Children's role in the community response to HIV in Zimbabwe

Introduction: Recent debates on how to achieve an optimal HIV response are dominated by intervention strategies that fail to recognize children’s role in the community response to HIV. Whilst formal responses are key to the HIV response, they must recognize and build on indigenous community resources. This study examines adult’s perspectives on the role of children in the HIV response in the Matobo District of southern Zimbabwe. Methods: Through a mix of individual interviews (n = 19) and focus group discussions (n = 9), 90 community members who were active in social groups spoke about their community response to HIV. Transcripts were subjected to a thematic analysis and coding to generate key concepts and representations. Findings: In the wake of the HIV epidemic, traditional views of children’s social value as domestic ‘‘helpers’’ have evolved into them being regarded as capable and competent actors in the care and support of people living with HIV or AIDS, and as integral to household survival. Yet concurrent representations of children with excessive caregiving responsibilities as potentially vulnerable and at risk suggest that there is a limit to the role of children in the HIV response. Conclusion: Community volunteers and health staff delivering HIV services need to recognize the ‘‘behind the scene’’ role of children in the HIV response and ensure that children are incorporated into their modus operandi — both as social actors and as individuals in need of support

Creating a Positive Police and Community Response to Homelessness

CCH policy brief that examines how police and our communities respond to homelessness, particularly homeless people on the street

Virtual Reality of Earthquake Ground Motions for Emergency Response

Ground motions interface earthquake science and engineering to advance understanding of seismic hazards and risk. Virtual reality provides an attractive tool to extend knowledge of the research community to a larger audience. This work visualizes emergency response under extreme motions, in the CAVE of the MARquette Visualization Laboratory. The visualization (a) displays ground motions (from the science community), (b) inputs these motions to structural models (from the engineering community) and illustrates the resulting responses, (c) translates structural responses to damage states of building elements, (d) creates a virtual room subjected to the perception associated with such earthquake shaking, and (e) introduces the human element of emergency response in this immersive environment. Building upon previous work on earthquake simulations, performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE), building information modeling (BIM), and earthquake awareness, this study integrates elements of PBEE and BIM within the CAVE environment to provide visual information for decision making. Real-time or near real-time information via earthquake early warning (EEW) and structural health monitoring (SHM) further facilitates response within a limited time frame. As advanced technologies contribute to the future of community resilience, visualization plays an emerging role in connecting earthquake science, engineering, and policy

Combatting Opioid-Related Deaths in Rural Vermont Through Community Partnership

Substance abuse continues to be a public health crisis. With legislative changes and creation of MAT programming in Vermont, access to behavioral health services for substance abuse treatment has shifted community response and perceptions. As Little Rivers Health Care houses both a MAT program and is a naloxone distribution site, a community event was organized to help train community leaders on how to administer naloxone and provide an avenue to form community partnerships.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1398/thumbnail.jp

Hierarchical modelling of species sensitivity distribution: development and application to the case of diatoms exposed to several herbicides

The Species Sensitivity Distribution (SSD) is a key tool to assess the ecotoxicological threat of contaminant to biodiversity. It predicts safe concentrations for a contaminant in a community. Widely used, this approach suffers from several drawbacks: i)summarizing the sensitivity of each species by a single value entails a loss of valuable information about the other parameters characterizing the concentration-effect curves; ii)it does not propagate the uncertainty on the critical effect concentration into the SSD; iii)the hazardous concentration estimated with SSD only indicates the threat to biodiversity, without any insight about a global response of the community related to the measured endpoint. We revisited the current SSD approach to account for all the sources of variability and uncertainty into the prediction and to assess a global response for the community. For this purpose, we built a global hierarchical model including the concentration-response model together with the distribution law for the SSD. Working within a Bayesian framework, we were able to compute an SSD taking into account all the uncertainty from the original raw data. From model simulations, it is also possible to extract a quantitative indicator of a global response of the community to the contaminant. We applied this methodology to study the toxicity of 6 herbicides to benthic diatoms from Lake Geneva, measured from biomass reduction

Approaching Evaluation in Youth Community Informatics

In the Youth Community Informatics project, young people from disadvantaged communities use audio and video recording and editing tools, GPS/GIS, presentation software, graphics, and other digital technologies as the means for addressing community needs. They build community asset maps, document community history, develop exhibits in collaboration with libraries and museums, present cultural heritage, organize political action, operate community radio, create and maintain community technology centers, and express themselves through multiple media. These activities typically involve multiple partners and develop in unpredictable ways in response to community life. In order to understand what they mean in the lives of the youth and the community we need richer evaluation approaches.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Salva la Iglesia: A Congregation\u27s Fight for Community

The purpose of this study is to examine community response to crisis and the impact intercultural interactions have on the outcome of ethnic and religious group conflict. This research uses a case study focusing on the San Martín Catholic Mission in Oregon and the ways this particular community responded to the crisis of the Catholic diocese threatening to sell their property in 2010. I gathered data from a year of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observations in the setting, and in-depth interviews with six individuals involved in the church and related community groups. I then analyzed the data using the lens of social capital theory to examine the resource networks built through this event and their effect on the communities. Themes such as changing roles of immigrants and minorities in the United States, changing gender roles in community activism, and changing levels of activism after community crises are resolved emerged from this analysis, which indicate the importance of social factors in affecting community response to crisis. The findings of this case study have implications for how communities may need to adapt to the changing demographic of the United States as the Latino population increases, and it provides insight into patterns of interaction that may be seen between ethnic and religious communities in the future

Life After Hurricane Katrina: A Brief on the Chicagoland Katrina Relief Initiative

The goal of Chicago's Katrina Relief Initiative was to provide a comprehensive resettlement,relocation, and community integration response after the immediate crisis for hurricane evacuees. Chicago's response is now serving as a model for disaster recovery in other cities around the nation. This summary briefly outlines Chicago's response for the evacuees, who came to Chicago, what services they needed, and what we have learned to better prepare for future crises

Effects of urbanisation and landscape heterogeneity mediated by feeding guild and body size in a community of coprophilous beetles

Although the impacts of urbanisation on biodiversity are well studied, the precise response of some invertebrate groups remains poorly known. Dung-associated beetles are little studied in an urban context, especially in temperate regions. We considered how landscape heterogeneity, assessed at three spatial scales (250, 500 and 1000 metre radius), mediates the community composition of coprophilous beetles on a broad urban gradient. Beetles were sampled using simple dung-baited traps, placed at 48 sites stratified across three distance bands around a large urban centre in England. The most urban sites hosted the lowest abundance of saprophagous beetles, with a lower mean body length relative to the least urban sites. Predicted overall species richness and the richness of saprophagous species were also lowest at the most urban sites. Ordination analyses followed by variation partitioning revealed that landscape heterogeneity across the urban gradient explained a small but significant proportion of community composition. Heterogeneity data for a 500-metre radius around each site provided the best fit with beetle community data. Larger saprophagous species were associated with lower amounts of manmade surface and improved grassland. Some individual species, particularly predators, appeared to be positively associated with urban or urban fringe sites. This study is probably the first to examine the response of the whole coprophilous beetle community to urbanisation. Our results suggest that the response of this community to urbanisation matches expectations based on other taxonomic groups, whilst emphasising the complex nature of this response, with some smaller-bodied species potentially benefitting from urbanisation