Youth resilience and training programmes in Australia and the US: Beyond neoliberal social therapeutics.

In a world where opportunities are increasingly limited, young people are encouraged to become resilient and entrepreneurial in their pursuit of the traditional markers of adulthood. Social enterprise and community organisations dedicated to supporting young people seek to recast these expectations by providing supportive work and training environments and cultures and encouraging young people to find passion and hope in economic conditions that have failed to deliver the security and wellbeing that was promised. These organisations identify and respond to complex issues like unemployment and disengagement, homelessness and housing precarity, and provide personal development, support, education, training and employment options. In this paper, we explore how youth-focused social enterprise and community organisation programmes shape dispositions of resilience and entrepreneurialism. Drawing on the work of Butler and Anthanasiou and Dey and Mason, we argue that social organisations re-imagine the 'social therapeutics' that young people may require in relation to their participation in neoliberal forms of governmentality. We hope to challenge conceptualisations of such interventions as purely bounded by neoliberal and pro-capitalist therapeutic logics, by identifying the complex and sometimes contradictory goals that community organisations and social enterprises work towards in supporting young people to navigate a precarious economic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]