Consumer Engagement: Helping People Want What They Need

Developing or delivering a product, tool, or service that meets consumers' needs and leads to impactful behavior change is a significant challenge. Simply creating tools to foster financial security has not been enough to ensure that consumers will use them, much less benefit from them. Consumer engagement is an approach to tackling these key challenges that focuses on the needs, expectations, and realities of those being served by financial empowerment practitioners.Consumer Engagement: Helping People Want What They Need describes both a philosophy and a process for developing and delivering financial products and services. At the core is the consumer, who is the intended target of financial empowerment efforts and the key stakeholder; he/ she is the actor who ultimately decides what tools to use and is an indispensable source of intelligence about his/her needs and wants.Three pillars define consumer engagement, each of which informs and relies on the others: Demand Focus, Deep Connection, and Enthusiastic Use

Secrets of Your Leadership Success: The 11 Indispensable E’s of a Leader

Professor Rao has used his experiences in organizational systems to produce a “recipe” for true leadership. In developing the 11 E’s — from Enthusiasm to Ethics —this author attempts to identify the traits characteristically and uniformly found in great leaders. While each component may be descriptive of a recognized head of a particular organization, successful principled leadership mandates the amalgamation of all of these enumerated traits

Ready or Not: How California School Districts are Reimagining Parent Engagement in the Era of Local Control Funding Formula

There is a powerful connection between student achievement and parent engagement. Decades of research have affirmed that students whose parents are active participants in their learning and in their school experience heightened their outcomes in a variety of measures, from school readiness to graduation rates. Further, more recent research indicates that schools have a critical role to play in creating strong family-school partnerships for student success.And yet, sadly, successful parent engagement has eluded California for decades. Now, under the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), education officials and school district leaders have a new opportunity. Districts must demonstrate how they are striving to create powerful partnerships between educators and parents. This is a critical moment for education policymakers and administrators to transition from the compliance-based efforts of the past to authentic, outcome-based parent engagement programs, and to adopt a measurement system to track their progress.Ready or Not: How California School Districts are Reimagining Parent Engagement in the Era of Local Control Funding Formula is a report that examines the inner workings of districts across California as they try to meet the parent engagement expectations of LCFF. Drawing on thirty interviews with district leaders and staff members, the report is an honest and highly specific portrait of the very real challenges of parent engagement. It also highlights "signs of progress" that demonstrate districts' capacity for innovation

Spartan Daily, April 7, 2000

Volume 114, Issue 44https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9541/thumbnail.jp

Qualities of effective teachers who teach disadvantaged students: insights from the Varkey Teacher Ambassador Community

The goal of providing equitable quality education for every child will only be achieved if all children have access to a quality teacher. A shortage of effective teachers disproportionately affects children from poor and marginalized backgrounds. This study investigates the qualities, mindsets and behaviours of effective teachers who work with disadvantaged children using the Varkey Teacher Ambassador community. Our hope is that the findings from this study will inform policy makers across the globe and lead to improved policies to attract, develop, and retain effective teachers to serve the most disadvantaged students

Truth and Lives: Beneath Our Skin

“Art can be fundamental to our collective understanding of who we are, what we believe, and how we relate to each other and our surroundings. Artists can weave the cultural fabric necessary for a sustainable, vibrant society.” (Surdna Foundation, 2016). With this in mind, I’ve sought to create a project aimed at generating insight, compassion and critical dialogue around the common threads of body diversity. Through a practice of relationship building with individuals from diverse and marginalized intersections of society, I’ve begun adapting stories, shared by participants, about how they live and thrive (or not) in their bodies. Adaptations are in both visual art format (2D and 3D) and digital catching of the creative process. The stories are then released in video format on the project website www.beneathourskin.org. The catch and release format of this process is aimed at broadening audience impact to create change in how culturally we view and treat our own bodies and the bodies of others. I’ve also engaged in a reflective process around personal impact and assessment with participants to gauge impact and change over time. My intent is to continue this work, growing it to a sustainable program with the potential to impact change for participants within themselves, their relationships and their community. Through participation, contribution and reflections upon seeing their own stories through a new publicly shared lens participants will experience personal change, while their stories help lift perceptions of body diversity into a new light exposing where ongoing societal change is needed

Spartan Daily April 28, 2011

Volume 136, Issue 46https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1153/thumbnail.jp

The Production of Hrönir: Albanian Socialist Realism and After

Discussion of the work of Albanian artist Armando Lulaj in relation to the heritage of Albanian socialist realist art