“Cuz They Care About the People Who Goes There”: The Multiple Roles of a Community-Based Youth Center in Providing “Youth (Comm)Unity” for Low-Income Chinese American Youth
Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online September, 2010
“Cuz They Care About the People Who Goes There”: The Multiple Roles of a Community-Based Youth Center in Providing “Youth (Comm)Unity” for Low-Income Chinese American Youth
This article will explore the role of “CYC,” a community-based youth center, in providing a sense of what I call “Youth (Comm)Unity” for Chinese American youth from low-income immigrant families. While CYC combines the youths’ home and school worlds, it is also distinct from these worlds by forming a new and hybrid culture/space. In doing so, I argue Youth (Comm)Unity consists of three critical concepts: (a) the Multiple Worlds model developed by Patricia Phelan et al. (1991, 1993, 1998); (b) Angela Valenzuela’s “authentic caring” (1999); and (c) similar to Gloria Ladson-Billings’s “culturally relevant pedagogy,” “culturally relevant” understanding (1994; 1995a; 1995b). Through providing the youth with a sense of Youth (Comm)Unity, CYC is able to offer the following kinds of social and emotional support: sense of trust and caring, sense of ethnic self and identity, sense of home and safe space, serving as role models, and sense of being a teenager. Data for this article is drawn from a larger study based on 15 weeks of ethnographic-based research. As this article illustrates, community-based organizations bridge such gaps for youth from low-income and working-class immigrant families, and Youth (Comm)-Unity is key in order to better serve low-income students of color.
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