Listening to Diversity Stories: Principles for Practice in Community Research and Action

Through a telling of key events in the history of the “Teen Action Center” (TAC), a drop-in youth center located in downtown “Unionville,” this story demonstrates how ‘youth’ is an important diversity category. The community conflict highlighted in this story centers around the 1997 arrest of TAC's Executive Director and two youth leaders (all Puerto Rican) because a small group of Latino and African-American youth was smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk in front of the Center. This conflict brings into focus divergent views on where Unionville's youth of color belong in the city, both physically and figuratively. The lessons learned in this story have wide application as Unionville, and other cities undergoing demographic transformation and economic decline, are likely to continue to experience these types of clashes, where the dominant paradigm of economic development overrides the realities, rights, and interests of marginalized groups.This article has been adapted from a chapter in my dissertation (Ross, 2002) Rebuilding Communities, Shaping Identities: The Impact of a Participatory Neighborhood Planning Process on Young, Low-Income Adolescents of Color, completed at the University of Massachusetts-Boston Public Policy Program. I am a White, female middle class faculty member at a small private university. I remain connected to “TAC” as a Board member. Names have been changed to protect the identity of the participants. Names of data sources (newspapers) have been modified to protect the identity of the study location.