Digital Commons Network^™

Philanthropy’S Civic Role In Community Change, Patricia Auspos, Prudence Brown, Anne C. Kubisch, Stacey Sutton

The Foundation Review

· This article describes six key roles for philanthropic organizations’ engagement in communities. It draws on Living Cities, a consortium of financial organizations, private foundations, and public sector organizations that has been working since 1991 to improve distressed neighborhoods in 23 cities.

· The six civic roles described are (a) convening and leveraging diverse networks of relationships, (b) developing local data and plans for community change, (c) leveraging new resources on behalf of communities, (d) mobilizing political will, (e) framing new messages about community development and communicating more strategically, and (f) generating and testing new ideas and building and sharing …

Foundation Readiness For Community Transformation: Learning In Real Time, Prudence Brown, Marie Colombo, Della M. Hughes

The Foundation Review

· This article describes the internal structures and processes adopted by The Skillman Foundation to support the iterative practice of “learning and doing” in the first phase of a rapidly evolving, ambitious community change enterprise in six Detroit neighborhoods.

· The foundation invested in its own and its partners’ capacity to learn in real time so that together they could adjust and readjust their strategies in response to initial results and, in doing so, deepen their working relationships and build further capacity for effective implementation.

· Challenges to supporting this learning culture included increased visibility and pressures to produce results …

Evaluating A Voter Outreach Initiative, Amy Dominguez Arms

The Foundation Review

· This article describes an initiative designed to increase voting rates among low-income and ethnic groups in southern and central California communities.

· A rigorous evaluation demonstrated that participation rates could be increased by up to 10% among these groups.

· Using local, well-trained canvassers and making contact during the four weeks preceding the election were some of the more effective practices.

A Road Made By Walking: Participatory Evaluation And Social Change, Janet Rechtman

The Foundation Review

· This article describes how participatory evaluation was used in a Ford Foundation–funded project to promote mixed-income housing in Atlanta.

· The project resulted in an increase in mixedincome housing, but also in social outcomes such as increased knowledge about housing issues.

· Validity and reliability of the findings are demonstrated through feedback from the community members, rather than through statistical methods.

Youth Civic Engagement For Dialogue And Diversity At The Metropolitan Level, Barry Checkoway

The Foundation Review

· Youth civic engagement can take various forms, of which intergroup dialogue is one. Some forms – such as electoral participation – are inappropriate for young people.

· This article describes Youth Dialogues on Race and Ethnicity in Metropolitan Detroit, the nation’s most segregated metropolitan area.

· High-school-age students participated in intraand intergroup dialogues, metropolitan tours, residential retreats, and community action projects.

· Youth participants increased their knowledge of their own racial and ethnic identities and those of others, increased their awareness and understanding of racism and racial privilege, and developed leadership skills and took actions to challenge racism in …

Embedded Philanthropy And The Pursuit Of Civic Engagement, Mikael Karlström, Prudence Brown, Robert Chaskin, Harold Richman

The Foundation Review

· This article examines a range of civic engagement strategies pursued by embedded funders conducting community-change work in chronically disadvantaged communities.

· Embedded funders are place-based foundations that (1) commit to working in a particular community or communities over an extended period of time; (2) pursue direct and ongoing relationships with a range of community actors; (3) make community relationships and partnerships a primary vehicle of their philanthropic operation; and (4) provide extensive supports and resources beyond conventional grantmaking.

· Working as an embedded funder tends either to correlate with a prior commitment to civic engagement or to promote the …

Beyond The Npr Crowd: How Evaluation Influenced Grantmaking At The California Council For The Humanities, Clare Nolan, Alden Mudge

The Foundation Review

· This article describes an initiative designed to engage a broad cross section of Californians in the humanities. Initial findings from book reading groups were that participants were predominantly white, middle-aged women.

· Changing the type of programming to include poetry slams, photography, digital media, and writing programs broadened participation of various ages and ethnic groups.

