Download or read book Social Capital and Poor Communities written by Susan Saegert and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2002-01-10 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neighborhood support groups have always played a key role in helping the poor survive, but combating poverty requires more than simply meeting the needs of day-to-day subsistence. Social Capital and Poor Communities shows the significant achievements that can be made through collective strategies, which empower the poor to become active partners in revitalizing their neighborhoods. Trust and cooperation among residents and local organizations such as churches, small businesses, and unions form the basis of social capital, which provides access to resources that would otherwise be out of reach to poor families. Social Capital and Poor Communities examines civic initiatives that have built affordable housing, fostered small businesses, promoted neighborhood safety, and increased political participation. At the core of each initiative lie local institutions—church congregations, parent-teacher groups, tenant associations, and community improvement alliances. The contributors explore how such groups build networks of leaders and followers and how the social power they cultivate can be successfully transferred from smaller goals to broader political advocacy. For example, community-based groups often become platforms for leaders hoping to run for local office. Church-based groups and interfaith organizations can lobby for affordable housing, job training programs, and school improvement. Social Capital and Poor Communities convincingly demonstrates why building social capital is so important in enabling the poor to seek greater access to financial resources and public services. As the contributors make clear, this task is neither automatic nor easy. The book's frank discussions of both successes and failures illustrate the pitfalls—conflicts of interest, resistance from power elites, and racial exclusion—that can threaten even the most promising initiatives. The impressive evidence in this volume offers valuable insights into how goal formation, leadership, and cooperation can be effectively cultivated, resulting in a remarkable force for change and a rich public life even for those communities mired in seemingly hopeless poverty. A Volume in the Ford Foundation Series on Asset Building

Download or read book Social Capital at the Community Level written by John M. Halstead and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Social Capital at the Community Level, John Halstead and Steven Deller examine social capital formation beyond the individual level through a variety of disciplines: planning, economics, regional development, sociology, as well as non-traditional approaches like engineering and built environmental features. The notion of social capital in community and economic development has become a focus of intense interest for policy makers, practitioners, and academics. The notion is that communities with higher levels of social capital (networks, trust, and norms) will prosper both economically and socially. In a practical sense, how do communities use the notion of social capital to build policies and strategies to move their community forward? Are all forms of social capital the same and do all have a positive influence on the community? To help gain insights into these fundamental questions Social Capital at the Community Level takes a holistic, interdisciplinary or systems approach to thinking about the community. While those who study social capital will acknowledge the need for an interdisciplinary approach, most stay within their disciplinary silos. One could say there is strong bonding social capital within disciplines but little bridging social capital across disciplines. The contributors to Social Capital at the Community Level have made an attempt to build that bridging social capital. While disciplinary biases and research approaches are evident there is significant overlap about how people with different disciplinary perspectives think about social capital and how it can be applied at the community level. This can be from neighborhoods addressing a localized issue to a global response to a natural disaster. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars, researchers and policy makers of community and economic development, as well as rural sociologists and planners looking to understand the opaque process of social capital formation in communities.

Download or read book Professional Capital written by Andy Hargreaves and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The future of learning depends absolutely on the future of teaching. In this latest and most important collaboration, Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan show how the quality of teaching is captured in a compelling new idea: the professional capital of every teacher working together in every school. Speaking out against policies that result in a teaching force that is inexperienced, inexpensive, and exhausted in short order, these two world authorities--who know teaching and leadership inside out--set out a groundbreaking new agenda to transform the future of teaching and public education. Ideas-driven, evidence-based, and strategically powerful, Professional Capital combats the tired arguments and stereotypes of teachers and teaching and shows us how to change them by demanding more of the teaching profession and more from the systems that support it. This is a book that no one connected with schools can afford to ignore. This book features: (1) a powerful and practical solution to what ails American schools; (2) Action guidelines for all groups--individual teachers, administrators, schools and districts, state and federal leaders; (3) a next-generation update of core themes from the authors' bestselling book, "What's Worth Fighting for in Your School?" [This book was co-published with the Ontario Principals' Council.].

