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Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) classrooms can work to shift the dialog and structure of schools to better fit the needs of students and disrupt dominant narratives that have marginalized students of Color. As scholars have shown, this work is not devoid of tensions. This paper examines the tensions that arose during the first 2 years of a high school PAR class. Written from the perspective of the 23 students in Soy Yo, the students use testimonios to narrate their collective experience as they analyze three tensions that could have ended Soy Yo and their YPAR project before it began. As a decolonial method, testimonios allow students to reclaim their stories by shedding light on their struggles, tensions, and transformative moments that adult collaborators might overlook. These testimonios illustrate the potential for YPAR classrooms to becoming a third space that allows for campus change and personal transformation. The paper concludes with lessons learned for future scholars and educators to explore. Highlights: Contributes to the growing literature on tensions within Youth Participatory Action Research projects in schools.Highlights the use of testimonios as a decolonial method to be used in community based work.Illustrates how classrooms can become third spaces for students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we name and uplift the ways in which Miya community workers are building communities of resistance as ways to address the manifold colonial, structural (including state‐sponsored), and epistemic violence in their lives. These active spaces of refusal and resistance constitute the grounds of our theorizing. Centering this theory in the flesh, we offer critical implications for decolonial liberatory praxis, specifically community‐engaged praxis in solidarity with people's struggles. In doing so, we speak to questions such as: What are the range of ways in which Global South communities are coming together to tackle various forms of political, social, epistemic, and racial injustice? What are ways of doing, being, and knowing that are produced at the borders and liminal zones? What are the varied ways in which people understand and name solidarities, alliances, and relationalities in pursuit of justice? We engage with these questions from our radically rooted places in Miya people's struggles via storytelling that not only confronts the historical and ongoing oppression, but also upholds desire—Interweaving and honoring rage, grief, pain, creativity, love, and communality. Highlights: Reclaiming theory is a decolonial imperative for people excluded from Western knowledge societies.Miya women's praxis moves beyond "inclusion" to create non‐oppressive modes of being and knowing.Miya people resist commodification and damage‐centered narratives of Global South communities.Researchers must prioritize solidarity and honor communities' vocabulary, metaphors, and silences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State‐sanctioned violence (SSV) has resounding effects on entire populations, and marginalized communities have long persisted in the work toward liberation despite continued SSV. This paper aims to bridge the gap between the vast scholarship on resilience and the practical challenge of sustaining and thriving in communities targeted by SSV. We use the theoretical frame of the Transconceptual Model of Empowerment and Resilience (TMER) to articulate the process of resilience and the resources that support it: maintenance, efficacy, skills, knowledge, and community resources. As a practical frame, we ground our application of the model in the experiences of the first two authors in their own communities. Centering examples from the Black Lives Matter movement and the CeCe McDonald Support Committee, we use our theoretical and practical frames to explore the scholarship on resilience relevant to resisting SSV, and we identify mechanisms for supporting community stakeholders' efforts to move toward liberation from SSV. We discuss implications for future research and activism, and we include a toolkit with suggested strategies as an appendix for psychologists, activists, and community stakeholders to consider as they work to facilitate community resilience and build a society free from SSV. Highlights: Adapts findings from resilience literature to inform strategies for community resilience.Presents model for community resilience in communities targeted by state‐sanctioned.Presents model for resilience in communities targeted by state‐sanctioned violence.Black lives matter, Black trans lives matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community participation can be a potential strategy to increase the degree of the subjective wellbeing of immigrants within receiving societies. This study aims to analyze the relationship between immigrants' community participation and their subjective wellbeing, testing the two dimensions of sense of mattering (feeling valued and adding value) and psychological sense of community as potential mediators of this relationship. A total of 308 first‐generation immigrants living in Northern Italy filled out a questionnaire (45.1% were members of a migrant community‐based organization). We found that immigrants who are members of a migrant organization show a higher level of subjective wellbeing, sense of mattering, and psychological sense of community than those who are not members. We also found that the sense of adding value and the psychological sense of community serve as mediators of the relationship between community participation and subjective wellbeing. The findings suggest that active participation is positively related to immigrants' feeling useful and capable of contributing to society and their feeling of belonging, which, in turn, are positively related to their subjective wellbeing. Practical implications are presented, focusing on the need for generative social policies to move beyond the welfarist perspective in which immigrants only "receive" to embrace an active perspective in which immigrants can also "give." Highlights: Immigrant members in Migrant Community‐Based Organizations have higher subjective wellbeing in comparison to immigrant non‐members.Sense of adding value and sense of community act as mediators between participation and wellbeing.Generative social policies that embrace an active perspective where immigrants can "give" are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies commonly examine resilience as an outcome by way of measuring the degree to which protective factors maintain individuals' well‐being despite the presence of significant risk. In this study, we developed a model of community resilience that centered the voices of Black youth. Using data collected as part of a 3‐year, youth participatory action research project, we developed a model that focuses on what 11 Black youth perceive and believe contributes to community resilience through their investigation of problems and solutions related to community gun violence. Findings from a constructivist grounded theory analysis of multiple data sources (e.g., field notes, transcribed group discussions, youth photovoice activities) revealed our developing model of community resilience: Power through Black Community and Unity. Specifically, Power through Black Community and Unity was a core category that reflected the importance of care, support, and safety as strengths in the community's current response and resilience to gun violence, and future aspects the community