Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Measuring The Effectiveness Of Equitable Economic Development Strategies, Amy Minzner

The Foundation Review

There is anecdotal evidence that equitable economic development activities can foster inclusive growth and unlock the full potential of local economies by dismantling barriers and expanding opportunities for low-income people and communities of color. These strategies are being used with increasing frequency, and advocates and funders are pressing for their use throughout the country. Because of this, there is a need to better understand the link between equitable economic development activities and their ability to foster equitable opportunities and resulting impacts.

Establishing this link will require a new measurement strategy because traditional measures of economic development effectiveness focus on communitywide …

I, Too, Sing Neurodiversity, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

The neurodiversity community was envisioned as an inclusive and welcoming space for individuals with neurological conditions such as ADHD, autism, Tourette’s Syndrome, giftedness, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, intellectual disability, NVLD and related diagnoses. The underlying premise of neurodiversity is that people present with various neurological differences and there is value in acknowledging and accepting these differences. Despite efforts made over the past few decades, a growing number of individuals within the neurodiversity community, including people of color, have called for intersectional concepts to be more intentionally and more effectively interwoven into neurodiversity as a whole. Referencing “I, Too,” a decades-old poem …

Teaching While Autistic: Constructions Of Disability, Performativity, And Identity, Alexa Baird

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

The structure of organizational contexts and practices tends to be based on the normative assumption of the non-disabled individual as the prototypical state of being human. Therefore, schools, like many institutional sites, act to replicate the normative expectation of ableism and the atypical mind. These parameters impact not only the disabled students that operate both within these educational spaces but also the disabled adults embedded within these arenas professionally. Thus, disabled teachers act as a marginalized group that has historically been largely absent from the discourse on education and critical disability studies. This paper seeks to develop an understanding of …

Insights From Pennsylvania: Marketing Agritourism For The American Cider Culture, Alison E. Feeney, Antonia Price, Rachel Idacavage

Journal of Tourism Insights

Destinations and activities for travelers are greatly influenced by official tourism agencies that promote their local resources. Marketing for well-known places like breweries or vineyards can be straight forward, but destinations without clear descriptions can be more challenging. This paper examined how cider is defined, promoted, and marketed by official tourism websites to evaluate its potential for supporting the agritourism industry given the resurgence in craft beverages and increased public interest to purchase local products. Discrepancies between federal and state regulations of cider contribute to the public’s lack of awareness of what cider is, who can make it, and how …

Thriving Private-Community Partnerships: Perspectives From Fiji’S Upper Navua Conservation Area, Jeremy Schultz, Kelly Bricker

Journal of Tourism Insights

Ecotourism has proven itself to be a forerunner in the advancement of environmental conservation all the while supporting cultural tradition, uniqueness, and pride among indigenous communities. Successful private-community partnerships associated with ecotourism operations are vital to the overall prosperity of both the businesses and the local communities. Such accomplishments can be seen through numerous livelihood goals including income, food security, health, reduced vulnerability, governance, and empowerment (Walpole & Wilder, 2008).

Private-community partnerships also support global initiatives such as the Sustainable Development Goals (Ban Ki-Moon, 2015) and sustainable development frameworks including those proposed by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO, …

Understanding Contraflow Pop-Culture Tourism: The Case Of Transnational Fandom Of South Korean Pop-Culture And The “Hallyu” Tourism, Jungyun "Christine" Hur, Tony Kim

Journal of Tourism Insights

Pop-culture tourism has continuously grown its market among those who are fanatic of pop-culture, and destination marketers have noticed pop-culture as an effective marketing tool to attract more visitors. Pop-culture has been dominant by the US, but interestingly, a recent phenomenon sees a contra-cultural flow. This paper explores contraflow pop-culture tourism and guides the reader to how to understand this new tourism niche. Reviewing the case of transnational fandom of South Korean pop-culture, so called “Korean Wave” or “Hallyu” and its impact on inbound tourism, this paper suggests digital mediation as a key driver of contraflow pop-culture and transnational fandom, …

Savannah Hockey Classic Attendance Motivation, Chris Hanna, Chris R. Barnhill, Gregg Rich, Amy Rundio, Christina Gipson

Journal of Tourism Insights

The Savannah Hockey Classic has become a very successful annual university club hockey team tournament. The 21^st edition of the tournament was held in January 2020 in Savannah, Ga. featuring the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Florida, Florida State University, and University of Georgia club hockey teams—the same teams that have comprised the tournament for many years. This study utilized Personal Investment Theory (Braskamp, 1986) and the SPEED scale (Funk, Filo, Beaton, & Pritchard, 2009) for attendance motivation assessment. Social interaction motivations were significantly higher for county residents, spectators attending with friends, spectators attending with family, and past …

Social Support During Covid-19 Social Distancing, Josiah P. Stryd

Honors Projects

This pilot study measured emotional affect, social support, and use of digital communication technologies during the early 2020 COVID-19 stay at home order in Michigan among 65 Grand Valley State University Alumni Association members. The study used an online survey and was designed to examine the relationship between digital communication and social support during physical social distancing, and how this impacted emotional affect. Overall, the pilot study found largely unchanged reported emotional affect and social support before and during the stay at home order. A future study with larger sample size would aim to find if these results are replicated …

