44,116 research outputs found
Fundraising Bright Spots: Strategies and Inspiration from Social Change Organizations Raising Money from Individual Donors
"Let's find an outside expert who can help." It's a natural impulse in the search for answers to the chronic fundraising challenges facing so many nonprofit organizations. But what if the real answers were already all around us? And what can we learn from those nonprofits that are uniquely successful in their fundraising? These are the questions behind a new report by Klein & Roth Consulting and CompassPoint. Commissioned by the Haas, Jr. Fund, the report explores common strategies, practices and mindsets across a group of social change organizations that are beating the odds to achieve breakthrough success in individual giving. Among the key insights from the report: Fundraising is core to the identity of these organizations. It's an integral and connected part of their overall work, and it's something everyone has a role in -- including all staff, board and volunteers. When we first started this research, we suspected we would begin to identify some common skills and innovative techniques that lead to success in fundraising. But what the research shows instead is that there are deeper issues involved. It's less about tools and techniques and the skills of an organization's leaders, and more about developing the culture and the systems that are the foundation of long-term fundraising success
Massive Open Online Courses as affinity spaces for connected learning: Exploring effective learning interactions in one massive online community
This paper describes a participatory online culture – Connected Learning Massive Open Online Collaboration (CLMOOC) – and asks how its ethos of reciprocity and creative playfulness occurs. By analysing Twitter interactions over a four-week period, we conclude that this is due to the supportive nature of participants, who describe themselves as belonging to, or connected with, the community. We suggest that Gee’s concept of an affinity space is an appropriate model for CLMOOC and ask how this might be replicated in a higher education setting
Evaluation of options for a UK electronic thesis service: study report
The British Library (BL), JISC, UK HE institutions and CURL have funded an 18-month project to develop a national framework for the provision, preservation and open access to electronic theses produced in UK HE institutions. The project, called EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) was developed in response to a competitive tender invitation released by the JISC and proposes a service set up and run by the British Library.
The British Library’s current service, the British Thesis Service, offers access to around 180,000 doctoral theses, predominantly from 1970 onwards, though it is estimated that overall some half million theses dating from the 1600s are in existence in the UK. Around 80% of requests are for theses published within the last 13 years and almost all of these exist only in hardcopy. Through this service, theses are acquired ‘on demand’ and delivered on microfilm at a cost of just over £60 to the user (and at this price the service runs at a loss). Whilst this service, coupled with the Index to Theses (Expert Information), enables the location of and access to relatively recent British theses by the determined seeker, no one could argue that the process is optimised. As a result, usage of theses is much lower than it might be and much research is going unnoticed and unused as a result. Conversely, it has been shown that when theses are easy to locate and access, usage is high: at Virginia Tech, a pioneer site in the provision of a formal, systematised ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) service, downloads have been shown to increase over 30-fold when a thesis is available free online and easily located.
A national service for the UK that provides discovery and access to theses in electronic form via the Web will increase the utility of doctoral scholarship. A single interface that directs users to theses wherever they are held, and which addresses the issues of intellectual property, permissions, royalties, preservation, discovery, and other matters associated with the public provision of theses in electronic form, will be of great benefit to the scholarly community in the UK and across the world.