Download or read book Psychological Sense of Community written by Adrian T. Fisher and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the authors have explored a series of different types of communities - moving from the basic idea of those based at a specific location all the way to virtual communities of the internet. A key feature of this book is the research focus that emphasizes the theory-driven analyses and the diversity of contexts in which sense of community is applied. The book will be of great interest to those concerned with understanding various forms of community and how communities can be mobilized to achieve wellbeing.

Download or read book Intellectual Capital for Communities written by Ahmed Bounfour and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-06-25 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the knowledge economy, the value of corporations is directly related to their knowledge and intellectual capital. But broaden the perspective a little wider and you begin to see the possibilities: Think of cities, regions, even entire nations, in addition to the public sector. If intangibles and intellectual capital are important to the private sector, they are also important to the productivity and competitiveness of the public sector, and so to communities and nations as a whole. In this book, Editors Ahmed Bounfour and Leif Edivinsson have brought together the best minds in intellectual capital throughout the world to focus on a new and fertile area of research: measuring and managing the intellectual capital of communities. This is a creative and cutting-edge area of research that has the potential to change how public sector planning and development is done. Once there is a clear way to identify where wealth is created in a given region/nation, this process has the potential to reveal a huge knowledge repository in the public sector with a significant—but idle—potential for collective wealth creation—the wealth of nations in waiting.

Download or read book Community Organizing written by Ross J. Gittell and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1998-06-10 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing new insight into an important community development challenge, this text looks at how to stimulate the formation of community-based organizations and effective citizen action in neighbourhoods.

Download or read book Asset Building Community Development written by Gary Paul Green and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive approach focused on sustainable change Asset Building and Community Development, Fourth Edition examines the promise and limits of community development by showing students and practitioners how asset-based developments can improve the sustainability and quality of life. Authors Gary Paul Green and Anna Haines provide an engaging, thought-provoking, and comprehensive approach to asset building by focusing on the role of different forms of community capital in the development process. Updated throughout, this edition explores how communities are building on their key assets—physical, human, social, financial, environmental, political, and cultural capital— to generate positive change. With a focus on community outcomes, the authors illustrate how development controlled by community-based organizations provides a better match between assets and the needs of the community.

Download or read book Capital and Community written by Jacques Camatte and published by Pattern Books. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capital and Community: the results of the immediate process of production and the economic work of Marx is a 1976 book which has been in and out of print for decades. The book sets out to trace the four fronts on which Marx critiques political economy: wage labor as the basis of capitalist society, the commodity as vehicle for introducing the problem of value and its forms, the birth of value, and forms which precede capitalist production for alienation and commodification of man. Upon this foundation, Camatte seeks to add onto the two questions which arrive from Marx's project: "1. the origin of value, its characteristics and forms; 2. the origin of the free worker, the wage-labourer." These questions are a vehicle for analyzing and contributing further to Marx's project of critiquing capital as totality and the surrounding view of the production process and the reality of it. This Radical Reprint by Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to manufacturing cost as possible.

Download or read book Social Epidemiology written by Lisa F. Berkman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-09 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows the important links between social conditions and health and begins to describe the processes through which these health inequalities may be generated. It reviews a range of methodologies that could be used by health researchers in this field and proposes innovative future research directions.

