Increasing Latinx Youth Engagement Across Different Types of After-School Organizations

This article explores how Latinx youth engagement practices vary across different types of out-of-school organizations that successfully sustain Latinx youth participation. Data are drawn from a qualitative study of 13 California organizations that each emphasize one of 3 missions: social justice youth development, “one-stop” wrap-around services, or academic enrichment. While all organizations are found to adhere to a core set of Latinx youth development guiding principles, there are nuanced differences in how they are operationalized in practice across varied organization types, reflecting variation in terms of discourse, scale, and scope. These findings highlight the need for youth development practitioners and collaborating researchers to understand the context of youth-serving organizations when identifying and implementing promising practices and extension programs.


Introduction
The Latinx population is the second-fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States after Asian Americans; it is also the youngest ethnic group. California has the largest Latinx population under 18 years of age among all states in the United States (Pew Research Center, 2014). Historically, Latinx youth faced structural inadequacies of policies and public institutions which did not address the unique needs of Latinx youth and their families (Gandara & Journal of Youth Development | http://jyd.pitt.edu/ | Vol. 16 Issue 5 DOI 10.5195/jyd.2021.1084 Increasing Latinx Youth Engagement 141 Contreras, 2009;Rodriguez & Morrobel, 2004). This context suggests the importance of understanding how youth development organizations engage Latinx youth well and develop strategies to support Latinx youth and community development. In response, this study is grounded in the imperative that academic researchers partner with youth-serving institutions that successfully reach and sustain the participation of our most underserved populations to articulate and disseminate nuanced understandings of "what works" to inform praxes. In this article we explore how Latinx youth engagement practices vary across different types of out-ofschool organizations that sustain Latinx youth participation (Erbstein & Fabionar, 2019). We examine organizations that emphasize one of three missions: social justice youth development, "one-stop" wrap-around services, and academic enrichment. Erbstein and Fabionar (2019) conducted a review of Latinx youth development scholarship and practice-based literature from the fields of ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, youth studies, and human development, which revealed five consistent themes that exist in successful Latinx youth serving organization. These themes, presented as guiding principles suggested organizations (a) contend with effects of discrimination, (b) respond to poverty, (c) address local youth needs, (d) provide support for ethnic or other identity, and (e) have an integrated understanding of youth development. They have implications for all four domains of youth development organizations: conceptual framework, organizational infrastructure, program elements, and program and community relationships (Eccles & Gootman, 2002). This line of inquiry provides little guidance on the types of youth development organizations that engage and support Latinx youth well.

Review of the Literature
Few scholars describe the types of youth-serving organizations that engage vulnerable youth. Most scholars describe the characteristics of youth development program types (Catalano et al., 2002;Eccles & Templeton, 2002;Futch Ehrlich et al., 2017;Mahoney et al., 2009). We rely on the following youth development program descriptions during out-of-school time to inform our study: Journal of Youth Development | http://jyd.pitt.edu/ | Vol. 16 Issue 5 DOI 10.5195/jyd.2021.1084 Increasing Latinx Youth Engagement 142 • After-school enrichment programs offer experiential learning activities on a regular basis throughout the school year and are supervised by adults with opportunities of peer mentoring. Youth have choices from a variety of group activities and engage in peer interaction (Mahoney et al., 2006). Summer camps are similarly organized and offer day or overnight activities.
• Civic engagement programs address organizational or community change on a regular basis and may be youth-led or led by a youth-adult partnership (Zeldin et al., 2014).
• Comprehensive family support organizations (one-stop) provide youth-and familyfocused services for prevention or crisis intervention. Organizations engage marginalized youth and family members to address current and emerging multidimensional issues of families and communities (Trask et al., 2006;Settipani et al., 2019. Building on Erbstein and Fabionar's (2019) strategies for Latinx youth engagement in quality out-of-school time programs, an empirical study of 13 California organizations that successfully sustain Latinx youth participation confirmed the importance of these principles, identified similarities among organizations, and described practices from practitioners and youth perspectives that operationalized them (Moncloa et al. 2019). These Latinx youth organizations illustrated the importance of including equitable access in organizations' conceptual framework, providing equitable programs and accessible locations as imperative elements to consider, employing staff at all organizational levels who reflect the demographics and shared experiences of youth served, creating culturally relevant learning environments informed by local context and lived experiences of youth and families, and supporting young people to navigate discrimination and negative messaging. However, among these organizations there were differences in how they framed their conceptual frameworks, missions, and programs.
Effective Latinx youth development organizations use a guiding philosophy that builds on mainstream positive youth development research and practice (Gambone & Connell, 2004;Lerner et al., 2011) and include an emphasis on extended understandings of Latinx youth  (Erbstein & Fabionar, 2019;Moncloa et al., 2019). In this article, we explore whether there is substantive variation in how different youth development organization types operationalize these guiding principles.

