Mobility, Career Pathways, and the Landscape of Employer and Youth Engagement in the South

It's tough for a southern kid born at the bottom of the income ladder to get ahead. Overcoming regional economic hardship, long-tolerated racial inequity and subpar education infrastructure is almost impossible. But there is progress. This issue brief examines two key elements connecting southern young adults with rewarding employment opportunities: employer and youth engagement. The brief offers a framework to assess the preconditions for effectively engaging employers and young adults and identifies examples of promising efforts. It also considers what philanthropy can do to reinforce the importance of employer and youth engagement and expand the use of both in the South

Community Development: A Guide for Grantmakers on Fostering Better Outcomes Through Good Process

Focuses on participation and collaboration as major elements of processes that are effective. Provides examples of, and offers tools for overcoming, challenges to collaboration. Includes strategies and resources for evaluation and collaboration

Mini is beautiful:Playing serious mini-games to facilitate collective learning on complex urban processes

Spatial planning projects can be conceived as processes of collective learning. Planners have been looking at games and playful approaches to support these processes. Considering that planning projects are long and complex, we propose to not reason for single, full-fledged and all-encompassing games, but instead work with strings of, so-called, serious mini-games that each addresses a specific learning goal, guided by a collective learning model. This paper conceptualizes a toolbox to support the development and contextualization of such strings of serious mini-games

Connecting citizens with urban environments through an augmented reality pervasive game

The concept of Playable City situates games in public spaces to create connections between the citizens and the urban environment. To this end, Augmented Reality (AR) and pervasive technologies can provide additional information about urban objects or places and support innovative and engaging experiences to increase the user interest in the surrounding area. Understanding how these experiences affect the user interest is crucial for reaching a well-established connection between the people and the spaces around them. Our contribution is a preliminary framework to evaluate how being engaged in a playful activity improves interest and awareness in a specific urban area. The framework is based on the situated motivational affordances to establish a correlation among the users' motivations, the situation, and the employed technological artifact. We use an AR pervasive game to evaluate a playful historical experience as a technology probe. The results suggest that while playing the game, the citizens started to show a growing interest in the historical facts around them. At the same time, they began to raise concerns about other issues like sustainability, socio-environmental, and socioeconomic development.This work is supported by the project sense2MakeSense grant funded by the Spanish State Agency of Research (PID2019-109388GB-I00) and the Madrid Government (Comunidad de Madrid - Spain) under the Multiannual Agreement with UC3M in the line of Excellence of University Professors (Grant Number: EPUC3M17) context of the V PRICIT (Regional Programme of Research and Technological Innovation

Fearsquare: hacking open crime data to critique, jam and subvert the 'aesthetic of danger'

We present a critical evaluation of a locative media application, Fearsquare, which provocatively invites users to engage with personally contextualized risk information drawn from the UK open data crime maps cross-referenced with geo-located user check-ins on Foursquare. Our analysis of user data and a corpus of #Fearsquare discourse on Twitter revealed three cogent appraisals ('Affect', 'Technical' and 'Critical') reflecting the salient associations and aesthetics that were made between different components of the application and interwoven issues of technology, risk, danger, emotion by users. We discuss how the varying strength and cogency of these public responses to Fearsquare call for a broader imagining and analysis of how risk and danger are interpreted; and conclude how our findings reveal important challenges for researchers and designers wishing to engage in projects that involve the computer-mediated communication of risk

A mixed reality neighborhood tour: understanding visitor experience and perceptions

Museums are increasingly turning to technology to improve their offerings. This presents an opportunity to surrounding neighborhoods to take advantage of the museum in order to connect with visitors and offer them a glimpse into their community. The work presented in this article contributes to advancing the state of the art in designing Mixed Reality (MR) entertainment experiences by presenting and discussing Yasmine’s Adventures (YA), a mobile application aiming to extend the museum visitor’s experience into the surrounding neighborhood. YA demonstrates the potential of MR in engaging visitors to explore neglected urban areas. This is achieved by incorporating the opinions of community members, and other contextual information, into a fictional story telling journey, delivered through a MR entertainment experience distributed in real space. Consequently, users are provided with opportunity to connect with enriched portraits of these spaces. Results from a quantitative and qualitative evaluation showed that participants’ perception of the neighborhood was positively affected by the experience, which fostered curiosity and willingness to explore the neighborhood both at the spatial and social levels. By taking the tour, participants increased their interest in interacting with locals and fostered greater knowledge of the area, which they were willing to share after experiencing it.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Social Justice and the Arts

This document is designed to provide a concise, but representative sampling of the many arts programs, projects, networks, and individuals involved in creative, progressive change in their diverse communities. The purpose of this examination is to provide information to enhance the creative work of the Open Buffalo Arts Network as the initiative moves forward. Not meant as an exhaustive list of relevant places to study, this report represents a variety of small and large organizations that are currently addressing issues of justice and opportunity, worker equity, and high road economic development, and similar topics. The programs or policy organizations in this document are arranged by listing first those potentially the most useful to Open Buffalo or like-minded organizations. However, all the programs listed have interest as creative, purposeful, and sometimes “out of the box” ways to advance social justice and the arts