· The location of the program also made a difference, with schools and community-based organizations drawing more diverse audiences than libraries.

Proving Foundation Impact On Public Policy Empirically: The Case Of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation And Consumer Choice For Adults With Developmental Disabilities, Ann Whitney Breihan

The Foundation Review

· Foundations that work on national public policy issues face challenges in demonstrating impact.

· This case study of how the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s initiative to support choice of program provider for developmentally disabled adults uses some advanced statistical techniques to demonstrate the impact of the foundation’s funding.

· This study suggests that to get the greatest impact on policy change, foundations should consider offering modest competitive grants to governmental departments; spending the funds in regional groupings; and focus on jurisdictions that have demonstrated interest in the policy area by spending their own funds.

Setting The Table For A Sustainable And Just Food System, Kien Lee, Kolu Zigbi, Marjorie Nemes

The Foundation Review

· As consumers and producers, people of color have been affected disproportionately by systemic problems in the food system.

· This article describes the Diversifying Leadership for Sustainable Food Policy initiative, a joint effort of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to build the capacity of organizations led by people of color to engage in policy and advocacy work.

· Grantees successfully built their capacity to engage in policy work (e.g., increased capacity to identify policy targets), increased their organizational capacity (e.g., diversified boards), improved their communities’ capacity (e.g., created opportunities for dialogue and improved …

New Voices At The Civic Table: Facilitating Personal And Social Change, Laura T. Pinsoneault, Linda Nguyen

The Foundation Review

· This article describes six pilot initiatives of the Alliance for Children and Families -- New Voices at the Civic Table (New Voices), a philanthropy-funded effort to challenge human service organizations to integrate civic engagement as a permanent part of their infrastructure.

· All six New Voices models included common elements: leadership training, civic education, experiential learning, participatory decision-making, networking, and reflective evaluation.

· Each also reflected one of four primary variations to civic engagement based on their community needs and demands: self-efficacy, constituent involvement, mobilizing, and organizing.

· Results demonstrate that civic engagement in human services not only produces …

Finding The Win In Wicked Problems: Lessons From Evaluating Public Policy Advocacy, John Sherman, Gayle Peterson

The Foundation Review

· Many of the social issues private foundations and other philanthropies attempt to address — poverty, homelessness, global climate change — are wicked problems. That is, they defy easy definition, lack permanent solutions, and have multiple stakeholders.

· The wicked problems framework helps make explicit the challenging nature of the issue to be addressed, requires an inclusive style of leadership that seeks stakeholder involvement, and demands candid exchange among stakeholders about the nature of the problem and effectiveness of efforts to address it.

· A wicked problems framework provides a set of criteria and questions for evaluators of advocacy efforts …

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Leveraging Grantmaking: Understanding The Dynamics Of Complex Social Systems, David Peter Stroh

The Foundation Review

· The nonobvious interrelationships among elements in a complex system often thwart people’s best intentions to sustainably improve system performance.

· The complex, nonlinear problems that most foundations address can be solved most effectively by thinking systemically instead of linearly about these problems.

· Systems thinking offers a range of analytic tools to improve our capacity to think systemically, including ways to distinguish problem symptoms from root causes, reinforcing and balancing feedback, system archetypes, mental models, and system purpose and goals.

· Applying these tools enables us to target highleverage interventions that can lead to sustainable, system-wide improvement.

· These …

Effective Advocacy Evaluation: The Role Of Funders, Johanna Morariu, Kathleen Brennan

The Foundation Review

· This article addresses the role of funders in supporting advocacy and advocacy evaluation work.

· The growth and strengthening of the advocacy evaluation field has lessened the “hard to measure” stigma attached to advocacy grantmaking.

· An increasingly broad array of evaluation designs and methods better capture advocacy data, enable rapid analysis and learning, and foster accountability.

