Making Immigrant Rights Real

This is an overview of Ireland's changed migration landscape, followed by a description of The One Foundation's (OF) thinking on measures to effect change in response to a growing immigrant population, and the investments made to achieve its goal -- to make immigrant rights real in Ireland. A case study of an investment in the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI) follows to provide a deeper understanding of some advocacy approaches taken, their impact, and lessons learned

Lessons learned in effective community-university-industry collaboration models for smart and connected communities research

In 2017, the Boston University Hariri Institute for Computing and the Initiative on Cities co-hosted two workshops on “Effective Community-University-Industry Collaboration Models for Smart and Connected Communities Research,” with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF). These efforts brought together over one hundred principal investigators and research directors from universities across the country, as well as city officials, community partners, NSF program managers and other federal agency representatives, MetroLab Network representatives and industry experts. The focus was on transdisciplinary “smart city” projects that bring technical fields such as engineering and computer science together with social scientists and community stakeholders to tackle community-sourced problems. Presentations, panel discussions, working sessions and participant white papers surfaced operational models as well as barriers and levers to enabling effective research partnerships. To capture the perspectives and beliefs of all participants, in addition to the presenters, attendees were asked to synthesize lessons on each panel topic. This white paper summarizes the opportunities and recommendations that emerged from these sessions, and provides guidance to communities and researchers interested in engaging in these types of partnerships as well as universities and funders that endeavor to nurture them. It draws on the collective wisdom of the assembled participants and the authors. While many of the examples noted are drawn from medium and large cities, the lessons may still be applicable to communities of various sizes.National Science Foundatio

Fostering Innovation in Philanthropy

Innovation is a buzzword with growing resonance in the philanthropic community. But how are foundations going about adopting innovative practices? In this guide, you'll learn the definition of "innovation"; 8 approaches to philanthropic innovation; key practices of innovative funders; recommendations to become innovative and support innovation; and more

Come On In. The Water's Fine. An Exploration of Web 2.0 Technology and Its Emerging Impact on Foundation Communications

According to the authors of Come on in. The water's fine. An exploration of Web 2.0 technology and its emerging impact on foundation communications, foundations that have adopted new and still emerging forms of digital communications -- interactive Web sites, blogs, wikis, and social networking applications -- are finding that they offer "opportunities for focused convenings and conversations, lend themselves to interactions with and among grantees, and are an effective story-telling medium." The report's authors, David Brotherton and Cynthia Scheiderer, of Brotherton Strategies, who spent nearly a year exploring how foundations are using new media, add that "electronic communications create an opportunity to connect people who are interested in an issue with each other and the grantees working on the issue."The report also acknowledges that the new technologies raise skepticism and concern among foundations. They include the "worry of losing control over the foundation's message, allowing more staff members to represent the foundation in a more public way, opening the flood gates of grant requests or the headache of a forum gone bad with unwanted or inappropriate posts."Still, the report urges foundations to put aside their worries and make even more forceful use of new media applications and tools. The report argues that whatever is "lost in message control will be more than made up for by the opportunity to engage audiences in new ways, with greater programmatic impact."Acknowledging that adoption of new media tools will require some cultural and operational shifts in foundations, the report offers suggestions from Ernest James Wilson III, dean and Walter Annenberg chair in communication at the University of Southern California, for how to deal with these challenges. He says that for foundations to make the best use of what the technology offers, they should concentrate on three things:Build up the individual "human capital" of their staffs and provide them the competencies they need to operate in the new digital world.Make internal institutional reforms to reward creativity and innovation in using these new media internally and among grantees.Build social networks that span sectors and institutions, to engage in ongoing dialogue among private, public, nonprofits and research stakeholders.As Wilson also says, "All of these steps first require leadership, arguably a new type of leadership, not only at the top but also from the 'bottom' up, since many of the people with the requisite skills, attitudes, substantive knowledge and experience are younger, newer employees, and occupy the low-status end of the organizational pyramid, and hence need strong allies at the top.

