In their rich history, community-based educational spaces (CBESs) have afforded communities room to build young people’s critical consciousness, to organize for social change, and to create learning environments that foster a political – and, in certain respects, a more meaningful – education. Broadly speaking, CBESs meet the specific needs of communities, such as providing access to food and opportunities for learning and identity exploration. In this chapter, the authors overview the scholarly literature related to CBESs and their power-building features that facilitate community power and psychological empowerment processes, as well as the tensions in CBESs that can hinder power-building. Amid this discussion, the authors highlight Urban Underground, a CBES in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as an organization that exemplifies the humanizing education, youth empowerment, and power-building possible within CBESs. Through this chapter, the authors contend that CBESs have the power to bring about social change in their communities and spur transformative change for those they serve.

Youth-infused community coalitions engage youth and adults in addressing complex issues at the local level. Coalitions tend to engage young people when the issues they address pertain to the youth population in their community. This chapter provides an example of a youth-infused community coalition located in Appalachian Ohio that seeks to promote the health and well-being of community members. Youth engage directly with adults on the coalition to review data, identify root causes of problems in their community, and implement strategies to address these issues. We detail how participating in youth-infused community coalitions facilitates the growth and development of youth and their communities and then identify three features critical to facilitating community power and psychological empowerment in youth-infused community coalitions: member representation, decision-making processes, and opportunity role structure.

Community coalitions promote empowerment by providing pathways for residents and organizations to gain and apply new skills, grow in leadership, and play an active role in calling for and creating community change. Coalitions create synergy through strategic pooling of diverse and complementary perspectives, connections, and resources. This chapter provides a brief overview of coalitions and how they operate as a community change mechanism by providing a structure to create changes in policies, systems, and environments. We present a case study of the California Healthy Cities and Communities initiative in which leaders in twenty communities with underserved or vulnerable populations were empowered to address environmental and structural determinants of community well-being. Next, we review the literature on how coalitions have been studied as a mechanism for community empowerment across disciplines and levels of empowerment. We conclude with recommendations for future research, including a greater focus on equity and understanding community change processes.

The Chinese government launched a nationwide policy campaign regarding neighborhood governance in the early 2010s. The state-led movement served both to strengthen state legitimacy and enhance community development. But how it contributed to community empowerment or disempowerment is little examined. This chapter attempts to review the extant literature on the campaign from a community empowerment perspective. Implications and suggestions for future research are also included.

Neighborhood associations are geographically bound, grassroots organizations that rely on volunteer membership and direct participation to identify and address issues within their neighborhood. Often these groups serve as intermediaries between residents and local decision-makers, such as government officials, developers and business owners, and providers of public goods and services. As a case example, we describe the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP), launched in 1990. The NRP is a notable long-standing attempt to bolster the role of neighborhood associations in municipal governance. It demonstrates many of the potential benefits as well as the challenges of neighborhood associations as vehicles for locally scaled democracy. After this, we examine dynamics of community power and empowerment processes in neighborhood associations and make recommendations for practice and future research.

Community organizing within local faith-based institutions (churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) is now widespread in the US and has seen adoption in several other countries. As congregation-based organizing has grown and matured as a field over four decades, leaders have drawn strong connections between the social and political goals of community organizing and the religious traditions and values of the participating congregations. This blending of organizing practices and religious traditions has been crucial to the success of this approach. This chapter describes some of the practices that congregation-based community organizing initiatives employ to build power among residents who are actively participating in defining and deciding how to alter the systems that affect their lives. A statewide organizing federation (PICO California) and the reflections of influential organizer Jose Carrasco serve as a case example of the intertwining of interfaith values with a power-based organizing approach.

This chapter examines the power and empowerment processes taking place in immigrant organizing and activism, primarily in the US. Immigrant youth activism around the Federal DREAM Act provides a case example. The youth whose activism and organizing seek the passage of this act are often referred to as “the DREAMers.” The discussion of the DREAMers is followed by a synthesis of interdisciplinary literature on immigrant community power and psychological empowerment processes. The chapter concludes with recommendations for policymakers, politicians, and social science researchers. Policymakers need a better understanding of the effects of their decisions on the large, heterogeneous group of noncitizen immigrants whose lives are interconnected with those of US citizens (e.g., undocumented parents of citizen children). Social scientists should pay attention to the similarities and differences between immigrant and refugee organizing and activism and should engage in collaborations with immigrant community leaders on mutually beneficial research.

Gender–sexuality alliances (GSAs) are school-based clubs that provide space for LGBTQ+ youth and their heterosexual cisgender peer allies to socialize, build community, provide social-emotional support, access LGBTQ+-affirming resources, and advocate against discrimination. In this chapter, we review the historical underpinnings of GSAs; their contemporary roles in schools; the ways in which GSAs harness their collective power to advocate and promote social justice for LGBTQ+ people; the ways in which youth experience empowerment through their GSA involvement; and how GSA research can be used by school administrators, GSA advisors, and youth leaders. Finally, we highlight avenues for future research that could further aid GSAs in their aspirations to promote thriving among their members and social justice in their schools.

Recurrent gestures are stabilized forms that embody a practical knowledge of dealing with different communicative, interactional, cognitive, and affective tasks. They are often derived from practical actions and engage in semantic and pragmatic meaning-making. They occupy a place between spontaneous (singular) gestures and emblems on a continuum of increasing stabilization. The chapter reconstructs the beginnings of research on recurrent gestures and illuminates different disciplinary perspectives that have explored processes of their emergence and stabilization, as well as facets of their communicative potential. The early days of recurrent-gesture research focused on the identification of single specimens and on the refinement of descriptive methods. In recent years, their role in self-individuation, their social role, and their relationship to signs of sign language have become a focus of interest. The chapter explores the individual, the linguistic, and the cultural side of recurrent gestures. Recurrent gestures are introduced as sedimented individual and social practices, as revealing the linguistic potential of gestures, and as a type that forms culturally shared repertoires.

This chapter reviews the relation between gesture and the natural signed languages of deaf communities. Signs were for centuries considered to be unanalyzable depictive gestures. Modern linguistic research has demonstrated that signs are composed of meaningless parts, equivalent to spoken language phonemes, that are combined to form meaningful signs. The chapter discusses a system called homesign used where a deaf child with hearing parents is not exposed to signed languages during language acquisition. Two ways in which gesture may become incorporated into a signed language through the historical process of grammaticalization are described. In the first, gestures are incorporated into a signed language as lexical signs, which go on to develop grammatical meaning. In the second, ways in which the sign is produced, its manner of movement, and certain facial displays, are incorporated not as lexical signs but as prosody or intonation, which may develop grammatical meaning. Finally, the chapter critically examines a new view in which certain signs are considered to be fusions of sign and gesture and proposes a cognitive linguistic analysis based in the theory of cognitive grammar.