Investor Behavior In The Midst Of A Global Pandemic, Abigail N. Bates

Honors Projects

Investors partaking in portfolio and asset management through the stock market and other avenues do so with certain reasoning and methods in hand. Each investor may have different interests and risk tolerances that guide their choices for investment. Behavioral finance allows for an in-depth look at an investor’s actions and the influencing psychology behind it. Before this approach was popularized, early studies of finance assumed that investors were always rational in their decision making and put resources only into opportunities that would increase their utility or happiness. The behavioral finance approach takes a more comprehensive look at these behaviors and …

Roadmap To Improved Accessibility For The Gvsu Libraries’ Institutional Repository And Library Publishing Services, Grand Valley State University Libraries

Library Reports and Communication

This roadmap outlines the context of accessibility needs for digital materials published through the University Libraries’ institutional repository and/or library publishing (IR/LP) services, and identifies priority areas for improving the accessibility of IR/LP content.

Given available resources and constraints, making all new and legacy content fully accessible is not feasible. However, the GVSU Libraries have identified specific priorities for making content accessible, and commit to providing accessible versions of IR/LP content on request.

The Link Between Nativity Status And Racial Infant Mortality Disparities, Hannah Pierson

McNair Scholars Manuscripts

The United States has one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the developed world. Studies indicate infant mortality varies greatly across racial groups. Black women are twice as likely to report preterm birth or infant death relative to White women. Foreign-born Black women have similar rates to that of native-born White women rather than native-born Black women, suggesting the link between race and reproductive health is more complex than previously understood. Thus, this study examines the interplay between nativity, race, and reproductive health. The cumulative disadvantage perspective has been employed to better unpack how life course stressors may …

Grand Valley Magazine, Vol. 20, No. 2, Fall 2020, Grand Valley State University

Grand Valley Magazine

Grand Valley Magazine is a quarterly publication about Grand Valley State University produced by University Communications since 2001.

Institutions, Structural Policies, And Economic Development: Evaluating The Interrelationships Between Rule Spaces For Developing Countries, Jordan Pattison

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

Research on long term economic development has consolidated around the central role of economic and political institutions. Within these institutional spaces, structural policies represent a subset of incentive structures with their own effects on economic behavior. To capture the separate effects of both institutional environments and structural policies, we construct an Institutional Index (II) and a Structural Policy Index (SPI) to evaluate their effects on income levels and short term growth rates for non-high-income states. This paper finds that both the II and SPI predict variations in income levels between non-high-income states, with the II producing a larger and more …

Addressing Sexual Violence In K-12 Education, Taylor Bowie

McNair Scholars Manuscripts

Sexual assault has been widely recognized as a public health crisis for decades. Since at least the late 1980s, rates of sexual violence have been steady around 25% of women experiencing it by their freshman year of college. Our past and most prevalent prevention methods have consistently shown to be useless, as rates of violence have not decreased, and the results often do not lead to increased understanding about sexual assault and violence intervention. In recent years, college campuses have started to implement a new prevention education known as the bystander model. While the literature generally agrees it has some …

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Advancing Social Determinants Of Health Through Investments In Postsecondary Attainment And Sustaining Employment, Melissa B. Eggen, J’Aime C. Jennings, Molly O’Keefe, Brandy N. Kelly Pryor, Leslie Clements

The Foundation Review

In 2018, the Humana Foundation shifted the focus of its work to the social determinants of health, with the key aim of promoting health equity. With this new focus came a recognition that larger, long-term investments would be needed to support strategies addressing upstream determinants of health. The foundation also recognized the need to co-create processes with communities to understand how to provide essential holistic supports.

This article explores one area of the foundation’s new efforts, the Strategic Community Investment Program, which focuses in part on postsecondary attainment and sustaining employment. The foundation partnered with the University of Louisville’s Center …

Emergent Learning: Increasing The Impact Of Foundation-Driven Strategies To Support College Enrollment And Completion, Kimberly Hanauer, Stacy Sneed, Bill Debaun

The Foundation Review

This article examines lessons learned as part of the continued development of the Get2College Pilot School Program, an initiative of the Woodward Hines Education Foundation, designed to test a strategy for increasing college enrollment among Mississippi students through greater college exploration opportunities and application and financial aid supports.

While a review of the first three years of the pilot found it had an impact on college-going culture at its eight participating schools, Get2College found no significant increase in college enrollment over the 2016–2018 academic years and a retrospective analysis revealed flaws in the program’s design and theory of change. In …

Scaling Rural Access: One Foundation’S Partnership To Expand Fafsa Completion Across Mississippi, B. Tait Kellogg, Ann Hendrick, Kierstan Dufour, Patricia Steele

The Foundation Review

This article highlights Get2College, a program by the Woodward Hines Education Foundation that provide financial aid counseling to Mississippi high school students, and outlines a study that assessed efforts to scale the FAFSA completion initiative to increase the number of students statewide who complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

Get2College’s approach to scaling involved a partnership with the state’s rurally based community colleges and leveraged their established support networks to expand its outreach to the state’s often underserved students and increase FAFSA completion rates among that population.

