This chapter examines employment social enterprises (ESEs), organizations that provide employment opportunities to individuals marginalized and excluded in the labor market. Employment social enterprises employ chronically unemployed and underemployed individuals, including formerly incarcerated individuals, immigrants, and opportunity youth. This chapter begins by exploring the history, evolution, and prevalence of ESEs. We then highlight two exemplar ESEs to illustrate the design and demonstrate the impact of these organizations. After examining community power and psychological empowerment within ESEs, we explore different models of ESEs and identify topics for future research.

This chapter examines the past decade of organizing against the carceral state under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” (BLM). It draws on my collaborative research with Color Of Change and the movement for transformative justice alternatives to prison and policing for gendered violence. I look at recent BLM mobilizations through three lenses. One tracks BLM’s macro-level gains for community power at the situational, institutional, and systemic levels. Another documents the micro-level psychological empowerment processes of Black queer feminist approaches that center Black joy, political education, and care for Black women. Lastly, I look at the meso-level organizational settings that bridge individual psychological empowerment and capacity-building with macro-level outcomes like policy changes and culture shifts. Drawing on Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa’s concept of the “prism” (2021), I coin the term “Black prism” to describe organizations like Color Of Change that build political homes to amplify the power of Black constituents.

This chapter examines practical forms of citizen engagement occurring in collective problem-solving efforts such as civic enterprises, grassroots initiatives, and self-help groups. Drawing empirical evidence from diverse policy fields, it articulates the distinct experimental and disruptive policy work that citizens enact in these citizens’ governance spaces and challenges dominant interpretations that view them as either a testament to the capacity of citizens to effectively solve complex public problems or a symptom of advanced neoliberalism where states off-load complex problems onto citizens. The chapter moves beyond this dualism to consider the motivations, challenges, available resources, and distinct democratic work enacted by citizens in these spaces of bottom-up governance. It also discusses issues of growth and sustainability over time as well as the implications posed for conventional state and civil society institutions. Citizens’ governance spaces offer important lessons – in terms of both potential benefits and risks – for the project of deepening the quality and reach of citizen participation in modern democratic systems.

This chapter brings together key concepts from decolonial, feminist, and liberation-focussed psychologies to advocate for the role of community arts in the pursuit of epistemic justice and liberatory community empowerment. The chapter focuses on three areas of praxis that are evident in community-oriented psychology’s engagement with calls for decolonizing science: archival retrieval, relational knowledge practices, and storytelling and counter-storytelling. These areas are further illustrated via two case examples from Australia that detail how people who are marginalized and racialized form communities to address structural and symbolic violence while also strengthening practices and capacities for re-existence. The cases show how, through forming intentional settings and mobilizing cultural practice, practices of cultural remembering and reauthoring of stories can contribute to decoloniality and epistemic justice. These cases also highlight that marginalized and racialized communities can create home places of healing, connection, and memory. These relational practices of accompaniment require ongoing critical reflexivity and deliberate deep rethinking as well as equitable access to material and symbolic resources to engage in decolonial and antiracist work.

Participatory art, such as performing arts or visual arts, design, and craft, can be transformative in its ability to expose current systems of oppression while also providing a conceptual avenue for imagining and planning a different system. This chapter will describe how participatory arts may create a unique opportunity for youth empowerment and will discuss how participatory arts have the opportunity to address potential barriers to empowerment. With this chapter we aim to provide an overview of the empowerment process for youth with marginalized identities. We use a case example of a community-based program focused on drama therapy and theatrical performances, 2nd Act, to demonstrate how this type of participatory arts programming can be especially valuable for youth with additional vulnerabilities such as addiction and mental health recovery. Finally, we review how the literature on participatory arts using drama and theater demonstrates the capacity for these methods to enable broader community-level engagement and empowerment.

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) engages youth in systematic processes of collectively identifying, analyzing, and addressing systems-level stressors, such as policies or practices that create unequal opportunities for young people to live, learn, and thrive. In this chapter, we first provide an overview of the history of YPAR. Next, we discuss key dimensions of power and empowerment within the YPAR process. Specifically, we explore YPAR in the context of educational settings via three case examples (i.e., a leadership class, a school club, and an after-school program). Lastly, applications of YPAR and future research are discussed.

Action civics is a model for civic education that offers youth opportunities to participate in authentic democratic activities. In this chapter, we trace the origins of action civics and explore the field’s defining features, strengths, and challenges. We frame our analysis through two case descriptions of action civics intermediary organizations: Generation Citizen and Design Your Neighborhood. We discuss action civics education as a psychologically empowering process, and we illustrate tensions that arise as youth develop psychological empowerment. Through these examples, we reveal features of the action civics process model that support community power in the situational, institutional, and systemic domains. We explore empowering characteristics of empowering settings that are present in Design Your Neighborhood and Generation Citizen. These include common belief systems, a relational environment that supports intergenerational partnerships, opportunity role structures, opportunities to develop local leadership, and external linkages to community stakeholders. Our chapter concludes with recommendations for practitioners, researchers, and other stakeholders to consider as the field of action civics expands.