· Based on a study of advocacy grantees and a study of advocacy grantmakers, the authors conclude that supporting evaluation and capacity building, providing multi-year funding commitments and core support, and creating custom reporting requirements and timelines are strategies that funders can …

Tools To Support Public Policy Grantmaking, Martha Campbell, Julia Coffman

The Foundation Review

· This article provides guidance on how foundations can frame, focus, and advance efforts to achieve public policy reforms.

· Five essential steps for developing public policy strategy are described: choosing the public policy goal, understanding the challenges, identifying influential audiences, determining how far those audiences must move, and deciding how to move them.

· Two tools developed specifically to support foundations during the strategy development process are presented.

Measuring The Impacts Of Advocacy And Community Organizing: Application Of A Methodology And Initial Findings, Lisa Ranghelli

The Foundation Review

· The increasing emphasis by funders on strategic grantmaking and measurable outcomes may be a disincentive to support policy and advocacy work, because of the perception that outcomes can be difficult to assess.

· A tool for measuring impact can reduce the barriers to funding advocacy and policy work.

· The tool draws upon the literatures on evaluating advocacy and organizing, social capital building efforts, and return on investment approaches to evaluation.

· The tool was applied in two sites, where funders found it useful to understand advocacy impacts and learn how advocacy can enhance their grantmaking goals.

The Emerging Dichotomy Of The Educational Institution: Expression And Authority In Public Schools Under Morse V. Frederick, 127 S. Ct. 2618 (2007), Joanna S. Thomas

Nebraska Law Review

Tension has emerged from the United States Supreme Court's review of student speech. This tension, between the importance of protecting the right of the student and the authoritative role of the educator, is emphasized in Morse v. Frederick. The examination of this conflict in light of First Amendment history in public schools is necessary to properly understand how future cases will be affected. The Court has noted that "education is perhaps the most important function of our local governments." The conflict of liberty and social order in education requires a delicate balance of interests. It is not necessarily the Court's …

Fee Shifting And Sovereign Immunity After Seminole Tribe, T. Haller Jackson Iv

Nebraska Law Review

This Article asks two questions: (1) Is the constitutional availability of attorneys' fees from states limited by the constitutional availability of damages, and (2) what would be the effect of saying "yes"? Those simple and straightforward questions defy an easy answer. In Parts IV-VI of this Article, I attempt to work through several ways of thinking about those problems to arrive at an account of what the Court might do, what I believe it should do, and why struggling with this problem is a valuable exercise.

Cruel And Unusual: State V. Mata, The Electric Chair, And The Nebraska Supreme Court's Rejection Of A Subjective Intent Requirement In Death Penalty Jurisprudence, Mark Mills

Nebraska Law Review

In State v. Mata, the Nebraska Supreme Court held that death by electrocution violates the Nebraska Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, effectively overruling an established line of Nebraska precedent upholding electrocution as a constitutional means of execution. At the time of the Court's decision, Nebraska had the dubious distinction of being the only state in the union using electrocution as the state's sole method of execution. Now, in the aftermath of Mata, Nebraska finds itself in a curious position: capital punishment is statutorily and constitutionally permissible in the state of Nebraska, but there is currently no …

Surveillance And The Political Value Of Privacy, Benjamin J. Goold

All Faculty Publications

The steady expansion in the use of surveillance technologies by the state and private sector represents a substantial threat to the privacy of ordinary individuals. Yet despite the best efforts of civil libertarians, many members of the public still struggle to understand why privacy is valuable and deserves to be protected as a basic right. In part, this is a result of the inherent complexity of the idea of privacy, but it is also due a tendency on the part of privacy advocates to focus on the individual - as opposed to the social and political dimensions - of privacy. …

Corporate Environmental Reporting And Climate Change Risk: The Need For Reform Of Securities And Exchange Commission Disclosure Rules, Constance Z. Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

This article argues for strengthened Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) rules mandating the disclosure by businesses of the impacts of climate change on their operations. The author surveys the existing SEC regulatory scheme and concludes that it is insufficient since few companies are currently disclosing climate change risks in their SEC filings. Alternative approaches to filling the environmental risk disclosure gap are examined, but found to be poor alternatives to enhanced SEC requirements, since they fail to provide a scheme for uniform and consistent disclosures across companies.

