Process Evaluation Insights on Program Implementation

This white paper has the explicit intention to draw lessons learned from the past 30 years of energy efficiency program evaluation in order to facilitate improved program design and implementation going forward. The discussion in this white paper is developed based on interviews with 43 individuals who are either practitioners or users of process and market evaluation. In addition, we obtained references to published materials from our contacts and reviewed conference proceedings dating from 1992 to 2008, which resulted in a review of nearly 100 articles or reports documenting the results of, or commenting on, process and market evaluations

Tilling the Field: Lessons about Philanthropy's Role in School Discipline Reform

Anyone concerned about how the futures of millions of children are jeopardized because of discipline practices that unfairly exclude students from U.S. public schools will be heartened by this story about how transformative change can happen.It's a story of how students and parents, civil rights advocates, academics, policymakers and government came together -- with help from philanthropy -- to advance reform.The linchpin was a four-year, $47 million school discipline reform initiative that Atlantic launched in 2010 to promote policies and practices that would keep vulnerable children in school and on track to graduate and go on to college, rather than on the path to prison.We hope this report will be useful to all who might benefit from our experience:For funders -- to inform strategic choices going forward, to anticipate future challenges, and to consider potentially powerful responses.For grantee and government partners -- to celebrate successes as well as to consider options for refining strategies and tactics going forward.For students of movements that protect the vulnerable -- to understand the complex arc of advocacy as shaped by intentional strategies and tactics as well as history and on-the-ground realities.KEY INSIGHTS1. When philanthropy and the public sector work together, a foundation's role should be more than just paying for a government-initiated project. Philanthropic leaders can add value by helping to define a shared goal and develop a structure for ongoing dialogue and decision making. 2. Philanthropy can help create opportunities for policy change through a strategic combination of investments designed to (re)frame the problem, identify and lift up viable policy alternatives, and apply pressure for change. 3. Grassroots organizing by parents and young people can play a major role in advancing changes to local and national educational policy -- and that impact is amplified when grassroots movements receive philanthropic support

The Wealth of Nations and the Advancement of Collective Security

This thesis will address the economic development of countries from the strategic perspective of the United States, and consider how this development will progress overlaid in the context of the Chinese framework for the projection of national power. Using an inter-disciplinary approach, this research will synthesize sources on national security policy and economics, while seeking a Christian apologetic framework to answer these questions: How can the United States promote the economic development of countries in the Asia-Pacific region using a biblical economic-development model, as a part of its national strategy? This thesis focuses on some of the political and socio-economic ideas which catalyze economic development, explaining how these ideas can be strategically promoted by the US government: using the vehicle of civil-society initiatives in economically under-developed strategic-partner countries to foster economic development and securing their autonomy from emerging hegemonic powers

Conceiving and Executing Operation Gauntlet: The Canadian-Led Raid on Spitzbergen, 1941

In August and September 1941, Canadian Brigadier Arthur Potts led a successful but little known combined operation by a small task force of Canadian, British, and Norwegian troops in the Spitzbergen (Svalbard) archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. After extensive planning and political conversations between Allied civil and military authorities, the operation was re-scaled so that a small, mixed task force would destroy mining and communications infrastructure on this remote cluster of islands, repatriate Russian miners and their families to Russia, and evacuate Norwegian residents to Britain. While a modest non-combat mission, Operation Gauntlet represented Canada’s first expeditionary operation in the Arctic, yielding general lessons about the value of specialized training and representation from appropriate functional trades, unity of command, operational secrecy, and deception, ultimately providing a boost to Canadian morale. Interactions also demonstrated the complexities of coalition warfare as well as the challenges associated with civil-military interaction in the theatre of operations

Taking the Public Trust: How a New York Real Estate Developer Is Threatening State Governments in the West

A wealthy New York developer coordinated an $8 million campaign to enact state ballot initiatives that would eviscerate state environmental safeguards in four Western states and threaten to bankrupt the state treasuries.Organizations connected to Howie Rich have primarily funded the initiatives to allow individual landowners to claim compensation from state and local governments for any decrease in property value as a result of planning, environmental or other government protections. They will be on the ballot in four states on Election Day: Arizona (Proposition 207), California (Proposition 90), Idaho (Proposition 2) and Washington (Initiative 933).Similar initiatives were bounced -- in full or in part -- from ballots in Oklahoma and Nevada because courts there found that the structure of the initiatives violated those states' requirements that ballot initiatives embrace only a single subject. In Montana, a court found that proponents engaged in massive fraud in the petition drive to win a spot on the ballot.The campaigns falsely advertise the initiatives as necessary to prevent governments from condemning property owners' land, but they instead are intended to serve as cash cows for developers. If approved, they would leave governments with an unacceptable choice between rolling back decades of environmental protection rules -- such as those to combat sprawl, protect wetlands and preserve clean air and clean water -- or paying bounties to developers as compensation for restrictions on using their land however they please

A Handbook of Data Collection Tools: Companion to "A Guide to Measuring Advocacy and Policy"

This handbook of data collection tools is intended to serve as a companion to A Guide to Measuring Advocacy and Policy. Organizational Research Services (ORS) developed this guide on behalf of the Annie E. Casey Foundation to support efforts to develop and implement an evaluation of advocacy and policy work. The companion handbook is dedicated to providing examples of practical tools and processes for collecting useful information from policy and advocacy efforts. Included within this handbook are a legislative process tracking log, a meeting observation checklist, a policy brief stakeholder survey, a policy tracking analysis tool, and a policy tracking form.This best practice provides an approach to measure advocacy and policy change efforts, starting with a theory of change, identifying outcome categories, and selecting practical approaches to measurement

Articulating Problems and Markets: A Translation Analysis of Entrepreneurs’ Emergent Value Propositions

In this qualitative study, the authors apply Callon’s sociology of translation to examine how new technology entrepreneurs enact material arguments that involve the first two moments of translation—problematization (defining a market problem) and interessement (defining a market and the firm’s relationship to it) - which in turn are represented in a claim, the value proposition. That emergent claim can then be represented and further changed during pitches. If accepted, it can then lead to the second two moments of translation: enrollment and mobilization. Drawing on written materials, observations, and interviews, we trace how these value propositions were iterated along three paths to better problematize and interesse, articulating a problem and market on which a business could plausibly be built. We conclude by discussing implications for understanding value propositions in entrepreneurship and, more broadly, using the sociology of translation to analyze emergent, material, consequential arguments. The study is based on data collected at the Austin Technology Incubator’s Student Entrepreneur Acceleration and Launch program (ATI SEAL) at The University of Texas at Austin.IC2 Institut