Bridging the Gap in Youth Mental Health Services: Out-of-School Time Programs as a Means of Supporting Youth Development Across Contexts

This dissertation and its three studies combine to make the case for out-of-school time (OST) programs as a context for bridging the gap in access to mental health supports and services for marginalized youth. The first and second manuscripts focus primarily on the effectiveness of a specific OST mentoring program as a context for delivering the types of supports intended to bolster and promote positive youth development, as well as the importance of precise measurement and treatment specification to evaluate intended effects. The third manuscript builds on the work of the first two by qualitatively exploring the integration and expansion of the types of social-emotional learning (SEL) and mental health (MH) supports offered to youth in the OST context. In this manuscript, the author also explores and establishes themes in current practices related to provider roles in offering SEL/MH supports in OST spaces, as well as ways providers and practices integrate with and build on existing structures for in-school MH and SEL offerings. In conjunction, these manuscripts push the field one step further in the direction of utilizing novel and responsible methods of increasing equitable access to culturally responsive and evidence-informed mental health supports for youth and communities.