Download or read book Rural Communities written by Cornelia Butler Flora and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-05 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communities in rural America are a complex mixture of peoples and cultures, ranging from miners who have been laid off in West Virginia, to Laotian immigrants relocating in Kansas to work at a beef processing plant, to entrepreneurs drawing up plans for a world-class ski resort in California's Sierra Nevada. Rural Communities: Legacy and Change uses its unique Community Capitals framework to examine how America's diverse rural communities use their various capitals (natural, cultural, human, social, political, financial, and built) to address the modern challenges that face them. Each chapter opens with a case study of a community facing a particular challenge, and is followed by a comprehensive discussion of sociological concepts to be applied to understanding the case. This narrative, topical approach makes the book accessible and engaging for undergraduate students, while its integrative approach provides them with a framework for understanding rural society based on the concepts and explanations of social science. This fifth edition is updated throughout with 2013 census data and features new and expanded coverage of health and health care, food systems and alternatives, the effects of neoliberalism and globalization on rural communities, as well as an expanded resource and activity section at the end of each chapter.

Download or read book Planning Twentieth Century Capital Cities written by David Gordon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 695 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of capital cities worldwide – in 1900 there were only about forty, but by 2000 there were more than two hundred. And this, surely, is reason enough for a book devoted to the planning and development of capital cities in the twentieth century. However, the focus here is not only on recently created capitals. Indeed, the case studies which make up the core of the book show that, while very different, the development of London or Rome presents as great a challenge to planners and politicians as the design and building of Brasília or Chandigarh. Put simply, this book sets out to explore what makes capital cities different from other cities, why their planning is unique, and why there is such variety from one city to another. Sir Peter Hall’s ‘Seven Types of Capital City’ and Lawrence Vale’s ‘The Urban Design of Twentieth Century Capital Cities’ provide the setting for the fifteen case studies which follow – Paris, Moscow and St Petersburg, Helsinki, London, Tokyo, Washington, Canberra, Ottawa-Hull, Brasília, New Delhi, Berlin, Rome, Chandigarh, Brussels, New York. To bring the book to a close Peter Hall looks to the future of capital cities in the twenty-first century. For anyone with an interest in urban planning and design, architectural, planning and urban history, urban geography, or simply capital cities and why they are what they are, Planning Twentieth Century Capital Cities will be the key source book for a long time to come.

Download or read book Social Capital and Health written by Ichiro Kawachi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As interest in social capital has grown over the past decade—particularly in public health —so has the lack of consensus on exactly what it is and what makes it worth studying. Ichiro Kawachi, a widely respected leader in the field, and 21 contributors (including physicians, economists, and public health experts) discuss the theoretical origins of social capital, the strengths and limitations of current methodologies of measuring it, and salient examples of social capital concepts informing public health practice. Among the highlights: Measurement methods: survey, sociometric, ethnographic, experimental The relationship between social capital and physical health and health behaviors: smoking, substance abuse, physical activity, sexual activity Social capital and mental health: early findings Social capital and the aging community Social capital and disaster preparedness Social Capital and Health is certain to inspire a new generation of research on this topic, and will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in public health, health behavior, and social epidemiology.

