk/journal-social-research-practice

Active Travel Co-Benefits of Travel Demand Management Policies that Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions, MTI Report 12-12

There is increasing evidence that improved health outcomes may be significant co-benefits of land use plans and transport policies that increase active transport (or walking and biking for purposeful travel) and reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) from vehicle miles traveled (VMT). A greater understanding of these benefits may broaden the constituency for regional planning that supports local and national GHG reduction goals. In this study, California’s activity-based travel demand model (ABM) is applied to (1) demonstrate how this new generation of travel models can be used to produce the active travel data (age and sex distributions) required by comparative risk assessment models to estimate health outcomes for alternative land use and transport plans and to (2) identify the magnitude of change in active travel that may be possible from land use, transit, and vehicle pricing policies for California and its five major regions for a future 2035 time horizon. The results of this study suggest that distance-based vehicle pricing may increase walking by about 10% and biking by about 17%, and concurrently GHG from VMT may be reduced by about 16%. Transit expansion and supportive development patterns may increase active travel by about 2% to 3% for both walk and bike modes while also reducing VMT by about 4% on average. The combination of all three policies may increase time spent walking by about 13% and biking by about 19%, and reduce VMT by about 19%