Just spaces: urban recreation centers as sites for social justice youth development.

Adorned in mesh shorts and a camp t-shirt, Sara,1 as if entering her own personal living room, offered me2 a seat in the foyer of the YMCA. Affectionately referred to as her home, Sara grew up in this YMCA. Now, this urban-based recreation center was where she worked as a pre-school teacher and a camp counselor.It was Sara's lunch break, and the foyer was the most comfortable and convenient space to conduct the interview I requested a few weeks earlier. As she sat, slight familiarity and a smile crossed Sara's face as she remembered her first interview with me, five years before. At our first meeting, Sara was a senior in high school in an urban community in the south central United States. Now, Sara was a 22-year-old student in college, majoring in Education and striving to make a positive impact on the life of her family and the economically oppressed community she grew up in.Sara's aspirations of teaching in this urban community in the South were inspired by her own experiences in this community recreational space. Teaching children in her community, at her "Y," was not merely a job, but was Sara's complex response to social injustices around her. The YMCA had given her hope for the future, amidst challenges and abandonment in her childhood; now Sara was a part of responding to the needs of the community by providing that same sense of dignity and value for others that she was provided.With population numbers in urban areas steadily rising and a widening income achievement gap (Reardon, 2013), Clark's (1989) notion that social scientists "must confront and seek to understand the dynamics of social action and social change" is critical to explore within urban milieus (p. xxxv). According to the 2010 U.S. Census, approximately 250 million or more than 80% of the U.S. population lived in urban areas (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). In addition, nearly 33% of households in urban areas had one or more children under the age of 18 years, and 24% were below the poverty level (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011a). Furthermore, the percentage of non-Hispanic White children has decreased steadily since 1994, and Census figures predict that by 2019 the majority of children will be children of color (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011b). In light of these figures, leisure scholars need to examine why access matters in urban areas, as well as the importance of young people's affordable and sustained access to leisure experiences in socioeconomically oppressed environments.In urban areas, access to community structures that provide community cohesion and places for recreation is a social justice issue (Arai & Pedlar, 2003). As Parry, Johnson, and Stewart (2013) suggested, "leisure is a context where people can create changes that may bring about a more socially just world, and the research we conduct brings visibility to these efforts" (p. 83). Over the past two decades, leisure scholars have taken a keen interest in social justice (Allison, 2000; Crompton & Wicks, 1988; Henderson, 1996,1997,2008; Mowatt, Arai, Sc Kivel 2009; Parry et al., 2013; Roberts, 2009; Yuen, Pedlar, Arai, & Kivel 2009). In addition, leisure scholars have a history of recognizing the need for diverse methodologies (Bowling 2002; Henderson, 1988) and varied epistemological and theoretical frameworks (Floyd, 1998; Mowatt, French, Malebranche, 2013; Shinew, Floyd, McGuire, & Noe, 1995) in exploring the meaning of leisure in marginalized groups. Nevertheless, despite more than 50 years of research, in a multitude of disciplines, the impact and the devastation associated with lack of access to and equity in leisure spaces continues to be an issue (Cohen et al., 2013; Vaughan et al., 2013).In response to the call for this special issue of the Journal of Leisure Research on social justice, this paper explored the role of social justice youth development (SJYD) as a framework. Through the story of one young woman's access to and experiences in her local YMCA, we discuss how accessing functional and funded recreational facilities, which provide safe nurturing environments, can promote two critical components of SJYD, self-awareness and critical consciousness. …