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Lessons learned from a creative methods approachYouth Creating Disaster Recovery & Resilience (YCDR 2 ) is a crossborder initiative aimed at learning from and with disaster-affected youth 13 to 22 years of age in Joplin, Missouri, in the United States, and Slave Lake, Calgary and High River, Alberta, in Canada.Each of these communities experienced major disasters and were in the early stages of recovery when they were selected for this study. Working with local partners in each community, YCDR 2 faculty and students engaged youth in experiential and arts-based workshops to explore their stories of recovery and resilience. The questions framing this research project focused on the people, places, spaces and activities that helped or hindered the recovery process for youth and their peers.Beyond the practical and theoretical advances of the work, which are described elsewhere Fletcher et al. 2016), the project offers a number of methodological contributions and lessons learned about community and youth engagement and processes that simultaneously highlight the capacities of youth, generate data, and provide novel options for knowledge mobilisation in disaster research and practice. This article, therefore, describes the YCDR 2 engagement and research process and elaborates on the opportunities and challenges associated with establishing youth-community-academic partnerships in postdisaster contexts. PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH WITH CHILDREN AND YOUTHThis research was grounded in a participatory orientation, and the flexible research and engagement strategy mirrors some of the concurrent data generation and analysis strategies of grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin 1997). This approach allowed us to be flexible and responsive in the emergent and shifting contexts of diverse post-disaster environments (also see Brown 2009). Furthermore, it supported our ability to adapt each research workshop to suit the unique needs and capacities of each community, the youth with whom we were working and the research team.

This research, which was conducted in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, draws on 50 in-depth interviews with displaced single mothers and disaster relief providers in Colorado. Government agencies and charitable organizations offered various resources and services to Katrina evacuees, including food, clothing, emergency shelter, temporary housing, transportation, employment assistance, temporary childcare, school enrollment assistance, and health care. This study illustrates that there was close alignment between resources provided by disaster response organizations and resources needed by displaced single mothers. Yet, despite the considerable overlap, the single mothers in this study experienced many recovery-related difficulties associated with accessing available resources. In particular, single mothers 1) were often unaware of available resources; 2) experienced a conjunction of many different, pressing needs; 3) suffered a loss of their informal social safety net; 4) encountered numerous bureaucratic obstacles in accessing aid; and 5) often felt mistreated and stigmatized. These barriers to accessing resources heightened the vulnerability of single mother headed households.