Aligning Community-Engaged Research to Context.

Community-engaged research is understood as existing on a continuum from less to more community engagement, defined by participation and decision-making authority. It has been widely assumed that more is better than less engagement. However, we argue that what makes for good community engagement is not simply the extent but the fit or alignment between the intended approach and the various contexts shaping the research projects. This article draws on case studies from three Community Engagement Cores (CECs) of NIEHS-funded Environmental Health Science Core Centers (Harvard University, UC Davis and University of Arizona,) to illustrate the ways in which community engagement approaches have been fit to different contexts and the successes and challenges experienced in each case. We analyze the processes through which the CECs work with researchers and community leaders to develop place-based community engagement approaches and find that different strategies are called for to fit distinct contexts. We find that alignment of the scale and scope of the environmental health issue and related research project, the capacities and resources of the researchers and community leaders, and the influences of the sociopolitical environment are critical for understanding and designing effective and equitable engagement approaches. These cases demonstrate that the types and degrees of alignment in community-engaged research projects are dynamic and evolve over time. Based on this analysis, we recommend that CBPR scholars and practitioners select a range of project planning and management techniques for designing and implementing their collaborative research approaches and both expect and allow for the dynamic and changing nature of alignment

Policies for capacity development

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A Development Evaluation Study of a Professional Development Initiative to Strengthen Organizational Conditions in Early Education Settings

High quality instruction is essential to producing developmental gains for young children and can mitigate risk factors such as family poverty and low parental education. Even in programs with highly qualified teachers, teacher-child interactions often do not provide the level of instructional support that children need to be well-prepared for success in kindergarten. In order to improve instructional quality, an emerging focus on early childhood professional development involves supporting leaders in creating a web of supports for teacher learning and child growth. The purpose of the 3-year evaluation study was to assess the effectiveness of an Early Childhood Education Professional Development Initiative (ECE PDI) in advancing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of community-based early childhood leaders and teachers in relation to creating the conditions for superior developmental outcomes for low-income students served by these community-based centers. Findings from the implementation and impact studies are reported

Community Building for Children’s Health: Lessons From Community Partnerships for Healthy Children

· This article describes Community Partnerships for Healthy Children (CPHC), a 10-year, $17 million initiative of the Sierra Health Foundation targeted at improving children’s health in northern California by mobilizing communities to use their assets. Implementation grants were modest ($50,000 annually), but technical assistance and communications support were also provided. · The initiative rolled out in four phases. Overall, a total of 31 communities participated in the initiative. Twenty-six communities remained through phase three, with 18 engaging in the final fourth phase. · Evidence indicates that CPHC improved the health of some children in some communities with regard to some outcomes, but did not improve the health of children at the population level. Community building appears to be well-suited to devising and implementing successful strategies to address straightforward health issues in the short term; more time, resources, and expertise are needed for more complex problems. · The community collaboratives achieved many of the intermediate goals of the initiative. The evidence is strong that communities did identify and respond to needs. · Most of the collaboratives on their own had access to few resources initially, but over time they were able to gather fiscal and human resources from a variety of sources and combine them to provide services such as recreation programs or family resource centers. Collaboratives involved in the final grant stage had been able to raise from other sources an amount nearly twice the foundation’s investment in CPHC. · The collaboratives were similar in role but differed in many other ways, such as the geographic scope and the existing assets. Collaboratives that had members with certain skills (such as grantwriting, public relations, and computer skills) had greater success

Collaborative Strategies for Day Labor Centers

This guide is designed to assist local officials, immigrant serving organizations, day labor center planners and leadership, and others to understand how collaborative relationships and partnerships can help communities to effectively establish, support and sustain day labor centers

University Partnerships With Community Change Initiatives: Lessons Learned From the Technical Assistance Partnerships of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Neighborhood Improvement Initiative

Examines the specific role of students and faculty in providing responsive research, technical assistance, and evaluation supports to the community. Contains stories and examples from Hewlett's university-community partnership program

Policy Partners: Making the Case for State Investments in Culture

Points to increasing evidence that governors and other state policymakers consider the development of cultural resources integral to comprehensive plans aimed at stimulating regional economic growth

Towards a framework for the evaluation of policies of cluster upgrading and innovation

In the current scenario, a large and growing number of policies for local development and cluster upgrading explicitly incorporate the idea of innovation as a systemic process, embedded in specific socio-cultural and institutional contexts and intermingled with international challenges, opportunities, and strategies. These policies bring new challenges to the activities of analysis and evaluation: despite the diffusion of a systemic approach both in innovation thinking and in innovation policies, a proper system-based framework for the analysis and evaluation of these policies is far from being achieved (Bellandi and Caloffi, 2010). Trying to advance our reflection on this field, we propose some exemplifications on a quite delimited set of contexts, i.e. those of industrial districts (Italian, in particular), characterized by SMEs clusters facing contemporary globalization challenges. Focusing on innovation policies aimed at supporting functional upgrading of districts and clusters soaked in changing international filières and value chains, the paper discusses the meaning of evaluation of industrial policies when a systemic perspective is considered. On such premises a couple of exemplifications are illustrate some features of appropriate evaluation methods. Finally, some methodological aspects concerning the design process of evaluation activities are discussed.Evaluation of policies; systemic approaches to evaluation; innovation and cluster policies; industrial districts