You Start with the Youth

Narratives of Deservingness and Dissent at a Homeless Service Organization

Bibliographic Data

ID2363671
AuthorsDilara Yarbrough (0000-0003-3048-3800, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume65
Issue3
Pages506-528
Publication date2022-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociological Perspectives (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0731-1214 • E-ISSN: 1533-8673
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/07311214211019431
OpenAlexW3173875777
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited41

As they provide social services to people experiencing poverty and homelessness, many nonprofit organizations perpetuate ideologies that obscure the political and economic causes of poverty and blame poor people for their plight. But the ideologies and practices of service provision are more diverse than many scholars of the nonprofit industry have assumed. What are the processes by which professionalized service organizations not tied to broader social movements might nonetheless facilitate rather than hinder structural explanations of inequality among their clients? Using ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, and analysis of art and writing by young adults experiencing homelessness, I investigate the prevalence of structural explanations of poverty among clients at a large homeless youth service organization. I find that the organization's liberal assimilationist narratives about 'youth' facilitate more critical analyses of poverty and inequality among homeless participants. As the organization's public-facing communications emphasize the positive meanings of youth to assert clients' deservingness, homeless clients leverage the organization's assimilationist discourse to advance more radical critiques of the systems that oppress them. Building on scholarship about the medicalization of homelessness and the nonprofit industrial complex, this case study demonstrates how multiple ideologies and practices spanning the continuum from repressive to mobilizing can take hold within a single organization, and by extension, the nonprofit service industry

Disadvantaged · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Public relations · Scholarship · Sociology · Structural inequality · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

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