Chapter 7: Us and Them. Faith-Based Organisations and Street Youths in Søndre Nordstrand

In this chapter we describe and analyse faith-based organisations’ (FBOs) activities for and engagements with youths in Søndre Nordstrand, one of the most diverse city districts of Oslo. We ask whether these activities and engagements contribute to social cohesion, focusing particularly on whether and how they relate to youths at the margins of the local communities in the city district. The case study focuses on how the FBOs’ activities for and engagements with youths in Søndre Nordstrand relate to youth at the margins of their communities rather than how youths at the margins relate to the FBOs, reflecting a slight reorientation in comparison with the other case studies in this book. Our approach problematises the idea that young people not in education, employment or training (NEET young people) are at the margins in this context. Elsewhere, Bjørn Hallstein Holte (2018a) has argued that the NEET concept did not mean the same to the people we talked to in Søndre Nordstrand as it does in published research. In Søndre Nordstrand it was understood as referring mainly to teenage boys who were associated with youth gangs, petty crime or drugs. Our research indicates that these youths were at the margins of the local communities, but it is not clear that they were in NEET situations to a greater extent than other young people. There may also have been other groups of NEET young people, including girls and young women, who were rarely mentioned by the people we talked to. We therefore use the emic category