Download or read book Building Civic Capacity written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors of this volume argue that urban education is in urgent need of reform and that, although there have been plenty of innovative and even promising attempts to improve conditions, most have been doomed. The reason for this, they agree, lies in the failure of our major cities to develop their "civic capacity"--The ability to build and maintain a broad social and political coalition across all sectors of the urban community in pursuit of a common goal.

Download or read book Building Civic Capacity written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors of this volume argue that urban education is in urgent need of reform and that, although there have been plenty of innovative and even promising attempts to improve conditions, most have been doomed. The reason for this, they agree, lies in the failure of our major cities to develop their "civic capacity"--The ability to build and maintain a broad social and political coalition across all sectors of the urban community in pursuit of a common goal.

Download or read book Democracy as Problem Solving written by Xavier De Souza Briggs and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-07-18 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Case studies from around the world and theoretical discussion show how the capacity to act collectively on local problems can be developed, strengthening democracy while changing social and economic outcomes. Complexity, division, mistrust, and “process paralysis” can thwart leaders and others when they tackle local challenges. In Democracy as Problem Solving, Xavier de Souza Briggs shows how civic capacity—the capacity to create and sustain smart collective action—can be developed and used. In an era of sharp debate over the conditions under which democracy can develop while broadening participation and building community, Briggs argues that understanding and building civic capacity is crucial for strengthening governance and changing the state of the world in the process. More than managing a contest among interest groups or spurring deliberation to reframe issues, democracy can be what the public most desires: a recipe for significant progress on important problems. Briggs examines efforts in six cities, in the United States, Brazil, India, and South Africa, that face the millennial challenges of rapid urban growth, economic restructuring, and investing in the next generation. These challenges demand the engagement of government, business, and nongovernmental sectors. And the keys to progress include the ability to combine learning and bargaining continuously, forge multiple forms of accountability, and find ways to leverage the capacity of the grassroots and what Briggs terms the “grasstops,” regardless of who initiates change or who participates over time. Civic capacity, Briggs shows, can—and must—be developed even in places that lack traditions of cooperative civic action.

Download or read book Building Civic Capacity written by Claudia La'vern Edwards and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Citizens Academy Handbook written by Ricardo S. Morse and published by Unc School of Government. This book was released on 2017 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citizens academies have emerged as an innovative way local governments are investing in civic infrastructure through the civic education of their citizens. The Citizens Academy Handbook offers important insights to communities and engagement-minded public officials who are considering starting such a program. It also offers practical guidance for staff who run citizens academies. These pages are filled with nuts-and-bolts advice on all aspects of program planning and delivery, profiles of successful programs, sample materials, and spotlights on innovative practices.

Download or read book Community Collaboratives written by Carla Michelle Roach and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2009 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The process of youth development, or an adolescent's pathway to young adulthood, spans multiple domains -- cognitive, physical, social, and emotional -- and calls for an equally comprehensive approach to framing and addressing youth issues. Community-level stakeholders and systems are ideally positioned to deliver the holistic, coordinated resources that positive youth development requires; it is here, in these local settings, that young people can access the kind of services, supports, and opportunities that promote long-term wellbeing. In the ideal, young people growing up in a community supportive of youth development would benefit from educational opportunities, health and human services, recreational activities, and other resources that were both comprehensive and integrated. However, the core concepts of positive youth development can be difficult to communicate in a clear and succinct manner. Also, the systems that serve young people tend to function independently of each other. And, in the policy arena, young people are disadvantaged by negative stereotypes and the fact that they wield no political power, especially if they are poor. As a result, most communities provide limited or unaligned resources for youth and focus instead on addressing specific youth problems or deficits. In this study, I focused on community collaboratives and their potential to reshape local attitudes and approaches to youth. A structured and intentional process of collaboration can build civic capacity to support a comprehensive array of resources for young people by introducing a shared vision that emphasizes youth development as a critical dimension of community well being, securing political will for communitywide reforms that enhance youth development, and reinforcing collective decision-making to coordinate the delivery of supportive services. I asked: How did aspects of community context facilitate the emergence of community collaboratives? To what extent and under what conditions did community collaboratives generate civic capacity to support youth development? Did community collaboratives mobilize community support in ways that contributed to their own sustainability? Interviews, observations, and record data from California collaboratives in Daly City, Redwood City, and the South Coast region informed my analysis and highlighted three critical inputs for collaborative work: structural support from a local institution, local stakeholders who are willing to lead collaborative work, and pre-existing interagency relationships. I also found that embedding the collaborative structure within public agencies, asking public leaders to own collaborative work, and facilitating multi-sector dialogue helped to build civic capacity for youth development. And I saw that civic capacity contributed to sustainability by establishing a broad leadership base, creating a clear succession plan, facilitating joint budgeting, and providing a way to engage key stakeholders in redefining collaborative priorities. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how collaboratives can change the way that communities frame and address youth issues, opportunities and resources. They also have practical implications for practitioners, policymakers, and funders who wish to support collaborative work. First, new or emerging collaboratives may benefit from organizational capacity-building, leadership development, and efforts to secure organizational-level commitments during the early stages of collaborative work. Also, this study underscores the need to maximize the particular contributions of different stakeholder groups: public stakeholders wield influence and resources while grassroots involvement confers legitimacy. And, the cases suggest that collaborative founders or funders should anticipate sustainability issues from the outset and use civic capacity to their advantage by structuring their work in a way that renews and reinforces the elements of civic capacity over time.

