Youth empowerment and engagement : an analysis of support practices in the youth protection system in Québec

Abstract

The most common goal of interventions that support youth from care in the transition to independent living is to help them to become relatively self-sufficient. It was in this context that a project was created to implement and evaluate group work strategies for this population. Two sources of information were used: the youths who participated in the program and all the facilitators. The intent behind this research was not only to monitor the trajectory of the youth participants through the group process, but also to expose the workers who intervened in the transition to adulthood to an alternative treatment paradigm and a different way to work with groups. The results reveal that the implementation of new intervention approaches is a process that takes time, and must take the context of the work into account.