Old New Media: Closed-circuit Television and the Classroom

This article explores closed-circuit television (CCTV) and its ‘bright promise stage’, as it was contemplated, marketed, and implemented as a low-cost classroom tool. After the Federal Communications Commission issued the 1952 Sixth Report and Order, many schools and communities sought to bring educational television to the classroom. However, this model was financially out of reach for most. CCTV was a more affordable version of educational television that could cater to specific classroom needs and allow schools to create their own in-house network. CCTV represents just one of many new technologies that have been promoted as ideal for classroom instruction over the last century. Using articles and advertisements from popular press magazines, educational journals, books, and archival materials, this article seeks to illuminate the ‘social practices and conflicts’ that contributed to the conversations around CCTV’s classroom utility. It concludes by connecting CCTV’s promotion in the 1950s to more recent new media technologies

Handwashing with Soap -- Two Paths to National-Scale Programs Lessons from the Field: Vietnam and Indonesia

This paper describes two Southeast Asian programs that are making handwashing a feature of everyday lives on a national scale. The program in Vietnam has concentrated on first gaining an understanding on how people actually behave and then determing how to change that behavior, while the program in Indonesia leverages the reach of the private sector and other partners to scale up handwashing initiatives previously researched and already underway

POWER LESSONS: Women's Advocacy and the 2030 Agenda

In September 2015, the 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Comprised of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 related targets, the "2030 Agenda" tackles a range of global challenges, including eradicating poverty, reducing inequalities, addressing climate change and promoting peace. If implemented successfully, this new agenda could transform the lives of women and girls all over the world

The N-Word: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned

In the fall of 2008, I dared to teach a fifteen-week course that focused on a single word, a word arguably like no other, a word adorned with these emotionally colorful descriptors: “the most explosive of racial epithets,” “our cruelest word,” “the most toxic in the English language,” “the most troubling word in our language,” “almost magical in its negative power,” “six simple letters that convey centuries of pain, evil and contempt,” “an almost universally known word of contempt,” “occupies a place in the soul where logic and reason never go,” and “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.” I have since taught the course three more times. Because of the overwhelming success of my multimedia and multi-genre undergraduate course, “The N-word: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned,” both for my students and for me, and because of the peculiar and alleged post-racial American historical moment in which we now are living with the first African American U.S. President, this reflective pedagogical piece, “The N-Word: Lessons taught and Lessons Learned,” is particularly relevant and timely. Indeed, although the use and history of the “nigger” with its various interracial, intraracial, and intracultural associations have garnered public attention in American classrooms, in the American media, and in American popular culture, deeper implications surrounding this word, the word “nigger” has not had the kind of sustained classroom exploration my semester -long course afforded. Putting this single word under a critical microscope underscored for me and my students the fact that ideas about language and identity, about language and public performance, and about language and American race relations inextricably connect youths and elders, blacks and whites, males and females, children and adults, the international and the domestic, past and present, public and private, and the personal and the political. Specifically, this pedagogical reflection offers a social and political context for the course, an intellectual rationale for the course, specific and detailed course content, students’ responses to the course, students\u27 and teacher\u27s overarching lessons gleaned from the course, and bibliographic suggestions for classroom practitioners and critically curious others navigating the ocean of materials on the word that journalist Farai Chideya has called “the all-American trump card, the nuclear bomb of racial epithets.”

Technology-enhanced Personalised Learning: Untangling the Evidence

Technology-enhanced personalised learning is not yet common in Germany, which is why we have tasked scientists with summarising the current status of international research on the matter. This study demonstrates the great potential of technology in implementing effective personalised learning. Nevertheless, it has not been assessed yet whether the practical implementation actually works: Even in countries such as the U.S., which lead the way in using techology in classroom settings, hardly any evaluation studies have been done to prove the effectiveness of technology-enhanced personalised learning. In the light of the above, the authors make recommendations for actions to be taken in Germany to make best use of the potential of technology in providing individual support and guidance to students