Community partnership and innovative practice to improve youth's educational and health issues in underprivileged neighbourhoods

Community partnership and innovative practice to improve youth’s educational and health issues in underprivileged neighbourhoods This presentation focuses on the evaluation results of a community-based project to support youth’s school success in a low-income area in Montréal (Canada). The study is based on a realistic evaluation approach, an emergent methodology to evaluate community initiative process and outcome (Pawson & Tilley, 1997), which brings together mechanism variation and relevant context variation to explain outcome pattern variation. Our analysis sets out three main dimensions of the community project. Firstly, we compare a ‘concerted’* community that benefits from a program supporting local and collective action, and a ‘non-concerted’ community, in terms of process and outcome. We explain the school-health-community collaborations and their innovative processes in relation to resulting services. Secondly, we describe the innovative practice of after-school accompaniment of youth and their parents, embedded in the ‘concerted’ community project. Thirdly, we present the intervention effects on parental supervision, youth competences and school success and we discuss these results according to the realistic evaluation approach. *A concerted community is one with structures through which community members consult each other on planning and collaborate on actions.