Download or read book Capacity building written by Deborah Eade and published by Oxfam. This book was released on 1997 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers specific and practical ways in which NGO's can contribute to enabling people to build on the capacities they already possess. It reviews the types of social organisation with which NGO's might consider working and the provision of training in a variety of relevant skills and activities.

Download or read book Building Community Capacity written by Robert J. Chaskin and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on a gap in current social work practice theory: community change. Much work in this area of macro practice, particularly around "grassroots" community organizing, has a somewhat dated feel to it, is highly ideological in orientation, or suffers from superficiality, particularly in the area of theory and practical application. Set against the context of an often narrowly constructed "clinical" emphasis on practice education, coupled with social work's own current rendering of "scientific management," community practice often takes second or third billing in many professional curricula despite its deep roots in the overall field of social welfare. Drawing on extensive case study data from three significant community-building initiatives, program data from numerous other community capacity-building efforts, key informant interviews, and an excellent literature review, Chaskin and his colleagues draw implications for crafting community change strategies as well as for creating and sustaining the organizational infrastructure necessary to support them. The authors bring to bear the perspectives of a variety of professional disciplines including sociology, urban planning, psychology, and social work. Building Community Capacity takes a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to a subject of wide and current concern: the role of neighborhood and community structures in the delivery of human services or, as the authors put it, "a place where programs and problems can be fitted together." Social work scholars and students of community practice seeking new conceptual frameworks and insights from research to inform novel community interventions will find much of value in Building Community Capacity.

Download or read book Building Civic Capacity written by Kelly B. Campbell and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Social Innovation and Democratic Leadership written by Marc Parés and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores new forms of democracy in practice following the 2011 global uprisings; democracy that comes from below, by and for the ‘have-nots’. Combining theories of social innovation and collective leadership, it analyses how disadvantaged communities have addressed the effects of economic recession in two global cities: Barcelona and New York.

Download or read book The Color of School Reform written by Jeffrey R. Henig and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-22 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is it so difficult to design and implement fundamental educational reform in large city schools in spite of broad popular support for change? How does the politics of race complicate the challenge of building and sustaining coalitions for improving urban schools? These questions have provoked a great deal of theorizing, but this is the first book to explore the issues on the basis of extensive, solid evidence. Here a group of political scientists examines education reform in Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., where local governmental authority has passed from white to black leaders. The authors show that black administrative control of big-city school systems has not translated into broad improvements in the quality of public education within black-led cities. Race can be crucial, however, in fostering the broad civic involvement perhaps most needed for school reform. In each city examined, reform efforts often arise but collapse, partly because leaders are unable to craft effective political coalitions that would commit community resources to a concrete policy agenda. What undermines the leadership, according to the authors, is the complex role of race in each city. First, public authority does not guarantee access to private resources, usually still controlled by white economic elites. Second, local authorities must interact with external actors, at the state and national levels, who remain predominantly white. Finally, issues of race divide the African American community itself and often place limits on what leaders can and cannot do. Filled with insightful explanations together with recommendations for policy change, this book is an important component of the debate now being waged among researchers, education activists, and the community as a whole.

Download or read book How Organizations Develop Activists written by Hahrie Han and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are some civic associations better than others at getting-and keeping-people involved in activism? Using in-person observations, surveys, and field experiments, this book compares and describes contemporary models for engaging activists to show the effectiveness of one that combine political activism with transformative personal and collective growth.

Download or read book Democracy as Problem Solving written by Xavier De Souza Briggs and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-07-18 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Case studies from around the world and theoretical discussion show how the capacity to act collectively on local problems can be developed, strengthening democracy while changing social and economic outcomes. Complexity, division, mistrust, and “process paralysis” can thwart leaders and others when they tackle local challenges. In Democracy as Problem Solving, Xavier de Souza Briggs shows how civic capacity—the capacity to create and sustain smart collective action—can be developed and used. In an era of sharp debate over the conditions under which democracy can develop while broadening participation and building community, Briggs argues that understanding and building civic capacity is crucial for strengthening governance and changing the state of the world in the process. More than managing a contest among interest groups or spurring deliberation to reframe issues, democracy can be what the public most desires: a recipe for significant progress on important problems. Briggs examines efforts in six cities, in the United States, Brazil, India, and South Africa, that face the millennial challenges of rapid urban growth, economic restructuring, and investing in the next generation. These challenges demand the engagement of government, business, and nongovernmental sectors. And the keys to progress include the ability to combine learning and bargaining continuously, forge multiple forms of accountability, and find ways to leverage the capacity of the grassroots and what Briggs terms the “grasstops,” regardless of who initiates change or who participates over time. Civic capacity, Briggs shows, can—and must—be developed even in places that lack traditions of cooperative civic action.

