Public Policy Commons^™

A Partnered Approach To School Change In A Rural Community: Reflections And Recommendations, Sara Rimm-Kaufman, Mary Fant Donnan, Dianne Garcia, Melinda Snead-Johnson, Eugene Kotulka, Lia Sandilos

The Foundation Review

With so many education policies and practices made at the local level, community-based foundations are in a unique position to support their local school districts in taking a comprehensive, systematic approach to improving the lives of young people. This article describes a research–practice partnership designed to produce school improvement in a rural community in western Virginia and reflects on a three-year collaboration among The Alleghany Foundation, two school districts, and the University of Virginia.

The partners identified challenges and strengths within the school districts and the community; gathered and analyzed existing district data and new findings from interviews and surveys …

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

By Us And For Us: A Story Of Early Childhood Development Systems Change And Results In A Rural Context, Lisa Payne Simon, Kirsten Scobie, Phoebe Backler, Catherine Mcdowell, Charles Cotton, Susan Cloutier, Clare Nolan

The Foundation Review

Since 2007, the Neil and Louise Tillotson Fund — a donor-advised fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation — has invested in early childhood development in Coös County — New Hampshire’s largest and most rural and economically disadvantaged county. Community providers from a range of disciplines formed strong professional relationships and agreed on common goals and evidence-based strategies to improve services for children and families.

This article describes how local community members joined forces with the fund to create an integrated early childhood development system for Coös’ children and families. It provides background on the investment and initiative strategy, summarizes …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Thriving Communities: A Model For Community-Engaged Grantmaking, Mary Francis, Colleen Desmond, Jeffrey Williams, Jennifer Chubinski, Jennifer Zimmerman, Ashlee Young

The Foundation Review

Interact for Health is a health conversion foundation serving the three-state region of Greater Cincinnati, Ohio. Its current community change initiative, Thriving Communities, is a community-learning model that helps embed health promotion and advocacy work in communities while those communities build an equitable infrastructure with stakeholders to more rapidly spread evidence-based practices.

This article explores the three tools developed for the Thriving Communities initiative: Success Markers, the Developmental Pathway, and Relationship Mapping. Interact for Health has found that these tools build core competencies and confidence among grantees as well as a process for community engagement that produces results at the …

Fostering Change And Fresh Voices: Vancouver Foundation’S Youth Engagement Journey, Trilby Smith

The Foundation Review

Since 2011, Vancouver Foundation has invested significant time, energy, ideas, and money in bringing together immigrant and refugee youth and young people with lived experience of the foster care system in British Columbia.

Through its Fostering Change and Fresh Voices initiatives, the foundation has listened and worked in partnership with these young people to address the issues that affect their lives, and important progress has been made in the forms of meaningful policy changes and improved political engagement. The foundation is now in the process of returning these initiatives to the communities that inspired them.

This article describes the roles …

Creating Habits For Inclusive Change, Pennie Foster-Fishman, Erin Watson

The Foundation Review

The act of transforming community outcomes requires diverse stakeholders across an array of settings to become actors of change. While this movement to action lies at the heart of effective community change, it also remains one of the most challenging aspects of collective work.

Drawing from the ABLe Change Framework systems-change model, this article presents four processes used in numerous communities across the United States to effectively engage diverse stakeholders in taking actions to improve local systems. These processes prioritize the voices of the most disadvantaged within communities and engage them as key actors in the change process.

This article …

Equity For All: Building The Infrastructure For Change Through Community-First Funder Collaboratives, Ellen Braff-Guajardo, Kaying Hang, Leslie Cooksy, Monica Braughton, Fontane Lo

The Foundation Review

Foundations increasingly recognize that improving conditions in many communities requires addressing inequities in access to rights and resources. Yet there are challenges to effective investment in underresourced regions, especially when foundations have limited familiarity with the region and may assume limited local capacity to leverage philanthropic investments.

This article discusses how Sierra Health Foundation partnered with other California and national foundations to establish the San Joaquin Valley Health Fund, a collaborative whose grants focus on strengthening the capacity of communities and organizations in the Valley to advance policy and systems changes that promote health and racial equity.

This article highlights …

An End To Business As Usual: Nurturing Authentic Partnerships To Create Lasting Community Change, Jeffrey Sunshine, Bernadette Sangalang

The Foundation Review

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation created Starting Smart and Strong, a 10-year place-based initiative in three California communities, to develop and test solutions that support parents, caregivers, and educators as they prepare young children to be healthy and ready for school. The initiative brings together public and private partners to create comprehensive early-learning systems and ultimately scale what works.

This article offers key insights into the foundation’s experience, three years into implementation, with managing this complex initiative and how program officers were compelled to think differently about the best roles staff can play to support grantee communities and amplify …

Book Review: The Goldilocks Challenge: Right-Fit Evidence For The Social Sector, Veena Pankaj

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Decolonizing Wealth, Juan Olivarez

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Community Navigation As A Field Of Practice: Reframing Service Delivery To Meet The Needs Of Communities’ Marginalized Populations, Joby Schaffer, M. Julie Patiño, P. Barclay Jones, Ladawn Sullivan

The Foundation Review

Community navigators help individuals and families access local services and assistance through a combination of referrals and interpersonal support. The Denver Foundation launched the Basic Human Needs Navigator Learning Community in February 2014 to help navigators working with local organizations and community members practicing navigation independently improve their practice and identify similarities and differences in their approaches.