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the scholarly literature on youth engagement in policy advocacy in the context of municipal youth councils. First, the organizational structure, membership, and activities of youth councils are presented. Then, the prevalence and trends of youth councils in the US and internationally are discussed. A case exemplar of the Boston Mayor’s Youth Council and its youth-led participatory budgeting process is presented to illuminate key principles and practices of municipal youth councils, including the benefits and barriers of youth engagement on youth and communities. Then, the literature pertaining to power and empowerment processes in youth policy advocacy is reviewed, including key features of youth councils that can facilitate or impede psychological empowerment and community power. The chapter concludes with a review of implications for practitioners, leaders, policymakers, funders, and other stakeholders, as well as areas for future research.

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process that engages citizens in public investment decisions through a mix of deliberation, representation, and voting. This chapter describes how this democratic innovation has been practiced, elaborates its goals, provides an overview of its origins and diffusion, and reviews research on its outcomes for citizen engagement, local governance, and community empowerment. These findings are illustrated by two case studies. Porto Alegre, Brazil, not only represents the birthplace of PB, but also is an example of uniquely pronounced changes in government responsiveness to underserved communities and in the strength of civil society organizations after PB’s implementation. New York City’s program is fairly representative of PB as practiced in the Global North. Controlling a smaller share of city budgets, processes like PBNYC have been more able to replicate Porto Alegre’s model of equitable citizen engagement than to transform urban governance or the organization of local civil society.

The chapters in this book have each examined different approaches to building community power through organizations and participatory processes. Some of these approaches represent long-standing and widespread forms of practice (e.g., community organizing, neighborhood associations, participatory urban planning) that are continuously evolving. Other approaches are more emergent or are currently spreading to more localities (e.g., action civics, participatory budgeting) and are exerting influences on existing organizations and forms of practice. Research into each of these approaches varies accordingly, with some approaches having a robust foundation of research-based insights and others that have only recently become the focus of empirical studies. The contributors to this book are at the forefront of advancing research on each of these types of community empowerment processes. Many of them are doing so from an action research orientation, in collaboration with the organizations, initiatives, and networks that are establishing and supporting these efforts.

Community-engaged research (CEnR) has moved from the fringes to the mainstream of academic research, particularly that which orients to goals of social, racial, and health equity. The construct of empowerment, which encompasses interconnected processes at the level of the individual, the organization, and the community, can be used to understand the mechanisms by which CEnR may contribute to improvements in equity and justice. This chapter introduces and describes a conceptual model for empowerment in CEnR that synthesizes ideas and empirical advances from community psychology and public health. We use the model to examine the processes by which social power can be built and exercised through CEnR at multiple levels of analysis, suggesting that the power that comes from community-led and grassroots community organizing processes has the greatest significance for equity-based CEnR and ultimately for goals of equity- and justice-focused social change.

Rising poverty, shrinking economic opportunities, disengaged citizens and contentious public discourse, and racial inequality have become some of the greatest challenges communities are confronting. In efforts to maximize participation in addressing these issues, universities, community organizations, corporations, local government entities, and foundations are, independently or collaboratively, devoting resources to develop local leadership capacities. This chapter examines these community leadership development efforts and details two cooperative extension programs in a Midwestern US state. Through analysis of these case examples, the chapter offers a vision for how to reimagine community leadership programs so that they are more responsive to the complexity of current and emergent community challenges. An argument is made that US university extension services, because of their strong ties to local communities and networks nationwide, are well placed to support community leadership development that promotes community-identified strategies to address a wide range of local issues among diverse stakeholders. Insights from this chapter can inform future research and influence the design and implementation of community leadership development programs around the world.

The field of youth organizing emerged in the 1990s, as nonprofit organizations began engaging low-income youth of color, aged thirteen to nineteen, in political education and community organizing work while also providing developmental supports, such as academic tutoring and mental health resources. Over the last thirty years, the field has expanded rapidly. This chapter discusses the unique features of youth organizing and identifies trends in the field, including the growth in different kinds of youth organizing groups, the rise of coalitions, and changes in the demographic makeup of participants. It then presents a case description of a long-standing youth organizing group, Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership (AYPAL), based in Oakland, California. Next, the chapter reviews the literature addressing how youth organizing promotes the psychological empowerment of its participants and builds community power situationally, institutionally, and systemically. It concludes by highlighting the implications of this research and suggesting opportunities for future scholarship.

Comprehensive citywide planning is a practice that many cities undertake regularly. In theory, the principles laid out in citywide plans can help guide the distribution of public and private investments that shape the future development of that city. In recent years, many major cities have been incorporating equity goals and frameworks into planning efforts in attempts to close long-standing racial gaps. Although urban planning, as a field, has espoused goals of participation and shared power in development decisions, power and influence is often concentrated among wealthier households and institutions. Participation in planning processes often involves conflict between opposing interests, and development outcomes are often inequitable. Comprehensive planning has the potential to change some development rules and processes that lead to inequitable outcomes, but this is contingent upon shifting power and influence away from wealthy and elite citizens and institutions. Research on power and empowerment is critical to understanding how influence is manifested through planning policies and processes. The City of Chicago’s “We Will Chicago” plan provides a case example of how city planning processes attempt to engage stakeholders in developing a vision and goals that align with traditionally marginalized groups.