Download or read book Civic Infrastructure Organizational Civic Capacity and Service Learning written by Margaret Banyan and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Civic Innovation in America written by Carmen Sirianni and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-07 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A new philosophy of organizing is afoot in the land. It works with, as well as opposing, City Hall. It forms ongoing relationships. It takes the long view. It works from the bottom up. It deliberates about ends and means. It crafts voluntary agreements. It fosters common work. After reading this book, you think, 'Maybe we are entering a new era of citizen activism and self-government.' We've learned. I recommend this book to any activist, and to anyone who wants to understand activism in America."—Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University "This book is an extraordinarily useful and comprehensive account of the wave of renewal that is occurring in the United States today. . . . Americans should read this excellent book."—John Gardner, founder of Common Cause and former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare "Civic Innovation in America by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland is a wonderful book, rich in insights and stories of the growth of civic learning, dazzling in its facility with issues of contemporary democratic and social theory. It is also a book of democratic hope. As the authors weave together an account of the steady accumulation of learning that has developed over the last generation, they also help to give this growing movement depth and visibility and self-consciousness. Civic Innovation in America not only chronicles the broad and diverse stirrings of a movement for democratic revitalization, it aids in bringing the movement into being. It could not come at a more crucial time."—Harry Boyte, Co-Director, Center for Democracy and Citizenship, University of Minnesota "This book offers a fresh, innovative approach to social movements, especially with its focus on the emergence of partnership strategies (as distinct from more purely adversarial strategies). The book reminds us of the importance of designing public policies that build civic capacity. There is important and insightful information here for scholars, agency professionals, and community activists alike."—Anne Schneider, Dean of the College of Public Programs at Arizona State University "Civic Innovation in America is a remarkably detailed catalog of major efforts at civic renewal in health, the environment, journalism, and community organizing—taking place in scores of cities and towns around the country in the past 20 years. Yes—vital, innovative, in-the-trenches civic work in the midst of the Reagan-Bush-New-Democrat era. To document these efforts and to persuasively show in them common origins, common patterns, and common problems is a civic achievement in itself. Sirianni and Friedland not only describe important social change but contribute to it."—Michael Schudson, Professor of Communication, University of California, San Diego

Download or read book Building State Capability written by Matt Andrews and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments play a major role in the development process, and constantly introduce reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but children don't learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are written but not implemented. These achievement deficiencies reveal gaps in capabilities, and weaknesses in the process of building state capability. This book addresses these weaknesses and gaps. It starts by providing evidence of the capability shortfalls that currently exist in many countries, showing that many governments lack basic capacities even after decades of reforms and capacity building efforts. The book then analyses this evidence, identifying capability traps that hold many governments back - particularly related to isomorphic mimicry (where governments copy best practice solutions from other countries that make them look more capable even if they are not more capable) and premature load bearing (where governments adopt new mechanisms that they cannot actually make work, given weak extant capacities). The book then describes a process that governments can use to escape these capability traps. Called PDIA (problem driven iterative adaptation), this process empowers people working in governments to find and fit solutions to the problems they face. The discussion about this process is structured in a practical manner so that readers can actually apply tools and ideas to the capability challenges they face in their own contexts. These applications will help readers devise policies and reforms that have more impact than those of the past.

Download or read book Civic Engagement Across the Curriculum written by Richard M. Battistoni and published by Campus Compact. This book was released on 2017-01-27 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civic Education Across the Curriculum offers faculty in all disciplines rationales and resources for connecting their service-learning efforts to the broader goals of civic engagement. Campuses promoting engagement are beginning to tie service-learning practices to their civic mission of preparing students for participation in a diverse, democratic society. There are, however, few resources for faculty—especially those in fields not traditionally linked with civic education—to think about how civic engagement might be incorporated into their own disciplinary perspectives and course goals. This volume distills a wide range of disciplinary perspectives on citizenship into usable conceptual frameworks. It provides concrete examples of course materials, exercises, and assignments that can be used in service-learning courses to develop students’ civic capacities, regardless of disciplinary area. This volume will assist faculty in their own curricular work as well as enable them to combine their individual initiatives with others across their campus.