Sample
This 2-year qualitative study was conducted from 2016-2018 and draws upon interviews with 18 youth-serving professionals representing 13 Latinx youth development organizations in three California counties (Moncloa et al., 2019). Organizations were selected through a process of mapping the ecosystem of Latinx youth supports in each county, organizational research, and key informant interviews (Erbstein et al., 2017). These organizations had engaged Latinx youth for at least 1 year, sustained most Latinx youth participation, and were broadly known to have a positive reputation among Latinx youth, families, and communities in their regions.

Procedures
Data collection included organizational documents reflecting their missions, activities, and inperson semi-structured interviews with organizational leaders and staff members who worked with youth. We include interviewees' country or region of origin to reflect how people selfidentified in Table 1. The University of California Davis Institutional Review Board approved data collection protocols. Interviews elicited practitioners' perspectives on their backgrounds, and their strategies to recruit and sustain Latinx youth participation in youth development organizations and programs.
The protocol included open-ended questions regarding organizations' goals, missions, history, and stories about successes and challenges. All interviews were conducted in English, although

Analysis
To identify variations among three organization types, data was grouped together as cases as described in Table 2, where the unit of analysis is the organization type (Yin, 2009). We used grounded analysis (Charmaz, 2006;Strauss & Corbin, 1998) and NVIVO 11 to conduct queries of previously coded interviews to identify how the guiding principles varied across organization types. Queries revealed salient practices in three organization types and identified quantity and quality of practices with respect to organizations'(a) conceptual frameworks, (b) organization infrastructure, (c) program elements, and (d) community relationships (Eccles & Gootman, 2002). Quantity refers to the number of times interviewees mentioned a certain concept or approach, while quality indicates variations in the operationalization of the approach.
Guiding principles and practices that were operationalized in varied ways across organizational categories were further considered to assess the nature of these differences and potential explanatory factors. Table 3 describes in detail the data analysis process. Coding refinement Pursued a grounded analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1998;Charmaz, 2006)

Positionality
Field researchers resided in regions where they conducted interviews. All except one, of White European descent, were Latinx native Spanish speakers. Two authors are Latinx or Indian immigrants, and one author is of White European descent; the former are researchers and youth development practitioners, and the latter, while formerly a youth development practitioner, is now based in academia.

Findings
Data analysis revealed differences with respect to conceptual frameworks and program elements, which were associated with organization type. Conceptual frameworks include organizations' missions and philosophy that inform practice. Program elements include safe learning environment, positive relationships, social norms, skill building, youth leadership, and topical emphasis (Eccles & Gootman, 2002).

Social Justice Youth Development and Advocacy Organizations
Social Justice Youth Development and Advocacy organizations' (SJYD) missions aim to facilitate healthy development of young people-especially those marginalized based on race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or other characteristics-to develop an understanding of systems that produced inequitable structures of opportunity and outcomes, as well as the capacity to change them. Their missions include helping youth develop critical consciousness and language to articulate structural and cultural barriers experienced by their communities, along with the agency to begin contesting these by tapping community strengths. A staff member from Building Cultural Identity shares: A lot of our students now . . . are able to understand our conditions in our community from a very critical lens. They can understand it from race, class, gender . . . they built their skill sets to be able to understand our community as more than just . . . the east side is poor because that's how you lived, right?
They have the understanding that we live in communities that are a result of these systems.
In these organizations, staff reported Latinx youth learned to express themselves against injustice in their communities, work on art installations to highlight their culture, and facilitated activities to promote community building.
In all organizations, staff members share similar cultural backgrounds, language(s), and lived experiences with participating youth (Moncloa et al., 2019). In SJYD organizations staff draw on When youth get triggered and are encountering racism in the community, like it's not during your regular office hours. These are experiences that you share all times. Like we are in our homes, we experience sexism or misogyny, all these things.

