Civic and Community Engagement Commons^™

Developing Capacity And A Culturally Appropriate Mindfulness Intervention For Inner City Survivors Of Violence, Stephanie Hartwell, Anna Andrews

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

This project examines the acceptability and cultural relevance of Mindfulness for low-income communities of color most affected by urban/gun violence. The burden of violence extends to classmates, friends, family members, and communities through adverse effects on parenting, quality of life, economic productivity, and social cohesion.

Mapping Boston's Assets To Improve Livability For Older Adults: Boston's Age Friendly Community Initiative; And Building Bonds To Last A Lifetime: Creating Community Among Beverly’S Aging Population, Bernard A. Steinman, Abigail Butt, Ceara Somerville, Hayley Gleason

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

The Boston Age Friendly Community Initiative is working with the City of Boston to document a comprehensive and inclusive baseline assessment of needs within domains that influence health and quality of life of older adults. In a separate project, UMass Boston worked with the City of Beverly Council on Aging and Senior Center to develop a database that would allow the Senior Center to locate and contact both new and long-time resident seniors in the hopes of building a better relationship with them.

Success Boston: College Completion Initiative, Liliana Mickle

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

Success Boston provides intensive coaching support and wraparound services to Boston Public Schools students and graduates to ensure they are Getting Ready, Getting In, and Getting Through college so they are equipped to lead productive lives after graduation.

Challenges In Community Radio Development In India: Conflicting Institutional Logics, Paradoxes And Status Quo, Anusha Chaitanya Satturu, Suhaib Riaz

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

This research specifically addressed community radio in India led by development NGOs. This is comprised of a subset of organizations in the third sector that have distinctive, shared concerns with development and poverty reduction.

We Want To Create Our Own History: Youth Power And Leadership In The Boston Youth Justice Movement 2005-2008, Mark Warren, Perri Leviss, Sandeep Jani

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

This collaborative research project aims to co-create new knowledge on the youth justice movement in Boston that will be useful to partner organizations in advancing their goal of building a stronger movement as well as to contribute to academic and broader public understanding of youth justice.

Pre-Collegiate And Educational Support Programs: Celebrating 50 Years Of Educational Access, Opportunity, And Success, Terri Slater Morgan, Andrea Dawes, David Lemmel, Edgar Deleon

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

The Department of Pre-collegiate and Educational Support Programs provides low-income and first-generation students, students at high risk for academic failure, and students with disabilities with the skills, knowledge, and motivation to successfully enroll in and complete programs of post-secondary education. This mission is achieved through seven programs that address a range of learning needs and serve pre-collegiate students (middle and high school, veterans) and UMass Boston undergraduates.

The Anala Collaborative: Umass Boston’S Asian American, Native American, Latin@ And African Diaspora Institutes, Barbara Lewis, Carolyn Wong, Cedric Woods, Elena Stone

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

The ANALA Collaborative is the newly-formed umbrella for the four UMass Boston racial and ethnic institutes. This year, with help from a team from the College of Management’s Emerging Leaders Program, we have come together to form ANALA in recognition of the area’s increasing racial and ethnic diversity and the need for majority-minority communities to work together toward common goals. While each of the four institutes will retain its separate identity and programs, we will also place greater emphasis on collaborative efforts in the service of our common mission and vision.

Center For Social Policy: Systems Change Through Place-Based And Collective Impact Initiatives, Arthur Macewan, Brandynn Holgate, Donna Haig Friedman, Marija Bingulac

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

At the Center for Social Policy, the voices of those living in economic hardship and social exclusion not only inform our research and evaluation projects to help reshape poverty policy, they also inform us about the power of inclusive practices.

Pension Action Center: Protecting Your Retirement, Louise Cataldo, Michele Tolson

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

The Pension Action Center (PAC) is a one-of-a-kind organization serving New England and Illinois that touches the lives of thousands of low- moderate income people, who often have nowhere else to turn when they need help understanding and obtaining their retirement benefits.

Water Poverty In Disadvantaged Communities In California, Alyssa J. Galik

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

California, the eighth largest economy in the world, has nearly one million residents that lack daily access to clean drinking water, yet it recently became the first state in the US to declare water a human right through the passage of 2013 Assembly Bill 685. The majority of water quality violations take place in the rural San Joaquin Valley in unincorporated, low-income communities, which have difficulties accessing clean, drinking water due to issues including quality, affordability, and physical availability. The role of community participation in improving water poverty has been studied extensively in developing countries but its impact is infrequently …

We Get To Carry Each Other: Using The Musical Activism Of U2 As Framework For An Engaged Spirituality And Community Engagement Course, Marshall Welch

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

This article describes a January term community engagement service-learning course that used the musical and spiritually-based activism of the rock group U2 as an example of engaged spirituality using activism and advocacy. In addition to learning about the history, music, and activism of the band, students were taught a specific set of skills for activism, advocacy, and community organizing that included creating goal statements, developing and implementing action plans, and coordinating logistics for advocacy-based events on campus. Students were assigned to apply these skills as the service-learning component of the course. These activities were conceptualized as indirect service that reflected …

Interfacing Catholic Social Meanings, Sociology, Self, And Pedagogical Practices, Daniel J. Myers, Andrew J. Weigert

