Creating Change through Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development: A Policy and Practice Primer

Across the nation, artistic and cultural practices are helping to define the sustainability of urban, rural, and suburban neighborhoods. In the design of parks and open spaces; the building of public transit, housing, and supermarkets; in plans for addressing needs for community health and healing trauma; communities are embracing arts and culture strategies to help create equitable communities of opportunity where everyone can participate, prosper, and achieve their full potential. And artists are seeing themselves -- and being seen by others -- as integral community members whose talents, crafts, and insights pave the way to support community engagement and cohesion."Creating Change through Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development: A Policy and Practice Primer" highlights both promising and proven practices that demonstrate equity-focused arts and culture policies, strategies, and tools. The report describes the role of arts and culture across the nine sectors below. Within each policy chart there are goals, policies, and implementation strategies that can help achieve communities of opportunity. These policies have yielded such outcomes as: support for Native artists in reservation-based cultural economies, the creation of a citywide cultural plan, engaging low-income youth of color in using digital media, and efforts to address redevelopment, employment, food access, and environmental justice

Toward a collective intelligence recommender system for education

The development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), have revolutionized the world and have moved us into the information age, however the access and handling of this large amount of information is causing valuable time losses. Teachers in Higher Education especially use the Internet as a tool to consult materials and content for the development of the subjects. The internet has very broad services, and sometimes it is difficult for users to find the contents in an easy and fast way. This problem is increasing at the time, causing that students spend a lot of time in search information rather than in synthesis, analysis and construction of new knowledge. In this context, several questions have emerged: Is it possible to design learning activities that allow us to value the information search and to encourage collective participation?. What are the conditions that an ICT tool that supports a process of information search has to have to optimize the student's time and learning? This article presents the use and application of a Recommender System (RS) designed on paradigms of Collective Intelligence (CI). The RS designed encourages the collective learning and the authentic participation of the students. The research combines the literature study with the analysis of the ICT tools that have emerged in the field of the CI and RS. Also, Design-Based Research (DBR) was used to compile and summarize collective intelligence approaches and filtering techniques reported in the literature in Higher Education as well as to incrementally improving the tool. Several are the benefits that have been evidenced as a result of the exploratory study carried out. Among them the following stand out: • It improves student motivation, as it helps you discover new content of interest in an easy way. • It saves time in the search and classification of teaching material of interest. • It fosters specialized reading, inspires competence as a means of learning. • It gives the teacher the ability to generate reports of trends and behaviors of their students, real-time assessment of the quality of learning material. The authors consider that the use of ICT tools that combine the paradigms of the CI and RS presented in this work, are a tool that improves the construction of student knowledge and motivates their collective development in cyberspace, in addition, the model of Filltering Contents used supports the design of models and strategies of collective intelligence in Higher Education.Postprint (author's final draft

Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes

As interest in measuring and understanding the impact of arts investments in community development continues to grow, this new study, Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes, commissioned by the Levitt Foundation and led by Slover Linett Audience Research, examines how "creative placemaking" interventions build social capital in communities, using permanent outdoor Levitt music venues as case studies. This research offers insights into arts-based strategies to promote social connectivity, a central goal of many creative placemaking efforts, and is a working illustration of what can and can't be learned from different impact measurement approaches

Kresge Foundation 2010-2011 Annual Report

Contains an introduction to Kresge's strategy; board chair's letter; president's letter; foundation timeline; program information; grant summary, including geographic distribution; grants lists; financial summary; and lists of board members and staff

Foroba Yelen: Portable Solar Lighting and Sustainable Strategies for Remote Malian Villages

‘Foroba Yelen’ is a conference paper recording the case study led by Hall of a design enterprise project in Mali that investigated how designers can co-design and develop portable, sustainable solar lighting for remote off-grid Malian villages and how this can ultimately assist in an overall national-level strategy for slowing the rural urban migration patterns of West Africa. The project had a positive impact on the local community by enabling sustainable local lighting that helped maintain cultural practices, encouraged enterprise and facilitated education. The lights would be rented out by villagers and profits used to construct new lights designed to use locally sourced materials, construction techniques and components. The research builds on existing expertise of cross-cultural collaboration by the lead author (Hall 2009; Hall 2010; Hall 2012; Hall 2013), and describes the technical and cultural challenges faced by designers working in this challenging context – in particular, the challenge of whether to use imported or locally sourced technologies, locating suitable making processes and issues of deploying co-design methods across cultures. Impact is demonstrated by improvements in the social life of villages through public lighting as part of a strategy for slowing the rural–urban migration patterns and helping to maintain food production in the countryside. New knowledge, including methods for sustainable development, communication by remote design teams and design pedagogy, is presented in practice-related activities by designers in international collaborations. The range of project communications was mapped and diagrams generated to identify the most successful remote communication platforms. Following the project completion, the work was exhibited at the Royal College of Art (2011) and featured in three articles in Lighting Design (2012), Axis (2012) and New Design (2012). The project was funded by the eLand Foundation in Switzerland, Nakumatt Holdings in Kenya and Philips Lighting in Holland

Partnerships for Sustainable Development Goals 2016

This present document is the fourth edition of a report that has been prepared by the Division for Sustainable Development of UN-DESA as a follow up the Rio+20 Conference in 2012, as an effort to provide status of progress multi-stakeholder partnerships and voluntary commitments have in realizing sustainable development. This current 2016 edition reviews a number of action networks and multi-stakeholder partnerships, with a particular focus on how they support the theme of the 2016 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) - "Ensuring that no one is left behind". Information in the report is largely based on submissions from the Partnerships for SDGs online platform, which was originally developed following the Rio+20 Conference in 201. The platform was recently redesigned ahead of the adoption of 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015

The Faculty Notebook, September 2015

The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost

Leveraging Change: Increasing Access to Arts Education in Rural Areas

In 2015, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) received funding in the first round of collective impact grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to launch the pilot initiative, Leveraging Change: Improving Access to Arts Education in Rural Areas. The authors conducted research which included a literature review and interviews with arts education leaders in rural areas. Using the research compiled through this process, a pilot convening was held in western Massachusetts' Berkshire County to activate ideas, stimulate the exchange of information, and generate cross-sector collaboration focused on strengthening support for arts education in the region. This working paper is a summary of the research results and insights gleaned from this pilot initiative