Leaving the Street: Young Fathers Move from Hustling to Legitimate Work

This report explores employment and hustling among men in Fathers at Work, a three-year national demonstration designed to help low-income, noncustodial fathers secure living-wage jobs, increase their involvement with their children and manage their child support obligations. As part of P/PVs evaluation of the initiative, researchers undertook an in-depth interview study. When they learned that more than three quarters of all Fathers at Work participants had been convicted of a crime, they focused the interview study on 27 men who had relied on hustlingprimarily selling drugs, but also other illegal activitiesas a source of income. The report describes how the men became involved in hustling and what led them to seek alternatives. Participants hustling and work experiences are detailed, with four distinct patterns emergingresearchers found that these patterns appeared to influence early employment outcomes. The report closes with a look at the ongoing challenges faced by the men, and recommendations for programs working with similar populations

Growing Bigger Better: Lessons from Experience Corps Expansion in Five Cities Executive Summary

This summary presents key findings from the full report, Growing Bigger Better, which examines the Experience Corps programs four-year expansion initiative. The summary briefly considers whether and how the local sites, and the program as a whole, benefited from the expansion effort and presents lessons that are relevant to other programs considering expansion

Building Stronger Nonprofits Through Better Financial Management, Executive Summary

This executive summary presents a summary of early lessons from The Wallace Foundation's four-year Strengthening Financial Management in Out-of-School Time initiative (SFM). SFM was designed to improve the financial management systems of 26 well-respected Chicago nonprofits that provide out-of-school-time services

Growing Bigger Better: Lessons from Experience Corps' Expansion in Five Cities

Going to scale often entails replicating a program in new locations, but it can also involve efforts to expand a programs reach in existing locations, enabling it to have a greater effect on communities already being served. This was the case with Experience Corps, a Civic Ventures program that enlists older adults as volunteers to help strengthen literacy and other skills of elementary school students in low-income neighborhoods. Beginning in 2001, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Atlantic Philanthropies, Experience Corps embarked on a four-year initiative to expand in five cities. P/PV examined the five sites efforts to increase the size of their volunteer pool and expand to additional schools, manage their larger and more complex programs, and raise sufficient funds to meet annual goals and sustain growth.Growing Bigger Better considers how the sites initial readiness to expand, the organizational resources they possessed, and the receptivity of the external environment (i.e., the local school districts) shaped the sites progress. The report reflects on whether and how the local sites, and the program as a whole, benefited from the expansion effort, drawing out lessons that are relevant to other programs considering expansion. It concludes that while program expansion is a major undertaking, the Experience Corps expansion initiative clearly demonstrates how programs can become stronger, more energized and even more innovative through carefully planned and managed growth, and thus extend the benefits of their services to larger numbers of individuals and communities

Building Stronger Nonprofits Through Better Financial Management

The Wallace Foundation's four-year Strengthening Financial Management in Out-of-School Time initiative(SFM) was designed to improve the financial management systems of 26 well-respected Chicago nonprofits that provide out-of-school-time (OST) services. SFM grew out of the Foundation's longstanding commitment to improving the quality of services for youth during nonschool hours and the realization that even successful nonprofits face financial management challenges that have an impact on their ability to achieve their missions. To address these challenges, the initiative is working to reform public and private funding practices that strain OST organizations' financial management capacity and providing participating organizations with financial management training and peer networking opportunities (using one of two models that vary in intensity and in the balance of individual vs. group-based training and support)

AfterZones: Creating a Citywide System to Support and Sustain High-Quality After-School Programs Executive Summary

This executive summary draws from P/PV's analysis of the implementation of the AfterZone initiative -- a citywide system-building effort in Providence, RI, that aims to provide high-quality, accessible out-of-school-time services to middle school youth. The executive summary defines AfterZone's unique multisite service delivery model, provides an overview of study's qualitative and quantitative research design, summarizes the key findings relating to student recruitment, and reflects on lessons for other cities seeking to build systems to expand and support their after-school offerings

AfterZones: Creating a Citywide System to Support and Sustain High-Quality After-School Programs

This report presents P/PV's analysis of the implementation of the AfterZone initiative -- a citywide system-building effort in Providence, RI, that aims to provide high-quality, accessible out-of-school-time services to middle school youth. The AfterZone model is unique in that it is built on a network of "neighborhood campuses" (each campus includes multiple sites in a geographically clustered area), providing participants with the opportunity to travel to programs located outside of the main program facility, the middle school. Incorporating both qualitative and quantitative research findings, the report examines the implementation of the initiative's unique features and documents its operations. It also explores the challenges and successes of Providence's system-building efforts as well as the strategies used to sustain them. A final publication, which will focus on how youth participated in AfterZone programs and the relationship of various patterns of participation to youth outcomes, will be released in 2011

Differences in hearing acuity among “normal-hearing” young adults modulate the neural basis for speech comprehension

AbstractIn this paper, we investigate how subtle differences in hearing acuity affect the neural systems supporting speech processing in young adults. Auditory sentence comprehension requires perceiving a complex acoustic signal and performing linguistic operations to extract the correct meaning. We used functional MRI to monitor human brain activity while adults aged 18–41 years listened to spoken sentences. The sentences varied in their level of syntactic processing demands, containing either a subject-relative or object-relative center-embedded clause. All participants self-reported normal hearing, confirmed by audiometric testing, with some variation within a clinically normal range. We found that participants showed activity related to sentence processing in a left-lateralized frontotemporal network. Although accuracy was generally high, participants still made some errors, which were associated with increased activity in bilateral cingulo-opercular and frontoparietal attention networks. A whole-brain regression analysis revealed that activity in a right anterior middle frontal gyrus (aMFG) component of the frontoparietal attention network was related to individual differences in hearing acuity, such that listeners with poorer hearing showed greater recruitment of this region when successfully understanding a sentence. The activity in right aMFGs for listeners with poor hearing did not differ as a function of sentence type, suggesting a general mechanism that is independent of linguistic processing demands. Our results suggest that even modest variations in hearing ability impact the systems supporting auditory speech comprehension, and that auditory sentence comprehension entails the coordination of a left perisylvian network that is sensitive to linguistic variation with an executive attention network that responds to acoustic challenge.</jats:p

Plain Talk: Addressing Adolescent Sexuality Through A Community Initiative: A Final Evaluation Report Prepared for The Annie E. Casey Foundation

Plain Talk is a community change initiative that attempts to help sexually active youth protect themselves from pregnancy and disease. Plain Talk neighborhoods mobilize their residents and enlist agencies that would increase access to and support the effective use of contraception. The report discusses how residents were involved in developing and implementing community outreach efforts to change sexual attitudes and practices of adults, teenagers and service providers; the political and moral issues that arose in crafting the Plain Talk message; and the sites' efforts to improve reproductive health care services for adolescents