SJYD engage with youth beyond youth's participation in organizations.
A staff member describes a longer time horizon to support youth to achieve change: After Just Media they will try to go out there and achieve it because they know Just Media is always going to be here. And no matter what, we'll always be here to back each other up. And when something goes wrong, we're always here to help. So, it's like no matter what, we're always going to be a family.

One-Stop Organizations
One-stop organizations' missions centered on providing services and programs with and for youth, families, and communities. Within our sample, these organizations in some cases also Most enrichment organizations partnered with school districts to help students set and achieve goals and overcome academic hurdles, attending to their academic skills and their social and emotional needs. A staff member from Youth Afterschool shared: So, giving them that power that you choose who you're going to be. It's not who your teachers say or who your parents say you are . . . because I've had conversations with students like, "Well, that's what mom says I am," or "Well, that's what the teacher says I am. I'm somebody that doesn't listen. I have to throw a fit. I'm always in a bad mood. That's just who I am." So, they grow to believe that and act that. So, I feel like our job is to let them know that you're not just that and show them kind of their strengths and give them time to show their strengths so they can see that they're more than that and give them that empowerment of being able to change.
These organizations also bridge families and schools to help families navigate educational systems. A staff member at Expanded Learning for All shared, "We offer study groups. . . . We help them apply for scholarships, help them apply for colleges." In summary, despite shared guiding principles (Moncloa et al., 2019), important variations exist among these three organization types. All organizations sustain Latinx youth participation over time, and differences in their missions and program elements did not reduce their ability to maintain Latinx youth engagement.

Discussion
We discuss subtle variations by organization type that reflect mission-related discursive practices, and related orientations to scale and scope. Discursive practices describe how organization types position Latinx youth, and therefore their institutional praxes, in varying ways. Our consideration of scale explores relative emphases on individuals, families, or communities. Differences in scope reflect varied temporal orientations of programming. Table 4 describes organization types and the variations in discourse, scale, and scope.

Discursive Variations
Each organization type positioned quite differently Latinx youth, their roles vis a vis them, participation, and therefore their practices.
Staff in enrichment organizations describe helping youth navigate an education system that does not necessarily serve them well considering their ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status and associated family challenges, or immigration status (Rodriguez & Morrobel, 2004). Staff offer youth tools and skills to increase their success within existing school systems through homework and tutoring and activities or provide venues outside school in which to learn and have fun (Eccles et al., 2003). Staff also offered children opportunities to develop pride in their heritage, and identity(s), rather than aiming to facilitate systemic change.
Staff in SJYD and one-stop organizations view Latinx youth and family well-being as being under-supported by multiple systems: education, health, legal, transportation, social services, etc. Staff offer support for navigating these systems based on their experience, and for building resilience in the context of trauma and stress associated with discrimination, economic poverty, and family separation.
Enrichment programs aimed at younger children and managed by one-stop organizations did not give student choices for activities, whereas organizations that engaged adolescents incorporated student choice in activities. However, SJYD programming was fully informed by youth. Most SJYD did not use a set curriculum; youth defined the work by their passions and where they wanted to see change through their actions. One-stop organizations with an advocacy mission also engaged families in decision-making capacity. Youth participation and agency is determined by the context, nature of the relationship between youth and adults, and the organizations' mission.
Beyond recognizing multiple systems that challenge and support Latinx youth and family wellbeing, SJYD ground their activity in analyses that suggest the importance in fostering youth development by building young people's understanding of social disparities associated with race/ethnicity, among other factors, their identities, and capacities as change agents. In this context, SJYD help Latinx youth examine why these challenging conditions exist; consider why they are inequitably distributed across populations and places; and develop knowledge, skills, and networks to build more just and healthy systems and pursue transformative community engagement (Ginwright et al., 2006).