This article discusses the multiyear, peer-learning project, including the general lessons the foundation learned about both navigation and the use of a learning-community approach to reach its field-building goals.

Reports from participating organizations and community members over four years suggest the efficacy of …

Behavioral Instruments In Renewable Energy And The Role Of Big Data: A Policy Perspective, Sarah Giest, Ishani Mukherjee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

There has been a surge in the application of behavioral insights for environmental policymaking. It is often presented as an easy and low-cost intervention to alter individual behavior. However, there is limited insight into the cost effectiveness of these attempts and the impact of inserting behavioral policy instruments into an existing mix of traditional tools in a particular policy sector. Furthermore, there has been little focus on the intersection of large behavioral datasets and how they could complement behavioral insights. We present a conceptual overview of how the intersection of big data and behavioral knowledge would work in the renewable …

Charter School Funding: (More) Inequity In The City, Corey A. Deangelis, Patrick J. Wolf, Larry D. Maloney, Jay F. May

School Choice Demonstration Project

Public charter schools are a growing part of K-12 education. Charter schools are public schools that are granted operational autonomy by their authorizing agency in return for a commitment to achieve performance levels specified in a contract. Like traditional public schools, charter schools are prohibited from charging tuition, must not discriminate in admissions or be religious in their operation or affiliation, and are overseen by a public entity. Unlike traditional public schools, however, most charters are open to all students who wish to apply, regardless of where they live. If a charter school is over-subscribed, random lotteries usually determine which …

The Intentional City: Shaping London’S Urban Future, Zack Taylor

Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance – Publications

Summary of remarks made at a public roundtable celebrating the launch of the Centre of Urban Policy and Local Governance held at Western University on November 23, 2018. Participants included Pierre Filion, Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo and an expert in mid-sized cities; Arielle Kayabaga, Councillor-Elect for City of London’s downtown Ward 13; Michelle Baldwin, Executive Director of London’s Pillar Nonprofit Network and Co-Founder of Innovation Works; John Fleming, Managing Director of Planning and City Planner for the City of London; and Neil Bradford, Professor and Chair of the …

Defining Landscape-Scale Collaboration As Used To Restore Forests And Reduce Catastrophic Wildfires, Marcelle Elise Dupraw 2512721

The Qualitative Report

In this article, I explore the distinctive characteristics of landscape-scale collaboration in the context of forest resource management in the United States. The United States (US) is experiencing a significant increase in acres burned by wildfire in the wildland-urban interface zone, exacting a heavy toll on human life, health, property, and livelihoods. The US Forest Service’s Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR) Program demonstrates an effective approach to reducing risk of catastrophic wildfire through collaborative forest restoration work at the landscape scale. This is the first in a series of articles building toward a grounded theory to guide development of the …

Pursuing Resilience Of Coastal Communities Through Sustainable And Integrated Urban Water Management, Pacia Díaz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Reliability of water supply in the urban setting has become essential for communities to function and thrive. It is needed for more than mere human consumption and well-being. Although modern cities have water treatment and distribution systems, pressures from urbanization, population growth and the anticipated pressures of climate change are affecting the quality of water supply and the reliability of treatment and distribution systems. There is therefore an urgent need to take appropriate measures to improve the resilience of water supply systems before the impacts are irreversible.

Improving the resilience of water supply systems can be a challenge. In the …

Prescription Opioids And Heroin Abuse In New Mexico: Swot Analyses Of Possible Policies/Interventions And The Way Forward, Ali Abbasi

Public Administration ETDs

Throughout the last decade or so, Opioid related fatalities are at all-time high in the United States. New Mexico’s problem with Opioids abuse in not a new phenomenon and a large number of New Mexicans are losing their lives almost on a daily basis. The paper highlights the alarming situation of overdose deaths caused specifically by the abuse of Prescription Opioids and Heroin which, in 2016 alone have taken 347 lives in New Mexico. Policy makers along with other stakeholders play a vital part in shaping the politics along with other interventions which can help tackle the epidemic. The paper …

Reflecting On 1 October: Using Research To Inform Public Policy And Heal Our Community, Brookings Mountain West

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

On October 1, 2017, Las Vegas joined a growing list of cities in the United States home to a mass shooting, including Blacksburg, Virginia; Newtown, Connecticut; San Bernardino, California; Orlando, Florida; Columbine, Colorado; Fort Hood, Texas; Parkland and Jacksonville, Florida and other locations. In the weeks following the tragedy, the nation and the Las Vegas community, including UNLV, responded with tributes to the victims, short- and long-term memorials to those killed and wounded, and calls to investigate the circumstances that led to this tragic event and to find ways to prevent future atrocities. Following the one-year anniversary of the 1 …