Community Foundations as Community Leaders: A Comprehensive Literature Review and Future Framework

Community foundations claim to play an integral role in fostering philanthropy at a community level all across the United States. Community foundations have three distinct operational roles, including asset building, grantmaking, and community leadership. While asset building and grantmaking have methods available to quantify and measure their impact, community leadership has remained an elusive concept for community foundations for many years.This report shares the background on community leadership, as a concept, and covers the history of how community foundations have interpreted the role of community leadership over the years.While critiques are made of current frameworks and historical approaches, it is all done in a good-faith effort in order to show how the community foundation field has collectively progressed, and what work still needs to be done for community foundations to fully embrace their community leadership role - and that role is going to look different for each community foundation.The report includes a conceptual framework of community leadership based on existing studies and practical guidelines, including the use of civic leadership, collective leadership, and community engagement. The framework provides an opportunity to apply leadership at the institutional level and assists in examining nonprofit organizations as the unit of analysis, thus provide a more operationalized vision of community leadership

LGBTQ+ Nonprofit Organizations in the United States: Growth, Trends, Concerns, and the Outlook for Philanthropic Giving

To date, very little research has been conducted on LGBTQ+ nonprofits (Meyer, Dale, & Willis, 2021; Surfus, 2013) and how they function. For example, in a recent study of academic literature, Meyer et al. (2021) discovered only 40 academic articles published within the last 46 years on various LGBTQ+ issues and how they intersect withnonprofits. Just over 25% of these articles were published in the last five years. Furthermore, before 2000, most articles only focused on HIV/AIDS. Therefore, many unknowns exist regarding LGBTQ+ nonprofits and how they function as entities.As a certified LGBT Business Enterprise (LGBTBE®) through the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) Supplier Diversity Initiative, IPM Advancement has a passion and history of working with LGBTQ+ nonprofits. With 2-5% of the general population of every state identifying as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, we felt there was a need to better understand how these organizations operate and identify issues that would be helpful to share with these organizations, LGBTQ+ donors, policymakers, and other stakeholders concerned with the quality of life for members of the LBGTQ community.The report is designed to better understand the number of nonprofit organizations that are working on LGBTQ+ and equality issues nationwide, and where those organizations have impact. The report offers unique insights into organization growth, trends, concerns and the outlook for LGBTQ+ nonprofits related to philanthropic giving. Of particular interest is how engagement with LGBTQ+ nonprofits has changed since the 2015 marriage equality ruling

Effect of Interlayers on Mechanical Properties and Interfacial Stress Transfer of 2D Layered Graphene-Polymer Nanocompsites

Graphene, a monolayer of sp2-hybridized carbon atoms arranged in a two-dimensional (2D) lattice, is one of the most important 2D nanomaterials and has attracted tremendous attentions due to its unique geometric characteristics and exceptional mechanical properties. One of the most promising applications of this 2D nanomaterial is in polymer nanocomposites, in which the ultra-stiff, ultra-thin graphene layers function as reinforcement fillers. However, two significant questions remain to be answered: (1) whether the mechanical behaviors of 2D graphene reinforced nanocomposites can be analyzed by the convention composite theory, which is developed primarily for one-dimensional (1D) fiber-type of fillers, and (2) what are the effects of the “interlayers” in those 2D, ultra-thin, layered fillers on mechanical properties of the nanocomposites. Composites with both aligned and random-distributed graphene are analyzed using Tandon-Weng and Halpin-Tsai models. For composites reinforced with multi-layered graphene, the presence of soft “interlayers” needs to be considered. These layered graphene are treated as the “effective” reinforcement fillers and the moduli of such structures can be predicted by the Arridge model. Finally, the efficiency of reinforcement by 2D, layered graphene in polymer matrix is examined by using the finite element method. The accuracy of the finite element method is verified with the conventional Shear-Lag theory on a monolayer graphene. The distributions of interfacial shear strain are computed for composites reinforced with various layered graphene

Rural Philanthropy in the Southwest

Rural communities, while often small, have a large impact on the livelihood of all Americans. As resource centers for water, food, energy, and recreation, rural areas provide many of the resources for communities in urban, suburban, and rural settings to thrive. In fact, 97% of the United States is technically geographically defined as rural,  with much of the Southwest being considered rural, by measures of both geography and population density. Approximately 1 in 5 Americans live in rural communities,  representing 59.5 million individuals. Philanthropy Southwest, with funding support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and administrative coordination from the United Philanthropy Forum, hired Dr. Colton Strawser with Colton Strawser Consulting and the Community Leadership, Engagement, and Research (CLEAR) Institute to do an exploratory study of rural philanthropy in the southwestern United States.  The purpose of this study was to capture the current practice of a small group of foundations, understand innovative approaches to rural grantmaking, and seek wisdom on how funders can shift their grantmaking to support rural communities through different approaches via grantmaking, community leadership initiatives, and community capacity building

