Utah's Economy: The Future Is Here

Provides a snapshot of the state's working poor families and educational and economic trends. Makes policy recommendations for education reforms to meet the needs of a knowledge-based economy, tax reforms to provide work incentives, and support services

Food Systems & Bonds

The following white paper is part of a series that builds the case for creating a defined food systems asset class in order to support the market growth of robust food systems throughout the country. There are significant opportunities for development finance agencies at the state and local level to support food businesses and projects.This paper focuses specifically on bond financing, which is  onsidered a 'bedrock tool' by the Council of Development Finance Agencies (CDFA) for the historic and foundational role bonds have played in public financing. Background information on bonds is provided, including different types of bonds, the key players involved in bond deals, and the process by which a bond is sold. Case studies will demonstrate the way in which various types of bonds can support food and agriculture businesses and projects, and also highlight sectors of the food system that could be utilizing bonds more frequently

CDFA Food Finance White Paper Series: Advancing Food Systems Through Development Finance

Announcing the release of the sixth and final white paper of the CDFA Food Finance White Paper Series, Advancing Food Systems Through Development Finance! Research on food systems finance and leadership with pilot projects has positioned CDFA to identify three key strategies for a comprehensive approach for restoring America's local food systems: Reframe food systems development as infrastructure and economic development; Build effective relationships and partnerships across the entire food system; and Plan for strategic food systems financing. The case studies showcase how such strategies can be put to work rebuilding the food system and emphasize the groundbreaking potential of greater connections between development finance and local food systems. Every organization, community, economic development agency, and small business working in the food sector should adopt the Reframe, Build, Plan approach to expand financing and drive capital into the local food system.

OSU InFACT Economic Development Financing Plan

CDFA worked with The Ohio State University's Initiative for Food and AgriCultural Transformation (InFACT) to develop an economic development finance plan that creates a new financing entity to build a more robust food system across the state of Ohio by unlocking capital for food-related businesses, projects, and infrastructure. This approach also integrated InFACT's technical assistance programming and supported generous research opportunities for the University's faculty and students

Food Finance Detroit: A Landscape Map for Financing Detroits Local Food System

With funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, CDFA is researching how development finance agencies can become more engaged in local and regional food systems. CDFA aims to advance opportunities and leverage existing financing streams to scale local and regional food systems by increasing access to healthy foods and creating new living wage and accessible jobs in communities across the country.

Rhetorics of Life and Death: Towards a Zoerhetorical Theory

This dissertation develops a theory that accounts for the rhetorical practices that constitute living entities as sacred, expendable, or somewhere in between. I forward a concept of zoerhetorics, defined as legible, consequential, public, and partisan discourses or practices that raise or lower the status of entities along lines intelligible to biopolitical regimes of living. These biopolitical trenches of difference include gender, race, and ability. Joining biopolitics and posthumanist rhetorical theory, zoerhetorical theory attempts to understand how lives come to matter along the status-laden thresholds of humanity and citizenship. The theory of zoerhetorics forwarded here draws on the biopolitical/necropolitical production of unequal populations in order to explain the processes by which some living entities obtain higher or lower statuses than other living entities. In order to ramify zoerhetorical theory, I analyze the trajectories of zoerhetorics across three field-assemblages in the contemporary United States. The first case study explores the ways in which rhetorics at the National Memorial for the Unborn in Chattanooga, Tennessee inflate the status of fetal entities. By employing the zoerhetorical tropes (or zoetropes) of naming, apostrophe (en-voicing), and prosopopeia (en-facing), the Memorial for the Unborn inflates the status of the fetal entity, with resulting consequences of livability distributed across various groups of entities. The second case study explores the zoerhetorics of CIA drone strike targets in Pakistan, as represented in the New York Times. Across dichotomies of innocence (militant/civilian) and social belonging (U.S. citizen/Other), American-identified drone rhetorics produce racialized bodies for targeting in Pakistan. The third case study explores zoerhetorics of populations encouraged toward \u22life\u22 as they exercise in upscale athletic clubs in Boulder, Colorado. Through zoe/rhetorics of training and whiteness, vitality-performing biocitizens maintain and justify accumulated embodied privilege through practices of vitality. At each of these sites, zoerhetorics operate in prescriptive, iterative ways for entities with a contested relationship to humanity: the fetus, the drone target, and the vital biocitizen. The final chapter concludes with a series of topoi (topical resources), horoi (boundary markers), and qualities of zoerhetorics, as well as recommended future directions for building zoerhetorical theory

Powerful learning at SEA

The Sea Education Association (SEA) has an international reputation for creating powerful learning experiences in semester-long programs that involve conducting scientific research while sailing tall ships. To what extent, how and why these experiences occur was studied through interviews, extant data analysis, and participant observation of the SEA Semester program Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Themes consistent with past studies of powerful learning emerged, for example, authenticity, openness, relationships with others, and intense engagement, while outcomes continued to be highly individual. Relationships among these themes point toward complexity, design, and systemic design and suggest seeds of a theory of powerful learning systems.