40,989 research outputs found
Individual Philanthropy Patterns in Metro Atlanta
This report responds to the question of what do Metro-Atlanta nonprofit leaders know about why individuals give to charity. Specifically, there are several questions that are fundamental to this initial study. They include:* Who is giving?* What motivates individuals to give?* How much is being given?* Where is the giving being directed?The study is an initial attempt commissioned by The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta to collect reliable baseline data on individual giving patterns in the Twenty-two County Atlanta region. The information is to be used for understanding the demographic characteristics of givers as well as their perceptions, beliefs, values, and attitudes about charitable giving, volunteering, charitable organizations, and the factors that motivate them to support nonprofit organizations. In addition, the data also provides insight into the types of information that are most useful to individuals when making their giving decisions, and direction about issues the nonprofit sector must address to increase giving and enhance its visibility and legitimacy
Characterizing Pedophile Conversations on the Internet using Online Grooming
Cyber-crime targeting children such as online pedophile activity are a major
and a growing concern to society. A deep understanding of predatory chat
conversations on the Internet has implications in designing effective solutions
to automatically identify malicious conversations from regular conversations.
We believe that a deeper understanding of the pedophile conversation can result
in more sophisticated and robust surveillance systems than majority of the
current systems relying only on shallow processing such as simple word-counting
or key-word spotting.
In this paper, we study pedophile conversations from the perspective of
online grooming theory and perform a series of linguistic-based empirical
analysis on several pedophile chat conversations to gain useful insights and
patterns. We manually annotated 75 pedophile chat conversations with six stages
of online grooming and test several hypothesis on it. The results of our
experiments reveal that relationship forming is the most dominant online
grooming stage in contrast to the sexual stage. We use a widely used
word-counting program (LIWC) to create psycho-linguistic profiles for each of
the six online grooming stages to discover interesting textual patterns useful
to improve our understanding of the online pedophile phenomenon. Furthermore,
we present empirical results that throw light on various aspects of a pedophile
conversation such as probability of state transitions from one stage to
another, distribution of a pedophile chat conversation across various online
grooming stages and correlations between pre-defined word categories and online
grooming stages
Formative Evaluation of Job Clubs Operated by Faith- and Community-Based Organizations: Findings From Site Visits and Options for Future Evaluation
Over the past several decades, job search support groups, commonly referred to as “job clubs,” have evolved into one of several important activities used by the public workforce system and faith- and community-based organizations to enhance worker readiness and employability, as well as to provide ongoing support to unemployed and underemployed individuals as they search for jobs. The U.S. Department of Labor\u27s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) contracted in September 2012 with Capital Research Corporation, Inc. and George Washington University to conduct an assessment of job clubs sponsored by faith-based and community-based organizations (FBOs/CBOs). The overall purpose of this evaluation effort was to systematically describe the key characteristics of job clubs being offered by a range of faith- and community- based organizations, document how they differ from and are similar to the job clubs operated by publicly-funded workforce agencies (such as at American Job Centers [AJCs]), and identify potential approaches that might be used for more rigorous formal evaluation of impacts and effectiveness.
Findings from the telephone interviews with stakeholders and in-person interviews with facilitators during the site visits indicate that job clubs operated by FBOs, CBOs and public workforce agencies are alike in many ways, with all of them emphasizing the critical importance of: (1) networking during the job search; (2) offering ongoing peer support and sharing of similar experiences among participants; and (3) providing instruction and guidance on the basics of the job search process (e.g., elevator pitches, resume development, job interview practice). Noteworthy differences between the FBO/CBO job clubs and those operated by public workforce agencies are related to staffing patterns and available resources for program operations and services. While public workforce agency job clubs are led by paid professional staff, supported by the full complement of workshops, activities, and other services typically available through AJCs/One-Stop Centers, FBO/CBO job clubs, in most cases, operate with limited budgets or no funding whatsoever. Additionally, compared with public sector agencies, FBOs/CBOs typically collect little in the way of participant-level data, such as participant identifiers, demographic characteristics, service receipt, or outcomes. Finally, although this report suggests several approaches to future rigorous experimental/non-experimental and process/implementation evaluation of FBO/CBO-sponsored job clubs, there are likely to be formidable challenges to implementation of rigorous evaluation methods because these job clubs rarely collect identifying information on participants, such as Social Security numbers, and are generally opposed to random assignment for their programs
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