Lower Bounds for Structuring Unreliable Radio Networks

In this paper, we study lower bounds for randomized solutions to the maximal independent set (MIS) and connected dominating set (CDS) problems in the dual graph model of radio networks---a generalization of the standard graph-based model that now includes unreliable links controlled by an adversary. We begin by proving that a natural geographic constraint on the network topology is required to solve these problems efficiently (i.e., in time polylogarthmic in the network size). We then prove the importance of the assumption that nodes are provided advance knowledge of their reliable neighbors (i.e, neighbors connected by reliable links). Combined, these results answer an open question by proving that the efficient MIS and CDS algorithms from [Censor-Hillel, PODC 2011] are optimal with respect to their dual graph model assumptions. They also provide insight into what properties of an unreliable network enable efficient local computation.Comment: An extended abstract of this work appears in the 2014 proceedings of the International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC

Compressive Inverse Scattering II. SISO Measurements with Born scatterers

Inverse scattering methods capable of compressive imaging are proposed and analyzed. The methods employ randomly and repeatedly (multiple-shot) the single-input-single-output (SISO) measurements in which the probe frequencies, the incident and the sampling directions are related in a precise way and are capable of recovering exactly scatterers of sufficiently low sparsity. For point targets, various sampling techniques are proposed to transform the scattering matrix into the random Fourier matrix. The results for point targets are then extended to the case of localized extended targets by interpolating from grid points. In particular, an explicit error bound is derived for the piece-wise constant interpolation which is shown to be a practical way of discretizing localized extended targets and enabling the compressed sensing techniques. For distributed extended targets, the Littlewood-Paley basis is used in analysis. A specially designed sampling scheme then transforms the scattering matrix into a block-diagonal matrix with each block being the random Fourier matrix corresponding to one of the multiple dyadic scales of the extended target. In other words by the Littlewood-Paley basis and the proposed sampling scheme the different dyadic scales of the target are decoupled and therefore can be reconstructed scale-by-scale by the proposed method. Moreover, with probes of any single frequency \om the coefficients in the Littlewood-Paley expansion for scales up to \om/(2\pi) can be exactly recovered.Comment: Add a new section (Section 3) on localized extended target

Workplace Democracy and the Problem of Equality

Purpose: Professional communicators are becoming more invested in unique configurations of power in organizations, including non-hierarchical and democratic workplaces. While organizations dedicated to democratic processes may enact power differently than conventional organizations, they may fall short of practicing equality. This article explains the differences in non-hierarchical workplaces, considers businesses where democracy is a goal, and argues for considering equality as a habitual practice, particularly when writing regulatory documents. Method: We conduct a review of the literature on non-hierarchical workplaces and organizational democracy, applying Jacques Rancière’s concept of equality to two examples (one using primary data collection and one using secondary data) of two cooperatives where organizational democracy is integral to the design of the business. Results: The literature review exposes an interest in mêtis (cunning, craftiness, flexibility) as vital to practitioner success in non-hierarchical workplaces; however, this article demonstrates that mêtis does not prevent inequality, even in organizations expressly committed to workplace democracy. Conclusion: Professional communicators need to consider equality not solely as a structural resource (as in rules, laws, policies) but as a habitual practice to cultivate alongside other characteristics and frameworks important to a professional communicator’s toolkit

Condition Relative to Phenotype for Bass Populations in Southern Arkansas Lakes

Southern Arkansas reservoir largemouth bass populations (Micropterus salmoides) are often supplemented with stocks of Florida bass (M. floridanus) in an attempt to boost the frequency of hybrid and trophy bass. Stocking rates of Florida bass among these lakes are highly variable. We determined bass phenotype composition among 12 lake populations based upon stocking protocols: exclusively Florida bass, primarily Florida bass, mixed stocking protocol and primarily largemouth bass. We also compared condition among phenotypes (n =2,100) to test for hybrid or phenotype vigor. Mean relative weight of bass for most lakes but SWEPCO Lake (mean Wr = 72) were ≥ 90. Phenotype frequencies were inconsistent with FB stocking histories. No lake population was comprised only with pure Florida bass despite four of the lakes being stocked solely with this bass species. Numbers of F1 hybrid bass were low for all lake samples. Relative weight among phenotypes was also inconsistent among lake samples, allowing no conclusions to be made regarding relative weight and hybrid vigor or phenotype. Further testing increasing both the number of lake samples and sample size within lakes may provide insight into these questions of stocking effectiveness of Florida bass and hybrid or phenotype vigor

Final Report: Efficient Databases for MPC Microdata

The purpose of this grant was to develop the theory and practice of high-performance databases for massive streamed datasets. Over the last three years, we have developed fast indexing technology, that is, technology for rapidly ingesting data and storing that data so that it can be efficiently queried and analyzed. During this project we developed the technology so that high-bandwidth data streams can be indexed and queried efficiently. Our technology has been proven to work data sets composed of tens of billions of rows when the data streams arrives at over 40,000 rows per second. We achieved these numbers even on a single disk driven by two cores. Our work comprised (1) new write-optimized data structures with better asymptotic complexity than traditional structures, (2) implementation, and (3) benchmarking. We furthermore developed a prototype of TokuFS, a middleware layer that can handle microdata I/O packaged up in an MPI-IO abstraction