The EThOS project (Electronic Theses Online Service) was commissioned to develop a model for a workable, sustainable and acceptable national service for the provision of open access to electronic doctoral theses. The EThOS project team have completed the task and UCL Library Services in partnership with Key Perspectives Ltd have been asked to undertake a consultative study to assess the acceptability of the proposed model to the UK higher education community in the context of other potential models. This document reports the results of this consultative study, including a set of recommendations to JISC and other stakeholders for setting up a UK national e-theses service. The stakeholders other than JISC are:
The British Library
University administrators (registrars)
Graduate students and recent PhDs
Librarians
Institutional repository managers
Other e-theses services including:
DART-Europe
DiVA
DissOnline
Australasian Digital Theses
Theses Canada
Networked Digital Library for Theses and Dissertations
The EThOS tea
Distributive Justice and The Problem of Friendship
ArticleFriendship distributes critical benefits across society and does so unequally. Income, levels of education and health vary dramatically according to the quality of individuals' friendships. Further, friendships shape the motivations and aspirations of their participants. In light of these facts, this article questions whether and how egalitarian requirements should apply to personal friendship. I first show that existing theories of distributive justice, whether they are ‘outcomes centred’ or ‘institutionalist’, have reasons to consider personal friendship as a direct subject of justice. However, both fail to provide reasonable guidelines for how to apply the requirements of justice to friendship. I thus argue that principles of justice, in particular fair equality of opportunity, ought to assess and govern that part of the social structure that controls the production and distribution of friendship bonds across society. I theorise a ‘relational distributive structure’, mainly constituted by civil society associations, as the appropriate subject of justice
The Tacit Knowledge Problem in Multinational Corporations: Japanese and US Offshore Knowledge Incubators
This paper examines the ‘cognitive’ and ‘societal’ aspects of the tacit knowledge transfer problem in MNCs. Based on a comparative analysis of the overseas R&D labs of US and Japanese MNCs in the UK, it examines how home-based models of learning influence MNCs’ transnational social spaces for learning and their capabilities to address the tacit knowing problem. It illustrates how the US professional ‘networks of practice’ (NoP) and the Japanese organizational ‘communities of practice’ (CoP) approaches to transnational learning unfold in practice. It also examines how divergence between home and host country institutions governing knowledge production inhibits cross-societal tacit knowing.comparative thinking; tacit knowledge; knowledge transfer in MNCs; innovation and R&D; organizational learning; communities of practice
Healthy Valleys : reversing decline in eight rural communities
Healthy Valleys is a community focused health improvement initiative and our operating principles are our strength – we adopt a community development approach, we are flexible, responsive to communities, effective and innovative. Healthy Valleys adds value when delivering services because we are effective at engaging with disadvantaged communities. Indeed Healthy Valleys engages local people and delivers services in local places, all of which contribute to making a positive difference
Commons and Cooperatives
In the last decade, the commons has become a prevalent theme in discussions about collective but decentralized control over resources. This paper is a preliminary exploration of the potential linkages between commons and cooperatives through a discussion of the worker cooperative as one example of a labour commons. We view the worker coop as a response at once antagonistic and accommodative to capitalism. This perspective is amplified through a consideration of five aspects of an ideal-type worker cooperativism: associated labour, workplace democracy, surplus distribution, cooperation among cooperatives, and, controversially, links between worker cooperatives and socialist states. We conclude by suggesting that the radical potential of worker cooperatives might be extended, theoretically and practically, by elaborating connections with other commons struggles in a process we term the circulation of the common
Rapa Nui (Easter Island)’s Stone Worlds
This article explores the spatial, architectural and conceptual relationships between landscape places, stone quarrying, and stone moving and building during Rapa Nui’s statue-building period. These are central themes of the ‘Rapa Nui Landscapes of Construction Project’ and are discussed using aspects of the findings of our recent fieldwork. The different scales of expression, from the detail of the domestic sphere to the monumental working of quarries, are considered. It is suggested that the impressiveness of Rapa Nui’s stone architecture is its conceptual coherence at the small scale as much as at the large scale
Roots and reassessment of the Cuban 'guerrilla ethos' : from the armed imperative to the end of foquismo
Based on original interviews and rare archival sources, the central thread of this article is the origin, rise and reassessment of the Cuban Revolution’s «guerrilla ethos» that shaped the political creed of the first revolutionary generation. During the anti-Fulgencio Batista insurrection (1952-1959), the belief that only violence could lead to the ousting of the dictator steadily gained traction among the opposition as the right path to revolution. This radical approach was already voiced by a number of movements prior to the Moncada attack (July 1953), when Fidel Castro became a public national figure, and was crowned by the advent of the revolution in 1959. The revolutionary administration established an insurrectional doctrine – sometimes known as foquismo – that stemmed from the «lessons » of the anti-Batista fight and guided the island’s external involvements throughout the sixties. However, the «guerrilla mentality» confronted major challenges in the second half of the decade (guerrilla’s defeats, Soviet pressures). This article stresses an additional and often forgotten component that, nonetheless, exerted a powerful effect on Cuba’s reconsideration of its previous revolutionary principles: the unfolding of the Juan Velasco Alvarado military government (1968-1975) in Peru, promptly labelled in Havana as a viable route to «revolution», which resulted in a partial revision of the «guerrilla ethos» that emerged in fifties
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