could develop to increase community resilience to gun violence. This core category emerged in three subsequent ways: Collective Care, "Seeing Beyond the Bad," and Supportive Teen Spaces. This study illustrates potential pathways that youth service agencies and community practitioners can consider enhancing in their programming to promote resilience in their communities. Highlights: Power through Black Community and Unity (PTBCU) emerged as a developing model of community resilience.Communities expressed PTBCU through Collective Care, "Seeing Beyond the Bad," and Supportive Teen Spaces.Study shows potential pathways that youth programs and initiatives can take to promote resilience to gun violence in their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has examined the influence of individual‐ and case‐level factors on police decisions in sexual assault cases, with little attention paid to community‐level factors. This study examined the association between community‐level factors and police decisions to found sexual assault cases. Founding is the first decision officers make and determines whether a case is investigated. An archival data set of N = 8015 sexual assaults reported to a Midwestern city police department was used. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was first used to examine the relationship between six community‐level factors and founding rates within the city's 77 communities. Geographically weighted regression (GWR) was then used to examine whether these relationships varied by space. OLS results revealed communities with a greater proportion of Black residents, Latinx residents, Asian residents, and higher income had significantly higher founding rates. GWR results replicated these findings indicating these relationships varied significantly by space throughout the city. In contrast to the OLS, GWR results indicated communities farther from a rape crisis center had higher founding rates. Findings underscore the importance of analyzing localized effects and examining individual‐, case‐, and community‐level factors on sexual assault case outcomes in the criminal legal system. Highlights: Space is an important aspect of community context related to police response to sexual assault.Community‐level, extralegal factors appear to influence police founding decisions.Scholars are encouraged to analyze localized effects to better understand community context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have documented that vacant lot greening can reduce community‐level crime and violence. Busy Streets Theory (BST) suggests that residents who are involved in the greening process can help to improve physical environments and build social connections that deter crime and violence. Yet few researchers have explored how community engagement in the greening process may affect crime and violence outcomes. We applied BST to test the effects of community‐engaged vacant lot greening compared to vacant lots that received either professional mowing or no treatment, on the density of violent crime around study lots. Using mixed effects regression models, we analyzed trends in violent crime density over the summer months from 2016 to 2018 at 2102 street segments in Youngstown, OH. These street segments fell within 150 meters of an intervention parcel that was classified as one of three conditions: community‐engaged maintenance, professional mowing, or no treatment (control). We found that street segments in areas receiving community‐engaged maintenance or professional mowing experienced greater declines in violent crime density than street segments in areas receiving no treatment, and more decline occurred in the community‐engaged condition compared to the professional mow condition. Our findings support BST and suggest that community‐engaged greening of vacant lots in postindustrial cities with a concentrated vacancy can reduce crime and violence. Highlights: Greening of vacant lots is associated with decreases in violent crime.Community‐engaged greening is associated with a greater decrease in crime than professional mowing.Community‐engaged greening of vacant lots in cities can reduce violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding and enhancing community resilience is a global priority as societies encounter a rising number of extreme weather events. Given that these events are typically both sudden and unexpected, community resilience is typically examined after the disaster so there can be no before and after comparisons. As such, the extent to which existing community capacities buffer the effects of a traumatic event remains largely unexamined and untested in the literature. Drawing on a longitudinal study of 148 Brisbane suburbs, we examine the key community processes associated with community resilience to the crime before and after the 2011 Brisbane floods. We introduce a novel disaster severity index to simultaneously capture the direct and indirect impacts of the flood and embed this measure within our modeling framework. Results from the models provide important insights for predisaster preparedness and postdisaster rebuilding and recovery. Highlights: Neighborhood adaptive capacities were resistant to the flood.The bespoke flood severity index was strongly associated with lower levels of resilience to property crime postevent.Pre‐event adaptive capacities did not lead to resilience to property crime postevent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the American Psychological Association Taskforce on Indigenous Psychology acknowledges, fidelity to the inalienable right to self‐determination is the ethical foundation of Indigenous psychology. The task of decolonizing psychology is not only about divesting from Eurocentric paradigms that have controlled and limited Indigenous wellbeing, but producing new paradigms founded on Indigenous knowledges. The Indigenous paradigm of social and emotional wellbeing is both a new therapeutic practice and theory of wellbeing. As the exploration of the domains of SEWB has shown, findings from the National Empowerment Project indicate that strengthening a connection to culture is identified as of highest importance to the flourishing of Indigenous individuals, families, and communities. Wellbeing in Abya Yala (the Americas) is conceived as Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir and Māori constructs of wellbeing as Hauora. These transnational wellbeing conceptualizations can be situated within a larger global health movement, which is centered on strengthening Indigenous cultures of wellbeing, and sustainable planet–people relationships. Indigenous community psychologies are not anthropocentric and are centered on the sacredness of nature, the cultivation of spirituality, and accountability to maintain harmonious ecosystem relationships. Indigenous community psychologies from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Mexico are brought in plurilogue envisioning international solidarity networks that engage communities, activists, and committed student generations. Highlights: Indigenous community psychologies constitute global movements forging transnational solidaritiesIndigenous psychologies are not anthropocentric and promote holistic wellbeing.Embodied examples of Indigenous community psychologies trace hopeful pathways toward decoloniality.Transnational collaborations among Indigenous psychologists create innovative pedagogies.The inalienable right to self‐determination is the ethical foundation of Indigenous psychologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]