‘Modeling’ youth work: logic models, neoliberalism, and community praxis

Abstract

This paper examines the use of logic models in the development of community initiatives within the AmeriCorps program. AmeriCorps is the civilian national service programme in the U.S., operating as a grants programme to local governments and not-for-profit organisations and providing low-cost labour to address pressing issues of social inequality. Logic models are a popular tool in programme planning, which graphically illustrates the relationship between a programme’s goals, resources expenditures and expected outcomes. Drawing from institutional ethnographic data, this paper examines how the use of logic models within the programme planning process create particular modes of defining and intervening in the achievement gap, thus shaping interventions by youth workers at the level of individual behaviour and obscuring structural roots forms of inequality. It is argued that in such ‘technologies’ of neoliberalism, we can understand how neoliberal public policy works to influence interventions at the community level.