Variations in Scale
Analyses of scale view varied potential units of attention (e.g., individuals, sub-populations, schools, families, communities, states, nations, and places that link them) as intersecting and non-linear, reflecting organizations' recognition to consider their Latinx participants in relationship to multiple contexts at the same time.
Nonetheless, organization types reflect particular emphases. For example, enrichment organizations oriented themselves around promoting expanded competencies of individuals and their abilities to navigate their school systems. One-stop organizations also focused on individual needs and acted upon the important role of families in the lives of their youth participants. These organizations supported families' abilities to navigate local institutions and contribute to organizational and community needs. In some cases, one-stop organizations' activities intersected with national dynamics, as they sought to support families navigating the U.S. immigration system. SJYD practices attended to individual youth participants and, to a lesser extent, their families.
However, their sphere of attention and engagement tended to focus heavily on broader community, institutional, societal, and transnational contexts-helping young people both to explore and articulate how those contexts shape their own, their family's, and their community's daily experience, and how to be change agents with respect to them.

Variations in Scope
Academic enrichment and one-stop organizations reflected a tendency to focus on addressing immediate needs-for example, providing academic support in response to underperformance or responding to immediate family crisis situations using a problem-solving approach. Staff built relationships with youth and families over the span of 1 year and did not necessarily aim to sustain relationships with them beyond program participation. Nonetheless, one-stop and enrichment organizations created opportunities for youth participants and family members to give back to younger children and their communities over time.
In light of their objectives to transform people and places to promote more equitable opportunity and outcomes, SJYD viewed their activity on a longer time horizon. They were intentional about fostering sustained youth engagement, continually expanding networks, and creating ladders of opportunity to build upon young people's expanding skills and interest.

Study Limitations
Limitations of this study include a focus on California, and on interviewees who were predominantly of Mexican descent. Hence, the narratives discussed here may not reflect those of youth professionals from other Latinx subgroups in the United States. This study suggests various youth development organization types and their respective programs sustain Latinx youth participation, and it reveals differences in how these principles are operationalized in practice within each organization type. These practices appear to be consistent within organizational types across varied localities and populations. However, while we collected demographic data on each organization's youth participants, we cannot assess whether there are substantial differences in their backgrounds to suggest a particular "fit" between Latinx youth/families with certain experiences and specific organization types.

Implications
Several studies pointed to the mediating functions of youth development organizations for families and communities (Gambone & Connell, 2004;Lerner et al., 2005;Lerner et al., 2011).
However, only a few studies bring in contextual understanding of local conditions and how these organizations play an important role (Gonzalez, 2010;Hobbs & Sawer, 2009;Raffaelli et al., 2005). We believe the importance of both context and an organization's guiding philosophies contributes to this scholarship and offers a nuanced understanding of the way different organization types approach and engage with Latinx youth, families, and communities.
In this study, missions and philosophies of organizations shaped the nuanced and varied application of guiding principles for sustaining Latinx youth participation in practice (Erbstein & Fabionar, 2019). This study suggests organizational context and missions should be part of an ecological understanding of youth development. However, not all youth development organizations have mission-driven strategies. We recommend organizations develop missions to address the needs of the diverse youth and families they serve and align them to their programmatic efforts.
Youth development practitioners would benefit from an understanding of how • youth-serving organizations can expand their scope by learning from each other, • to seek out partnerships between youth organizations with limitations and organizations that engage Latinx youth well, • organizations' overarching conceptual frameworks shape their practices and focus on optimizing these to engage and sustain Latinx youth and families.
For policy makers with a planning perspective, it is useful to think about different organizations meeting different needs while serving the diversity within the Latinx community. For instance, if a community has one type of organization, such as enrichment, it is likely certain needs within the Latinx community-such as empowering older youth to come to terms with and heal from injustices, or basic needs to serve families-might not be met. This presents an opportunity for addressing these needs with Latinx youth, families, and communities.