Download or read book The Startup Community Way written by Brad Feld and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-08-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Way Forward for Entrepreneurship Around the World We are in the midst of a startup revolution. The growth and proliferation of innovation-driven startup activity is profound, unprecedented, and global in scope. Today, it is understood that communities of support and knowledge-sharing go along with other resources. The importance of collaboration and a long-term commitment has gained wider acceptance. These principles are adopted in many startup communities throughout the world. And yet, much more work is needed. Startup activity is highly concentrated in large cities. Governments and other actors such as large corporations and universities are not collaborating with each other nor with entrepreneurs as well as they could. Too often, these actors try to control activity or impose their view from the top-down, rather than supporting an environment that is led from the bottom-up. We continue to see a disconnect between an entrepreneurial mindset and that of many actors who wish to engage with and support entrepreneurship. There are structural reasons for this, but we can overcome many of these obstacles with appropriate focus and sustained practice. No one tells this story better than Brad Feld and Ian Hathaway. The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem explores what makes startup communities thrive and how to improve collaboration in these rapidly evolving, complex environments. The Startup Community Way is an explanatory guide for startup communities. Rooted in the theory of complex systems, this book establishes the systemic properties of entrepreneurial ecosystems and explains why their complex nature leads people to make predictable mistakes. As complex systems, value creation occurs in startup communities primarily through the interaction of the "parts" - the people, organizations, resources, and conditions involved - not the parts themselves. This continual process of bottom-up interactions unfolds naturally, producing value in novel and unexpected ways. Through these complex, emergent processes, the whole becomes greater and substantially different than what the parts alone could produce. Because of this, participants must take a fundamentally different approach than is common in much of our civic and professional lives. Participants must take a whole-system view, rather than simply trying to optimize their individual part. They must prioritize experimentation and learning over planning and execution. Complex systems are uncertain and unpredictable. They cannot be controlled, only guided and influenced. Each startup community is unique. Replication is enticing but impossible. The race to become "The Next Silicon Valley" is futile - even Silicon Valley couldn't recreate itself. This book: Offers practical advice for entrepreneurs, community builders, government officials, and other stakeholders who want to harness the power of entrepreneurship in their city Describes the core components of startup communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems, as well as an explanation of the differences between these two related, but distinct concepts Advances a new framework for effective startup community building based on the theory of complex systems and insights from systems thinking Includes contributions from leading entrepreneurial voices Is a must-have resource for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, executives, business and community leaders, economic development authorities, policymakers, university officials, and anyone wishing to understand how startup communities work anywhere in the world

Download or read book The Structure of Community Power written by Michael T. Aiken and published by New York : Random House. This book was released on 1970 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Capital City written by Samuel Stein and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This superbly succinct and incisive book” on urban planning and real estate argues gentrification isn’t driven by latte-sipping hipsters—but is engineered by the capitalist state (Michael Sorkin, author of All Over the Map) Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the former president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer. Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-driven process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents. Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.

Download or read book NGOs Social Capital and Community Empowerment in Bangladesh written by M.Rezaul Islam and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pivot examines non-governmental organization (NGO) interventions in two community development initiatives, namely social capital and community empowerment, and their role in funding and formulating development frameworks in developing countries like Bangladesh. It considers the key development discourse issues of collective action, social trust and access to knowledge, to political processes and to financial, social and natural resources. Given the large proportion of foreign funding, NGOs and donors also increasingly face the twin challenges of demonstrating both efficient and effective delivery of services and accountability in their relationships with various stakeholders. Reflecting on the relevance of NGOs for community development, and the merits, challenges and limitations of NGO activities, this book provides a comprehensive study of NGO participation in community development in Bangladesh and Third World countries more widely to highlight a global concern with international implications.

Download or read book Bowling Alone Revised and Updated written by Robert D. Putnam and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated to include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the Internet—the 20th anniversary edition of Bowling Alone remains a seminal work of social analysis, and its examination of what happened to our sense of community remains more relevant than ever in today’s fractured America. Twenty years, ago, Robert D. Putnam made a seemingly simple observation: once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolized a significant social change that became the basis of the acclaimed bestseller, Bowling Alone, which The Washington Post called “a very important book” and Putnam, “the de Tocqueville of our generation.” Bowling Alone surveyed in detail Americans’ changing behavior over the decades, showing how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether it’s with the PTA, church, clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. In the revised edition of his classic work, Putnam shows how our shrinking access to the “social capital” that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing still poses a serious threat to our civic and personal health, and how these consequences have a new resonance for our divided country today. He includes critical new material on the pervasive influence of social media and the internet, which has introduced previously unthinkable opportunities for social connection—as well as unprecedented levels of alienation and isolation. At the time of its publication, Putnam’s then-groundbreaking work showed how social bonds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction, and how the loss of social capital is felt in critical ways, acting as a strong predictor of crime rates and other measures of neighborhood quality of life, and affecting our health in other ways. While the ways in which we connect, or become disconnected, have changed over the decades, his central argument remains as powerful and urgent as ever: mending our frayed social capital is key to preserving the very fabric of our society.