In rural states like Mississippi, underresourced groups are sometimes left …

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Moving The Needle Or Spinning Our Wheels? A Framework For Long-Lasting, Equitable Change In Education, Heather Mccambly, Eleanor R. Anderson

The Foundation Review

In the quest for equitable and lasting reform in postsecondary education, philanthropy’s great strength is its flexibility to make use of multiple strategies. However, as most grantmakers know firsthand, not all strategy combinations lead to lasting systemic change.

This article offers an actionable approach for designing and analyzing philanthropically funded movements in order to remake an area of educational policy or practice. It begins with a review of philanthropic literature that identifies the primary change strategies used by funders in the education sector. It then introduces a tool, rooted in organizational research, to understand and predict the circumstances under which …

Partnering For Postsecondary Success In Rural Texas, Allison Pennington

The Foundation Review

Although students living in rural areas perform academically on par with their peers, they are less likely to complete a postsecondary credential due to geographic, economic, and other barriers. Greater Texas Foundation, a private grantmaker focused on postsecondary student success in Texas, fosters rural collaborations as part of its philanthropic strategy.

This article reflects on lessons learned by foundation staff from this strand of work. It describes innovative models for postsecondary support developed by the foundation’s rural partners, discusses the need to balance direct program support and capacity building, and emphasizes the importance of visiting rural communities in person.

To …

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

The Aaacf Community Scholarship Program: A Strategic Approach To Building Community, Shelley Strickland, Carmen M. Mccallum

The Foundation Review

Five years ago, the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation decided to take a strategic approach to offering college scholarships that would address gaps in educational achievement among local students. To increase the impact of its scholarship program, the foundation shifted its emphasis from one-time awards to promoting degree attainment, and determined that the criteria for new scholarships would be based on impact data instead of donor intent.

The Community Scholarship Program awards multiyear scholarships to local students of color, students from low-income families, and first-generation college students, and provides them with a dedicated college success coach to help them successfully …

Economic Impact Study: United Methodist Community House Expansion, Christian Glupker, Leslie Muller, Julie Cowie, Grand Valley State University

Other Faculty Publications

In 2019, United Methodist Community House (UMCH) commissioned IFF, a real estate consulting firm, to perform a strategic facility plan. This strategic plan’s needs assessment included the following: A new senior center, expanded child development center, and relocation of administrative offices.

Seidman Research Office at Grand Valley State University was retained by UMCH to perform an economic assessment of the IFF strategic facility plan. This economic assessment will:

(A) evaluate the economic impact of construction of proposed senior center;

(B) evaluate the economic impact of UMCH operations;

(C) evaluate the economic impact of expanded child development center; and

(D) quantify …

Programmatic Review Process Guide, Jeffrey Daniels, Annie Bélanger, Sarah Beaubien, Jon Jeffryes, Cara Cadena, Hazel Mcclure

Library Reports and Communication

The Grand Valley State University Libraries created a programmatic review process to review, realign, and renew its programmatic areas as the University faced changes and budget challenges. This programmatic review process guide details the Libraries’ guiding principles, prioritization approach, and decision-making criteria created to address the process by which library resources may be allocated. The Libraries were proactively reacting to the University’s projected budget shortfalls as a result of the continued demographic decline in college-aged individuals as well as the global pandemic. In this guide, University Libraries has clearly defined its mission for the coming years, the expectations and desired …

Investing In Mission-Driven Advocacy, Raymond Alqaisi, Carrie Warick

The Foundation Review

Philanthropy has a significant role to play in public policy advocacy, both in involving the individuals they support in advocacy and ensuring that advocates have the tools to be successful — not only in funding, but also in robust capacity-building assistance.

Looking at the work of the National College Attainment Network, this article explores how philanthropic investments can impact advocacy, in both financial and capacity-building support, through a recounting of a recent advocacy grantmaking initiative. It also details the key conditions conducive to policy change and the supports that were provided to grantees during the funding period.

As philanthropic leaders …

Strategic Planning: Plan-To-Plan Documentation, Kristin Meyer, Scarlet Galvan, Kristin Kerbavaz, Kim Ranger, Annie Bélanger

Library Reports and Communication

As part of the strategic planning process begun in 2020, the Grand Valley State University Libraries Strategic Planning Team developed a collection of planning-to-plan documentation to support the development of a new strategic planning framework. This documentation includes descriptions of the project and scope, the strategic planning team and their roles, and the timeline for the planning process. It also outlines the design principles that will guide the planning process and the ways that the team will incorporate methodologies like SOAR, North Star, and Design Thinking.

Social Distancing: The New Professional Civility, Benjamin Hunt

Graduate Research

As a naturalistic paradigm dictated by dialectal practices, culture must be understood in relation to a time and place in order to make ethical sense of society. Similarly, culture cannot be appropriately measured and studied without a reference to prior historical and geographical contexts. Naturalism is a dialectic that manifests as a type of evolution within our society. This cultural phenomenon allows human beings to reflect on those constructs through empirical means in order to understand the world, and to best prepare a society for how to move forward. The actions of the United States Government in regard to social …