Enabling Greater Access to Home Meal Delivery

Non-profit organizations like the Meals on Wheels (MOW) association of America prepare and deliver meals, typically daily, to approximately one million homebound citizens in the United States alone. However, many MOW agencies are facing a steadily increasing number of clients requesting meal service without an increase in resources (either financial or human). One strategy for accommodating these requests is to deliver multiple (frozen) meals at a time and thus make fewer delivers. However, many of the stakeholders (funders, volunteers, meal recipients) value the relationships that are developed by having a client receive daily deliveries from the same volunteer. Further, meal recipients may be concerned with the quality of the food delivered through a frozen meal. In this paper, we develop a method for introducing consolidation into home meal delivery while minimizing operational disruptions and maintaining client satisfaction. With an extensive computational study, the savings associated with various levels and types of disruptions are detailed

Between War and Peace: Humanitarian Assistance in Violent Urban Settings

Cities are fast becoming new territories of violence. The humanitarian consequences of many criminally violent urban settings are comparable to those of more traditional wars, yet despite the intensity of the needs, humanitarian aid to such settings is limited. The way in which humanitarian needs are typically defined, fails to address the problems of these contexts, the suffering they produce and the populations affected. Distinctions between formal armed conflicts, regulated by international humanitarian law, and other violent settings, as well as those between emergency and developmental assistance, can lead to the neglect of populations in distress. It can take a lot of time and effort to access vulnerable communities and implement programmes in urban settings, but experience shows that it is possible to provide humanitarian assistance with a significant focus on the direct and indirect health consequences of violence outside a traditional conflict setting. This paper considers the situation of Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Guatemala City (Guatemala)

Return To Campus Plan Fall 2020

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY & GUIDING PRINCIPLES INITIAL RETURN TO CAMPUS CONTINGENCY PLAN 1 CONTINGENCY PLAN 2 CONTINGENCY PLAN 3 TESTING, SCREENING, CONTACT TRACING, ISOLATION, NOTIFICATION COMMUNICATIONS FISCAL IMPACT APPENDI

Extreme weather survival strategies for agriculturally based organisations : a case study of Blinkwater Mills.

Master of Commerce in Management Studies. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2017.Extreme weather conditions demand extreme weather survival strategies. In recent months, South Africa has been drastically affected by extreme weather conditions exasperated by the presence of the El Niño Southern Oscillating (ENSO) cycle. Countless farmer’s country wide in South Africa were plagued by the drought brought on by ENSO cycle. The long reaching effect of the drought on every day South Africans can still be seen in the ever increasing price of basic foods (National Weather Service, 2016). Given this current situation, the aim of the study was to understand extreme weather survival strategies for agriculturally based organisations. Organisational supply chains can only absorb a certain amount of costs associated with the cultivation, processing, and distribution of goods before those costs inadvertently get passed on to the consumer (Morrehead, 2009). This coupled with inflation, paints a grim future for those South Africans already on the poverty line. Qualitative research was carried out utilising the in-depth telephonic interview as a data collection instrument. The data collected was analysed by identifying patterns, themes, categories and regular similarities in order to highlight the impact and extent of the resilience of Blinkwater Mills to the drought and their willingness to adapt practices. Given the small scale of Blinkwater Mills, 10 respondents participated in the study, of which 2 formed part of the pilot study. There was a 100% response rate. The findings indicated that although South Africa experienced a drought impacting farmers nationwide, Blinkwater Mills averted the full impact of the drought by benefitting from having farmers with irrigated land and numerous suppliers strategically placed throughout the province of Mpumalanga. They were however, not completely exempted from the drought as countless farmers’ yield and quality was affected by the low rainfall. It is therefore recommended that survival strategies be successfully crafted and implemented to address the needs of not only farmers and their immediate supply chain stakeholders but also for the consumers who are dependent upon basic food items. Studies have shown that there is a likelihood of recurrence of this phenomenon which demands that it be taken more seriously (National Weather Service, 2016). As a result, it must be brought to the forefront of government intervention policies when addressing the issue of climate change and its by-product, extreme weather conditions. Therefore, more research must be conducted within a South African context in order to not only bring attention to this crisis but also to identify constructive methods organisations industry wide can adapt as a means of dealing with and combatting the effects of extreme weather conditions

A limited-scope review of long term care and related services for the elderly

This report by the Legislative Audit Council reviews the long term care and related services for the elderly provided by South Carolina state government agencies