Urban Youth Friendships and Community Practice breaks new ground in identifying and capturing the importance of friendships and the role that community practitioners and scholars can play to enhance them.

Ecologically-focused interventions have taken center stage in addressing a range of social problems. This book synthesizes the latest research and theoretical advances of these approaches to offer multiple urban green revitalization strategies for combatting gun violence that is primarily impacting African-American/Black, Asian-American, and Latinx urban communities across the nation. Solutions include the introduction of greenspaces (greening), conversion of distressed buildings and vacant lots, and other structural changes to a community. This resource provides readers with a centralized place to draw upon research findings and includes illustrative case studies. Current and future social workers and other helping professionals will be able to work more effectively with the communities of color they serve to bolster interventions and advocate against gun violence.

In Activating Youth as Change Agents, editors Amy L. Cook and Ian P. Levy describe the applications of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as a youth-oriented group process where school counselors collaborate alongside students in developmentally relevant ways to achieve their goals toward personal growth and positive school-community improvement. The book provides practitioners and counselors-in-training with group-counseling skills focused on action and how to engage in social justice efforts both locally at their school and in their communities.

In Youth Dialogues on Race and Ethnicity, Barry Checkoway describes the work of a specific university-community partnership program: Youth Dialogues on Race and Ethnicity in Metropolitan Detroit. Including an analysis of the program's origins and objectives, activities and accomplishments, facilitating and limiting factors, and lessons learned from practice, Checkoway provides an unprecedented example of young people working together across segregated boundaries to transform their lives and communities. He also examines youth dialogues as a process, young people as change agents, adults as allies and partners, and the anchor institutions that support this work.

In his early thirties, Ethan Watters began to realize that none of his friends were following the paths of their parents. Instead of settling down in couples and starting families, they lived and vacationed in groups, worked together at businesses they'd started, and met every week for dinner. As he started to document this phenomenon, he encountered countless other "tribes," in cities all over the U.S. Watters explores why tribe members have embraced this structure and what kind of affection and stability they find there, and contends that the conventional wisdom painting Generation X as isolated, selfish slackers may hide an unexpected, much warmer picture.

While crime is down around the country, many inner city youth continue to die as a result of violence, drugs, AIDS, and other causes. In response to the deaths of its young members, many urban communities paint memorial murals to pay homage to the deceased and express the grief of an entire community. Here, Delgado explores the use of memorial murals for counseling the bereaved friends and family members of urban youth whose lives were cut short. He proposes that employing such approaches can help a community address the problems inherent in their societies while remembering and celebrating the lives of their most vulnerable members. Delgado begins by reviewing the key concepts and practice principles that are essential in any form of urban community social work practice. He details the incidence and nature of the phenomena of death at an early age, and describes the cultural aspects of grief and bereavement in general and as they pertain to the urban communities he observes. Throughout his discussion of the use of memorial murals in social work practice, he provides case studies about real communities and the ways in which they have used the murals to work through the grieving process. The book concludes with a framework and theoretical model for social workers who work with urban populations. This unique work addresses a common urban issue in the context of healing and outreach in a way that will especially appeal to social workers, community leaders and organizations, psychologists, urban sociologists, and students and scholars interested in the ways people deal with death and dying.

This multidisciplinary handbook, edited by the premier scholars in the field, reflects the empirical work and growth in the field of adolescent psychology.