The Urban League and the Vocational Guidance and Adjustment of Negro Youth

Abstract

There is an increasing need to use the processes of community organization for the improvement of programs of vocational guidance and adjustment affecting all of the community's youth. The central purpose of the larger work from which this report is abstracted was to urge the utilization of these processes in the interest of minority youth. The need becomes particularly crucial with the realization that community organization processes facilitate cooperative effort between such major contributing agencies as the school and the social agency. Thus a further delimitation of the concern, to give momentum to this cooperative effort as it relates to this specific facet of the educative process. In relation to both the method of community organization and the objective of improved planning and programming for vocational guidance services cognizant, of the needs of minority youth, the work of a single agency, the National Urban League, commends itself to both the professional educator and the professional social worker. This observation is significant in light of attributes of the League's program-use of social work methods, respect for vocational guidance as a technical competency, and a commitment to supplementing community agencies having prior responsibility for the vocational guidance function. Study of the Urban League's program as it relates to vocational guidance has involved a review of relevant administrative pronouncements, questionnaire data reflecting its cooperative work with the school within the context of community planning, and visitation of communities in which programs of action were under way. Critical examination and appraisal of League activity entails two important considerations: (1) a definitive statement of the vocational guidance function, and (2) acquisition of understandings basic to an operational program tied to the community and purporting to supplement the work of agencies having prior responsibility. The essential elements in an adequate program have been delineated and given authoritative endorsement by the National Vocational Guidance Association. This well-known analysis includes the following services: occupational information, self-inventory and personal data collecting, vocational counseling, vocational preparatory, placement, follow-up and adjustment. Acceptance of this frame of reference permits a point of view of vocational guidance in terms of (1) specific services, and (2) the more functional conception implicit in the term process. The involvements of this viewpoint emerge as both psychological and sociological -the former concern with enlightening, informing and assisting the in-