Street-Based Social Work Praxis: An “Un-Manual” for Advancing Human Rights and Identifying Social Safety Net Failures With Youth of Color Experiencing Poverty

Abstract

Street-based social work responds to the “social disaster” of U.S. youth of color experiencing poverty who fall through the cracks of existing social safety nets. Drawing from 17 years of feedback from youth clients about street-based service provision in university–community partnerships, the flexible street-based model uses several trauma-focused, strengths-based, and humanistic modalities to provide youth with a positive childhood experience and support their self-determination, undergirded by a culturally sensitive accompaniment approach. Street-based social work can be a transitional justice, human rights–based counterforce to mass criminalization of youth of color by supporting their efforts at redress. As a translational science approach, street-based social work yields knowledge about social safety net failures, how policies can be improved, and effective scaling of evidence-based interventions.