Final Needs Assessment Report: Identifying barriers faced by Ottawa Somali Youth in accessing post-secondary and vocational opportunities

In 2016, with funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation’s Seed Grant program, The Somali Centre for Family Services of Ottawa (SCFS) invited Carleton University’s Centre for Studies on Poverty and Social Citizenship (CSPSC) to partner on the completion of a needs assessment focusing on the barriers faced by Somali youth in accessing post-secondary education, and employment training and opportunities. In carrying out this research, the SCFS’s main objective was to address social and economic exclusion locally by inviting Somali youth (age 19-30) from the Ottawa area to engage in the\ud conceptualization and design of resources that could best support their participation in educational and vocational programs

Vers une plus grande transparence concernant les partenariats intersectoriels pour le développement technologique

This article explores the problems and potential of funded short-term cross-sector partnerships to address technological deficits in the nonprofit sector by engaging with the partners of a concluded project. The partnership case study that forms the backbone of this article was a three-year nationally funded nonprofit-industry-academic partnership. The ob- jective of the partnership was to increase the data collection capacity of a national nonprofit organization and its affiliate centres through the development of a web-based app. This article highlights the challenges and differing experiences of nonprofit-industry-academic partnerships more generally, and technology-development partnerships more specifically.Cet article explore les problèmes et le potentiel de partenariats intersectoriels subventionnés à court terme à gérer des déficits technologiques dans le secteur sans but lucratif en collaborant avec les partenaires de projets déjà conclus. Plus précisément, l’article se fonde sur une étude de cas effectuée sur un partenariat de trois ans subventionné à l’échelle nationale entre le milieu académique et le secteur sans but lucratif. L’objectif de ce partenariat était d’augmenter la capacité d’un organisme national sans but lucratif et de ses centres affiliés à recueillir des données en développant une application Web. Cet article souligne les défis et les diverses expériences des partenariats entre le milieu académique et le secteur sans but lucratif en général, et les partenariats consacrés au développement technologique en particulier

Social workers as double agents: critical inquiry, social work education, and the youth question

Contemporary iterations of the youth question present social work with a generative challenge to imagine the education needs of youth as social work students, and at the same time, to imagine the intervention needs of youth as service users. This paper engages this challenge through an empirical case that confronted us with our own preconceived understandings of young people and social work: a funded project to support the program evaluation capacity of a national network of youth centers in Canada. Working through three tensions that emerged in this work—(1) assumptions about youth and workers, (2) participation as a best-practice, and (3) how local data collection practices are networked to ambiguous, ongoing social processes—we reflect project learning and youth studies literature together to explore the possibilities of ‘critical inquiry skills’ in social work education. As we develop the concept here, critical inquiry skills are a means to encourage young people to see themselves as simultaneously within and outside of the categories and approaches they are taught and subjected to, and by extension, to invite and support newcomers to make the discipline and profession their own