Street-Based Social Work Praxis: An “Un-Manual” for Advancing Human Rights and Identifying Social Safety Net Failures With Youth of Color Experiencing Poverty

Street-based social work responds to the “social disaster” of U.S. youth of color experiencing

poverty who fall through the cracks of existing social safety nets. Drawing from 17 years of

feedback from youth clients about street-based service provision in university–community

partnerships, the flexible street-based model uses several trauma-focused, strengths-based, and

humanistic modalities to provide youth with a positive childhood experience and support their

self-determination, undergirded by a culturally sensitive accompaniment approach. Street-based

social work can be a transitional justice, human rights–based counterforce to mass criminalization

of youth of color by supporting their efforts at redress. As a translational science approach,

street-based social work yields knowledge about social safety net failures, how policies can be

improved, and effective scaling of evidence-based interventions.