Summer Youth Employment Programs as a Structural Approach to Prevent Youth Violence: an Integrative Review.

The growing momentum to combat racial and ethnic disparities in youth violence victimization and exposure by developing structural interventions is an important shift toward addressing the root causes of disparities in youth violence. However, discussions of structural interventions sometimes overlook existing programs such as Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEPs). We conduct an integrative review of evaluation studies on SYEPs and use the findings to re-examine the evidence and arguments for SYEPs, advancing this issue's goal of highlighting viable solutions to address youth violence. We identified 13 evaluation studies of SYEPs in Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Cuyahoga County, OH, and Washtenaw County, MI. Findings from these evaluations suggest that SYEPs impact behavioral and sociocultural environmental determinants of youth violence across the individual, interpersonal, and community levels. No evaluations reported on societal-level determinants of youth violence. Yet, well-designed SYEPs align with key components of interventions to address disparities in youth violence: (1) they are sustainable, having been implemented in several cities and states for decades despite precarious funding; (2) as evidenced by evaluation findings, they address behavioral and sociocultural environmental domains across multiple levels of influence; and (3) they address racial and economic disparities by serving youth disproportionately affected by community violence, Black and Latine youth in economically disadvantaged communities. We argue that when these programs are made universal, they are structural interventions that address youths' lack of employment opportunities at the societal level.