Building Youths' Social Capital

Team Oakland: Dr. Madsen and her amazing teammates, Regina Jackson, Executive Director of East Oakland Youth Development Center, and Phillip Graham, Senior Director of the Center on Social Determinants, Risk Behaviors, and Prevention Science at RTI International.

Overview

Dr. Madsen’s team is part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program, which is designed to support authentic engagement between researchers and community organizations, to ensure that cutting edge research will lead to real-world impact. Team Oakland is examining upstream drivers of youth violence and working with the City of Oakland to enhance their summer jobs program to reduce violence and improve economic equity.

Reports & Presentations

Research Brief: Increasing Youth Serving Organizations’ Capacity to Build Social Capital Among Youth

Team-Oakland-Research-Brief_Final.pdfDownload

Social capital – connections to resources and opportunities through social and community networks – improves a youth’s likelihood of future employment, educational achievement, and healthy development. Youth-serving organizations (YSOs) present adolescents opportunities to grow and strengthen their social networks, increasing their overall net social capital. Our project employed a community-based participatory action research (CBPR) approach to assess if and how YSOs in California integrate social capital into their programming and if YSOs see a need for a social-capital curriculum or measurement tools related to social capital.