PUBLICATIONS

The values of celebration, engagement, community, and safety are central to Vélez Young’s Choctaw and Cherokee family and many Indigenous societies. Her book celebrates and critically engages truth-telling as a framework for understanding the U.S. phenomena of nonprofit workplaces being inundated with staff teams engulfed in unmitigated chronic-stress (CS) and vicarious trauma (VT) in the course of “doing good.” Nonprofit community-based social services teams deliver programs and resources to communities facing the greatest symptoms of inequality in this country. We are fortunate that front-line professionals triage high-risk situations and cultivate opportunities for generational healing. Yet their work has not been comprehensively explored.

Indigenous author presence is vital here as the sectors’ focus areas reveal the racist and colonizing forces still with us. The book’s truth-telling in the nonprofit sector activates readership to contend with contradictions of ignoring this foundation. Further, Vélez Young contributes by outlining healing methods for mitigating the negative impact of CS and VT with their Indigenous origins and how to access these methods as individuals and collectives.

Ultimately, this book amplifies the contributions of nonprofit social services professionals while calling for the activation of their capacities to heal and transform oppressive norms and structures inside of the nonprofit sector.

Intended for a wide audience, this exploration of the primary forces relevant to punishment—poverty and political powerlessness—highlights the necessity for humane alternatives to our current incarceration binge. This provocative overview looks at the business of punishment and at the historical patterns of control regarding slavery, the death penalty, women, the LGBTQ community, juveniles, and supervision.

Vélez Young-Alfaro, M. (2018). School violence inside a youth prison school. In Gordon A. Crew (Ed.), School violence in American K-12 education. Hershey, Penn; IGI Global.

This chapter complicates common examples of “school violence” and sheds light on those types of school violence that have adult agents.

Herron, J.D. and Vélez Young-Alfaro, M. (2018). Racialized perceptions of school violence: Suspensions of African-American students. In Gordon A. Crew (Ed.), School violence in American K-12 education. Hershey, Penn; IGI Global.

This chapter explores the role of school suspensions in punishing Black students for real and imagined behavioral issues. 

Exploring Punishment

Four California authors weave together the U.S. cultural obsession with punishing, the role of
the legal system, and the colonial agenda to harm BIPOC communities, past and present. This
is an ongoing column in the Community Alliance Newspaper. 

Samples
Parole Punishes Everyone, Oct 1, 2021 by Jaime Leyva and Morghan Vélez Young
Isolation Punishment Continues After Prison, Nov 1, 2021 by Andrew Winn and Morghan Vélez Young
Punishing Mothers and Children is a Strategy of Colonizing, Dec 1, 2021 by Morghan Vélez Young

Academic Publications

Dr. Vélez Young has published numerous articles in academic publications, spanning a range of topics
pertaining to youth and young adults encompassed by the legal systems.