Sports participation is considered beneficial for the development of socially vulnerable youth, not only in terms of physical health but also in terms of cognitive, social and emotional health. Despite the strong belief that sports clubs offer a setting for positive youth development, there is limited knowledge about how socially vulnerable youths experience their participation in these clubs. Interviews were conducted with 22 socially vulnerable youths that play a sport at a local sports club. An inductive content analysis was conducted and three themes were discovered that are included in the positive and negative sports experiences: the extent to which the youths experienced visibility of their skills, the extent to which the youths felt confident while playing their sport, and the extent to which the youths felt that sport was a challenge they liked to take on. More importantly, there was a fragile balance within each of the themes and the sports coaches played an important role in installing and maintaining a supportive environment in which the youths could have meaningful, consistent and balanced sports experiences. It is not self-evident that for socially vulnerable youth sports experiences are positive and supporting.

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Today’s western society is characterized by a transition towards self-organization by citizens in communities. Increasingly, societal problems are addressed by groups of citizens who take action to find concrete solutions. A second feature of western society is that it is an information society in which information and communication play a key role. In this paper, we analyse how these two societal trends come together at the community level. Applying a relational and contingent perspective to how green urban citizens’ initiatives develop, we look into the role of information in their interactions with other people, organizations and institutions. We analyse the mechanisms whereby information plays a role in the citizens’ initiatives. This leads to the conclusion that informational capital is fundamental to the realization of citizens’ initiatives and that informational capital is generated, identified, used and enlarged through the relational strategies of bonding, bridging and linking. It is a process that works in both ways and reinforces citizens’ initiatives.

Participation in sport has often been related to positive developmental outcomes for socially vulnerable youth. However, we know very little about the role of sports participation in a socially vulnerable childhood. Taking a life-course perspective, we conducted interviews with 10 young adults to reflect on their socially vulnerable childhood and the role of sport in their lives. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, we discovered that four different roles of sports participation in a socially vulnerable childhood could be discerned. First of all, sports participation offered youths a safe place that allowed them to escape the struggles they faced in everyday life and that provided them with support, appreciation and feedback that they did not find in other life domains. Secondly, sports participation offered learning experiences that contributed to valuable insights about themselves or the world around them. Thirdly, sport could be an instrument to reach goals and as such sport became a resource in itself. Fourthly, sports participation could fulfil a purpose in life for socially vulnerable youth and become an important part of their identity. The participants' accounts showed how sports participation filled a specific gap in their lives and they mostly shared positive experiences. However, the participants' accounts also indicated the potentiality of sport to instigate a negative spiral of vulnerability, and therefore we have to remain critical towards the value of sports as a tool for positive youth development.

This study concludes that social capital within citizens' initiatives is both a prerequisite for the formation of initiatives and a result of the existence of initiatives.