Treffer: Confident Futures: Making Connections.

Confident Futures' participatory action research project focuses on how young people in nine community organizations in New York City and Amsterdam successfully learn locally-based practices of mutual care as they articulate their aspirations for health, happiness, safety and well-being. In this article we report on the issue of connectivity, or techniques for building, deepening, and sustaining connections that nurture young people through respecting and valuing the communities in which they are coming of age. Connecting as a working mechanism allows the youth engaged in Confident Futures' nine partnership community organizations to critically engage in socio-political issues central to their communities and wellbeing. We highlight the importance connections to trusted mentors and a web of CBO support for youth, and note how the Confident Futures team valued and deepened their own connections through their collective work and emphasis on the centrality of life-affirming techniques. We argue that these Confident Futures partners not only empower marginalized communities to promote youth well-being; they also create a space where building programs that prefigure larger policy change surrounding youth development becomes possible. PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY: The Confident Futures project brought together medical anthropologists, non-profit organizations and young community researchers in New York City and Amsterdam to explore their non-profit and community-based organizations' best practices toward ensuring successful and healthy futures for youth in their communities, broadly defined. The project was envisioned and implemented as a collaborative process in which anthropologists worked closely with young community researchers, who themselves were often beneficiaries of their organizations' programs in order to develop the methodological tools necessary to conduct participant observation and interviews with their peers and community organization leaders. As native anthropologists the community researchers identified the importance of building connections and long-term relationships with community leaders, families, local government and across organizations in New York City and Amsterdam as key components in the development of community resilience. We highlight the importance of these connections to trusted mentors and note how the Confident Futures team valued and deepened their own connections through their collective work and emphasis on the centrality of life-affirming techniques. We argue that these Confident Futures partners not only build connections that promote youth well-being, but also create a space where it becomes possible to build programs that envision larger policy change surrounding youth development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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