Connecting Youth to Opportunity: Better Understanding the Needs of Disconnected Young People in Washington, DC

Educational attainment defines workforce success, and a robust workforce drives economic stability and growth. Therefore, everyone has a stake in developing systems that promote strong education outcomes and successful transitions to the labor market: businesses and employers that aim to simultaneously build up the next generation of consumers and strengthen the future workforce; elected officials who wish to sustain the city's current prosperity and growth; parents and concerned community members who want a vibrant, healthy community; and youth themselves, who by and large want to lead stable, productive lives.Momentum has been building -- now is the time for the District of Columbia to develop such a system. Recent studies suggest thousands of youth between the ages of 16 -- 24 are disconnected, which is commonly understood to mean young people who are neither in school nor working. High dropout and unemployment rates and low post-secondary education attainment rates among District youth have led to a series of thoughtful and focused examinations of how the District of Columbia can reconnect youth to opportunity. Raise DC, the District's public/private partnership dedicated to establishing cradle to career alignment, is leading the charge with its focus on youth reconnection. This -- combined with the engagement of the foundation sector on the needs of disconnected youth and the recognition of other government and community working groups on this emerging and high-need sector of the youth population -- has opened the window of opportunity to combat youth disconnection through cohesive, evidence-driven, and cross-sector systems change

Putting It All Together: Guiding Principles for Quality After-School Programs Serving Preteens

Successfully navigating early adolescence depends, in large part, on the availability of safe and engaging activities and supportive relationships with adults, yet many preteens have limited access to positive supports and opportunities -- such as high-quality after-school programs -- that could put them on a path to success. Funders, policymakers and practitioners share the common goal of supporting strategies that will have the most long-lasting positive effects on young people.Recognizing this, the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health commissioned P/PV to identify the characteristics of quality after-school programs that are linked to positive outcomes for preteens. Based on the latest research and experience in the field, P/PV developed the publication, Putting It All Together: Guiding Principles for Quality After-School Programs Serving Preteens, along with a companion Resource Guide (http://www.lpfch.org/afterschool/resourceguide.html) that includes links to research and tools to strengthen programs.Putting It All Together focuses on six after-school program components associated with positive outcomes for preteens:Focused and Intentional Strategy: Programs have a clear set of goals, target specific skills, and deliberately plan all aspects of the program with a youth development framework in mind.Exposure: Programs are designed to: a) provide preteens with a sufficient number of hours per week over an extended period of time, that matches program outcome goals; and b) allow preteens to attend a variety of activities.Supportive Relationships: Programs emphasize positive adult-youth relationships regardless of the curriculum.Family Engagement: Programs strive to include families through various strategies, such as clear communication and a welcoming environment.Cultural Competence: Programs have diverse staff whose backgrounds are reflective of participants and who create practices and policies that: a) make services available to and inclusive of a variety of populations; and b) help participants understand and value a broad range of cultures.Continuous Program Improvement: Programs strengthen quality through an ongoing and integrated process of targeted staff training, coaching and monitoring, and data collection and analysis.While a host of factors, including organizational capacity, the needs of the youth served and the resources available, all play a role in determining a program's ability to achieve its goals, research suggests that these guiding principles are essential for program quality. That quality, in turn, is the foundation for positive results for youth.NOTE: This version of Putting It All Together contains a full list of endnotes and references, which we chose to omit from hard copies of the report, in the interest of brevity

The Poverty of Wealth and Income in the United States

An alternative poverty rate was calculated using poverty thresholds from the U.S. Census Bureau to assess income poverty and a similar set of thresholds at four months’ of the poverty threshold for annual income to assess wealth (i.e. net worth) poverty. Using point estimates derived from the multiple imputations of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) between the years of 1989 and 2007, the findings revealed the percentage of households in poverty by both measures was 6% in 2007 compared to 11.1% of households experiencing poverty of income only and 22.4% experiencing a poverty of at least one of the measures. The author assessed the demographics of the households experiencing poverty of both income and wealth and found a larger racial gap for African Americans and Hispanics than income poverty alone, support for the lifecycle hypothesis, and the importance of home ownership in lower poverty rates among other factors

Choice and the composition of general practice patient registers

Choice of general practice (GP) in the National Health Service (NHS), the UKs universal healthcare service, is a core element in the current trajectory of NHS policy. This paper uses an accessibility-based approach to investigate the pattern of patient choice that exists for GPs in the London Borough of Southwark. Using a spatial model of GP accessibility it is shown that particular population groups make non-accessibility based decisions when choosing a GP. These patterns are assessed by considering differences in the composition of GP patient registers between the current patient register, and a modelled patient register configured for optimal access to GPs. The patient population is classified in two ways for the purpose of this analysis: by geodemographic group, and by ethnicity. The paper considers choice in healthcare for intra-urban areas, focusing on the role of accessibility and equity