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

What connects Catholic Social Tradition with Sociology? How do each inform the other and how do they, together, flow through and animate the sociologist? Within a student-driven learning community pedagogy, this course builds on the humanistic aspects of Sociology as a scientific perspective a la Peter Berger’s Invitation to Sociology. This foundation is then filtered through a social psychological understanding of self with a sense of vocation through which persons’ deepest passions meets humans’ greatest needs. Biographical vignettes of sociologists’ careers of study that address issues of racial and gender inequalities and psycho-social shifts in values over the life course …

Journey Into Shame: Implications For Justice Pedagogies, Roger C. Bergman

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

Being formed for justice can be a painful experience. Sometimes that pain takes the form of shame and contributes to the formation and exercise of conscience. But shame in other forms can be opposed to human flourishing and social justice. Psychologist James Fowler provides a spectrum of two forms of healthy shame and four forms of unhealthy shame, to which the author adds four other varieties, strategic shame and spiritual shame, at one end of the spectrum, and murderous shame and genocidal shame, at the other. Various experiences of shame are dramatically illustrated in Black Like Me, John Howard …

Prophetic Imagination: Confronting The New Jim Crow & Income Inequality In America, Cornel West

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

On October 11, 2014, Cornel West delivered the keynote address to nearly 600 students at the regional Leadership & Social Justice Conference, hosted at Saint Mary’s College of California. The conference occurred two days before West was arrested in Ferguson, Missouri, during a demonstration to protest the killing of young Black men by White police officers, as in the case of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson. Speaking of the students, West said, "I would like to see these precious young people commit themselves to lives of integrity, honesty and decency, where they are vigilant against all forms of evil—White supremacists, …

A Question Of Perspective? Measuring Views On Equal Rights And Opportunities Among Minority Groups In European Large-Scale Surveys, Wolfram Schulz

Civics and Citizenship Assessment

Attitudes toward diversity and acceptance of minorities have increasingly become a focus of public attention due to the transition of the European region toward a more diverse society. In recent years, many studies have gathered and presented data on perceptions of tolerance or attitudes toward equal rights for social groups across European countries. Whenever respondents are asked about their views on diversity, tolerance and acceptance with regard to specific social group, it is always important to take into account whether they belong to this particular group or not. However, when studying attitudes towards smaller minority groups, comparing attitudes between majority …

Bringing Flowers Back To The Cité Des Fleurs: A Geographical Study Of The Sôma Beach Development Project In Mahajanga, Elizabeth Isaac-Herzog

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Mahajanga, Madagascar is currently watching one of its biggest development efforts unfold. The Sôma Beach project will transform the previously-bustling Village Touristique, degraded over the past decades by the ocean’s waves, into an accessible hotspot for national and international tourists. This study aimed to answer the overarching questions, “How is the Sôma Beach project being carried out?” and “How is it affecting the local population and spatial organization?” Interviews, spatial observation and analysis, and review of relevant documents were used during a month-long period in order to gather information on this topic. The study concluded that space was an influential …

Strengthening Democracy By Increasing Youth Political Knowledge And Engagement, Laura Langer

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Even though the United States had historically high voter turnout in 2008 and 2012, there remains troubling patterns pertaining to political engagement and knowledge among its least educated youth. The literature and theory suggests that if the United States educational systems increase the amount of civic education courses, extracurricular activity, and youth volunteering opportunities in high schools, especially among the most disadvantaged youth, it will lead to an increase in political knowledge and engagement. I test this idea with data from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) post-2012 election youth survey. The CIRCLE data …

Kenya’S Konza Techno City: Utopian Vision Meets Social Reality, Amina Johari

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper explores Kenya’s ambitious Konza Technology City. In 2008 the Kenyan government unveiled its plan to construct a city from scratch 60 kilometers outside of the nation’s capital, Nairobi. Konza Technology City is a flagship project for Kenya Vision 2030, the country’s development program covering the period 2008 to 2030. The new city is expected to relieve Nairobi of some of its traffic and overcrowding issues, and also support the country’s growing technology sector. Konza City is just one of many proposed city plans all over sub-Saharan Africa reflecting a growing phenomenon. Due to the challenges many African cities …

Waste Management And Environmental Initiatives In Accra, Ghana, Aoife Genevieve Duna

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Title: Waste Management and Environmental Initiatives in Accra, Ghana

Author: Aoife Genevieve Duna ([email protected]; Middlebury College, Anthropology and Dance major)

Objective: The objective of this project was fourfold: • To study the current waste management practices by government and private waste companies • To observe the perspectives of residents on waste disposal • To explore environmental initiatives by citizens, NGOs, and student groups • To investigate the potential projects that could reduce waste

Methodology: For my project, I conducted interviews, made observations, participated in daily personal waste management, visited a landfill, and visited a composting project.

Findings: Waste collection is …

“I’Ve Taken My Own Power”: Insights Into Women’S Empowerment And Its Effectiveness In Different Ngos In Cape Town, Molly Willeford

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The research outlined in this study examines different views on women’s empowerment in Cape Town, South Africa. Although a new Constitution and a new democracy promises equal opportunities for men and women, vast inequalities can still be seen throughout most of the country, with the city of Cape Town being no exception. There are numerous non-government organizations in Cape Town, most working towards what they call “the empowerment of South African women.” But what does empowerment mean for the workers and volunteers within these NGOs? The three participants in this study all belong to different organizations in the Cape Town …