The Effects Of An Educational Intervention On Nurse -Physician Collaboration And Compliance Rates With Quality Indicators For Cardiac Patients In Critical Care Settings, Sara L. Clutter

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Purpose. The purposes of this study were to investigate the effects of an educational intervention on knowledge, nurse-perceived nurse-physician collaboration, and compliance with quality indicators and to assess the relationship between collaboration and compliance. This study also investigated the difference in collaboration and knowledge between and within nurses from intensive care (ICU) and intermediate care (IMCU) settings.;Research questions. Six research questions guided this study. The questions compared knowledge, collaboration scores, and compliance with quality indicators between and within intermediate and intensive care unit nurses before and after an educational intervention. Questions also addressed the relationship between collaboration scores and compliance …

The Role Of Nadph Oxidase In Blood -Brain Barrier Dysfunction Following Stroke In Aged Rats, Kimberly Kelly

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Stroke is the leading cause of long-term adult disability and the third leading cause of death in the United States. More that 72% of stroke victims are over the age of 65, yet most studies utilize young animals. Aged rats suffer exacerbated stroke volume and inflammation, as well as worsened functional outcome when compared to young adult rats. While the blood brain barrier (BBB) remains intact with age, it becomes more susceptible to external factors. BBB permeability in the penumbra appears acutely, 20 min after middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) in aged rats. Importantly, BBB permeability is earlier and more …

Federal Recordkeeping And Process Improvement At The Federal Aviation Administration, Shannon C. Mcneal

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The purpose of this study was to identify methods to improve the acquisition and the recordkeeping process of employee accident data at the Federal Aviation Administration. Two expert focus groups were utilized to discover the existing problems and to propose possible resolutions to the problems. The potential solutions were prioritized by each expert focus group with the use of an individual priority decision worksheet. Most of the potential solutions were feasible, low cost and could possibly be implemented within a year's time. An analysis of the data showed that the three most cost effective and feasible solutions to the data …

The West Virginia Uncovered Etrainer; Creating An Online Multimedia Training Guide, Jessica M. Rhodes

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This professional project contains an external Web site, which serves as a multimedia journalism training guide for weekly rural newspapers in West Virginia. The training guide focuses on issues that many small rural newspapers face, including small staffs and limited budgets and resources. Small rural weekly newspapers in West Virginia serve as beacons of community journalism within their counties. Through the use of multimedia, they can enhance their Web sites to document the lives of those in their community in ways that are far more diverse than print journalism. This professional project also discusses the issues of social responsibility and …

The Effect Of A Flaxseed-Oil Enhanced Diet On The Shelf Life And Sensory Characteristics Of Farmed Brook Trout (Salvelinus Fontinalis), Courtney Anne Simmons

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The effect of dietary modification with flaxseed-oil (Flax) enhanced feed on the sensory characteristics and shelf life of brook trout fillets was examined. The diets were composed of a commercial feed supplemented with either fish oil (control diet, CD) or Flax (treatment diet).

Understanding The Black College Student Experience: The Relationships Between Racial Identity, Social Support, General Campus, Academic, And Racial Climate, And Gpa, Tonisha Hamilton

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Neuropsychological Assessment Of Working Memory, Processing Speed, And Cognitive Fatigue Among Individuals With Sickle Cell Disease: A Biopsychosocial Developmental Perspective, Laura J. Tagliareni

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Principal Perceptions Of Their Preparedness And The Preparedness Of Their Staff To Deal With Students Of Poverty In The Classroom, Lisa Anne Donmoyer

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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The Impact Of A Freshman Academy Small Learning Community On Student Achievement And Engagement, Christopher M. Fulco

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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