Benchmarking Diversity: A First Look at New York City Foundations and Nonprofits

New York City foundations and nonprofit organizations have racially diverse staffs, according to a new report by Philanthropy New York and the Foundation Center, but this diversity decreases at higher levels of seniority. A substantial number of foundations and nonprofits are tracking information about the racial and ethnic makeup of the grantees and populations that they respectively serve. The study is the first of its kind in New York City and the nation to examine "both sides" of the equation -- with survey data from 95 grantmaking foundations and 540 nonprofit organizations in the five boroughs

The Influence Of Television Pacing On Attention And Executive Functioning

Television shows, especially cartoons, are one of the most common types of media in children’s lives. Although there is a well-established connection between television exposure and difficulties with attention, it is unclear if all types of television are equally impactful. Given the amount of time children are exposed to television, there is a need to better understand which components of shows may or may not impact one’s attentional and executive functioning abilities. One such factor is the pace of the content. The current study expands on this limited area of the literature by utilizing a 9-minute 30-second long cartoon video, which has been edited at both a fast and slow pace, to examine the influence of pace on measures of attention and executive functioning (the Stop Signal Task and the Attentional Network Test) in both Typically Developing children (N = 24) and children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD; N = 17). Two (group; children with ADHD vs. Typically Developing children) x two (pace; fast vs. slow) ANCOVAs were conducted separately with each outcome measure as the dependent variable, group (ADHD and Typically Developing) and pace (fast and slow) as the independent variables, and IQ and Internalizing Problems as covariates. Findings suggested that although the majority of results were non-significant, effect sizes for group and pace (and associated covariates) varied across outcome measures. The Alerting and Executive Control ANT Networks also had non-significant but small effect sizes for the group by pace interactions. Planned comparisons of estimated marginal means revealed a non-significant and small effect of pace for children with ADHD, but no effect for Typically Developing children, for both interactions. Implications for those who work with and care for children are reviewed, and study limitations and future research directions are discussed

Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity). Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa

The neurological underpinnings of cluttering: Some initial findings

Background Cluttering is a fluency disorder characterised by overly rapid or jerky speech patterns that compromise intelligibility. The neural correlates of cluttering are unknown but theoretical accounts implicate the basal ganglia and medial prefrontal cortex. Dysfunction in these brain areas would be consistent with difficulties in selection and control of speech motor programs that are characteristic of speech disfluencies in cluttering. There is a surprising lack of investigation into this disorder using modern imaging techniques. Here, we used functional MRI to investigate the neural correlates of cluttering. Method We scanned 17 adults who clutter and 17 normally fluent control speakers matched for age and sex. Brain activity was recorded using sparse-sampling functional MRI while participants viewed scenes and either (i) produced overt speech describing the scene or (ii) read out loud a sentence provided that described the scene. Speech was recorded and analysed off line. Differences in brain activity for each condition compared to a silent resting baseline and between conditions were analysed for each group separately (cluster-forming threshold Z > 3.1, extent p 30 voxels, uncorrected). Results In both conditions, the patterns of activation in adults who clutter and control speakers were strikingly similar, particularly at the cortical level. Direct group comparisons revealed greater activity in adults who clutter compared to control speakers in the lateral premotor cortex bilaterally and, as predicted, on the medial surface (pre-supplementary motor area). Subcortically, adults who clutter showed greater activity than control speakers in the basal ganglia. Specifically, the caudate nucleus and putamen were overactive in adults who clutter for the comparison of picture description with sentence reading. In addition, adults who clutter had reduced activity relative to control speakers in the lateral anterior cerebellum bilaterally. Eleven of the 17 adults who clutter also stuttered. This comorbid diagnosis of stuttering was found to contribute to the abnormal overactivity seen in the group of adults who clutter in the right ventral premotor cortex and right anterior cingulate cortex. In the remaining areas of abnormal activity seen in adults who clutter compared to controls, the subgroup who clutter and stutter did not differ from the subgroup who clutter but do not stutter. Conclusions Our findings were in good agreement with theoretical predictions regarding the neural correlates of cluttering. We found evidence for abnormal function in the basal ganglia and their cortical output target, the medial prefrontal cortex. The findings are discussed in relation to models of cluttering that point to problems with motor control of speech