Hunt for the Supertwister

In this activity students try to identify the best time of year and place to position spotters to see possible tornado outbreaks. In order to do so they study a graphic that depicts the mean number of days per century with at least one F2 or greater tornado touching down. They then follow the instructions on their handouts and present their information using a poster, a mockup of a newspaper, a multimedia presentation, or a play. The site provides the required handouts and suggestions for extensions. Educational levels: High school, Middle school

Destination: Mars

This set of lessons is designed to increase students' knowledge, awareness, and curiosity about the process of scientific exploration of Mars. Topics include navigating to Mars, investigating Martian soils and geology, mapping Martian landforms, and searching for signs of life. A video is also available to accompany the lessons. Educational levels: Middle school, High school

AFRICA in the school and community

A brochure advertising the African Outreach Program at Boston University

Street Outreach Workers: Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Street outreach workers are an important part of the Senator Charles E. Shannon Jr. Community Safety Initiative (CSI) comprehensive gang and youth violence reduction strategy in Massachusetts1. Street outreach involves the use of individuals to “work the streets,” making contact with youth in neighborhoods with high levels of gang activity. These individuals are generally not employed by the criminal justice system agencies but rather are based in community service organizations or other non- governmental agencies. Street outreach workers provide an important bridge between the community, gang-involved youth, and the agencies (whether social service or law enforcement) that respond to the problems of delinquency and gangs. This guide offers information, guidance, and lessons learned from street outreach programs nationally and within the Massachusetts Shannon CSI communities to help guide existing street outreach programs and support communities considering developing new street outreach programs

Bank competition and outreach: evidence from Turkey

In light of the importance of banking sector outreach and given concerns that competition may adversely affect it, this study explores the empirical linkage between banking structure and outreach in Turkey for the period 1988-2010. Bank-, province-, and bank-province-level estimation results indicate that competition is in general conducive to the outreach of banks. We do not find evidence for collusive behavior among banks when they have multimarket contact. At the province level, the presence of foreign-owned banks is associated with higher outreach, while at the bank-province level, we observe that outreach of domestic banks exceeds that of foreign banks. Together, these results suggest that there are procompetitive spillover effects from foreign banks to their domestic counterparts

Operating and Managing Street Outreach Services

Increasingly, cities have added street outreach to the mix of strategies used in comprehensive gang reduction efforts, drawing upon mounting evidence of impact. Street outreach relies on street workers to support and advocate on behalf of gang members, or those at high risk of joining gang, to change behavior patterns and link them to needed services and institutions. Street outreach workers work day and night to link marginalized and hard-to-serve individuals in communities with high levels of gang activity to social services, and play an important role in diffusing and stopping violence (Decker, Bynum, McDevitt, Farrell, & Varano, 2008; Spergel, 1966; Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention [OJJDP], 2002). These workers reach out to targeted community members at their homes, community events, on street corners, in parks, and in any neighborhood spaces where community members in gangs or at risk of joining gangs spend time (OJJDP, 2002, p. 54). Outreach workers often possess intimate familiarity with the communities in which they work. Their knowledge and skills allow them to work with individuals whom traditional service providers cannot access or support. California Cities Gang Prevention Network cities (the Network or CCGPN) note that street outreach services are an important piece of their cities' primary intervention strategies, with ties to prevention and enforcement. This bulletin identifies ways outreach programs can strategically support, care for, and hire outreach workers

A realist synthesis of the evidence on outreach programmes for health improvement of Traveller Communities

Background: Improving the health of Traveller Communities is an international public health concern but there is little evidence on effective interventions. This study aimed to explain how, for whom and in what circumstances outreach works in Traveller Communities. Methods: A realist synthesis was conducted. Systematic literature searches were conducted between August and November 2011. Grey literature was sought and key stakeholders were involved throughout the review process. Iterative steps of data extraction, analysis and synthesis, followed by additional searches were undertaken. Results: An explanatory framework details how, why and in what circumstances participation, behaviour change or social capital development happened. The trust status of outreach workers is an important context of outreach interventions, in conjunction with their ability to negotiate the intervention focus. The higher the outreach worker’s trust status, the lower the imperative that they negotiate the intervention focus. A ‘menu’ of reasoning mechanisms is presented, leading to key engagement outcomes. Conclusions: Adopting a realist analysis, this study offers a framework with explanatory purchase as to the potential of outreach to improve health in marginalised groups

Social Media Advertisement Outreach: Learning the Role of Aesthetics

Corporations spend millions of dollars on developing creative image-based promotional content to advertise to their user-base on platforms like Twitter. Our paper is an initial study, where we propose a novel method to evaluate and improve outreach of promotional images from corporations on Twitter, based purely on their describable aesthetic attributes. Existing works in aesthetic based image analysis exclusively focus on the attributes of digital photographs, and are not applicable to advertisements due to the influences of inherent content and context based biases on outreach. Our paper identifies broad categories of biases affecting such images, describes a method for normalization to eliminate effects of those biases and score images based on their outreach, and examines the effects of certain handcrafted describable aesthetic features on image outreach. Optimizing on the describable aesthetic features resulting from this research is a simple method for corporations to complement their existing marketing strategy to gain significant improvement in user engagement on social media for promotional images.Comment: Accepted to SIGIR 201

A poverty outreach index and its application to microfinance

The Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke poverty index is modified to a poverty outreach measure that incorporates both depth of outreach and scale. In an application to microfinance institutions, the use of this type of poverty outreach measure rejects the common notion that there is a necessary trade-off between client outreach and institutional sustainability. Banks and credit unions are found to have greater poverty outreach than smaller, subsidized non-governmental organizations that exclusively target the poor.microfinance

Liberation-focused Community Outreach: A Qualitative Exploration of Peer Group Supervision during Disaster Response

While it is clear that community outreach and disaster response must include cultural and social justice competence, there is a dearth of knowledge regarding the process by which this can occur. Guided by liberation psychology, this qualitative study examined the peer group supervision process of psychologists and counselors providing outreach to Haitian communities in Florida after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The findings suggest that peer supervision generated a cyclical process in which the practitioners focused on both content and process themes that were salient to the community outreach. During supervision, practitioners used content information on the community\u27s culture, strengths, and sociopolitical issues to conceptualize the community\u27s experiences and needs. This content informed the outreach process, including the practitioners’ roles and the ways in which they connected and developed respectful relationships with the community. Ongoing peer supervision appeared to facilitate a liberation-focused community outreach and increase consciousness among the practitioners