Leaving the Street: Young Fathers Move from Hustling to Legitimate Work

This report explores employment and hustling among men in Fathers at Work, a three-year national demonstration designed to help low-income, noncustodial fathers secure living-wage jobs, increase their involvement with their children and manage their child support obligations. As part of P/PVs evaluation of the initiative, researchers undertook an in-depth interview study. When they learned that more than three quarters of all Fathers at Work participants had been convicted of a crime, they focused the interview study on 27 men who had relied on hustlingprimarily selling drugs, but also other illegal activitiesas a source of income. The report describes how the men became involved in hustling and what led them to seek alternatives. Participants hustling and work experiences are detailed, with four distinct patterns emergingresearchers found that these patterns appeared to influence early employment outcomes. The report closes with a look at the ongoing challenges faced by the men, and recommendations for programs working with similar populations

Teaching in a Total Institution: Toward a Pedagogy of Care in Prison Classrooms

This paper argues that a pedagogy of care can help reduce some of the human damage caused by incarceration. Rather than casting incarcerated men and women outside of the moral community and turning prisoners into a “them,” a pedagogy of care promotes inclusion and the creation of human connections. Recognizing prisoners’ humanity helps to dissolve some of the effects of institutionalization and may foster rehabilitation. Instead of limiting teachers to providers of information, as a traditional classroom expects, a pedagogy of care elevates teachers to human constituents of a learning community. This paper outlines a pedagogy of care in the teaching of college mathematics in medium and maximum-security prisons. It is based upon knowledge gained through 15 years of teaching in traditional college classrooms and seven years in prisons. The basic components of the pedagogy of care covered in this paper include communicating to students that learning matters, fostering high expectations, creating a welcoming space, and engaging student interest

Growing Bigger Better: Lessons from Experience Corps Expansion in Five Cities Executive Summary

This summary presents key findings from the full report, Growing Bigger Better, which examines the Experience Corps programs four-year expansion initiative. The summary briefly considers whether and how the local sites, and the program as a whole, benefited from the expansion effort and presents lessons that are relevant to other programs considering expansion

Growing Bigger Better: Lessons from Experience Corps' Expansion in Five Cities

Going to scale often entails replicating a program in new locations, but it can also involve efforts to expand a programs reach in existing locations, enabling it to have a greater effect on communities already being served. This was the case with Experience Corps, a Civic Ventures program that enlists older adults as volunteers to help strengthen literacy and other skills of elementary school students in low-income neighborhoods. Beginning in 2001, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Atlantic Philanthropies, Experience Corps embarked on a four-year initiative to expand in five cities. P/PV examined the five sites efforts to increase the size of their volunteer pool and expand to additional schools, manage their larger and more complex programs, and raise sufficient funds to meet annual goals and sustain growth.Growing Bigger Better considers how the sites initial readiness to expand, the organizational resources they possessed, and the receptivity of the external environment (i.e., the local school districts) shaped the sites progress. The report reflects on whether and how the local sites, and the program as a whole, benefited from the expansion effort, drawing out lessons that are relevant to other programs considering expansion. It concludes that while program expansion is a major undertaking, the Experience Corps expansion initiative clearly demonstrates how programs can become stronger, more energized and even more innovative through carefully planned and managed growth, and thus extend the benefits of their services to larger numbers of individuals and communities

Building Stronger Nonprofits Through Better Financial Management, Executive Summary

This executive summary presents a summary of early lessons from The Wallace Foundation's four-year Strengthening Financial Management in Out-of-School Time initiative (SFM). SFM was designed to improve the financial management systems of 26 well-respected Chicago nonprofits that provide out-of-school-time services

Building Stronger Nonprofits Through Better Financial Management

The Wallace Foundation's four-year Strengthening Financial Management in Out-of-School Time initiative(SFM) was designed to improve the financial management systems of 26 well-respected Chicago nonprofits that provide out-of-school-time (OST) services. SFM grew out of the Foundation's longstanding commitment to improving the quality of services for youth during nonschool hours and the realization that even successful nonprofits face financial management challenges that have an impact on their ability to achieve their missions. To address these challenges, the initiative is working to reform public and private funding practices that strain OST organizations' financial management capacity and providing participating organizations with financial management training and peer networking opportunities (using one of two models that vary in intensity and in the balance of individual vs. group-based training and support)

The Relationship Between Motor Planning and Freezing of Gait in Parkinson’s Disease

Objective: To examine how a cued change in motor plan influences Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with freezing of gait (FOG) (PD FOG; n=10), compared with those without FOG (PD non-FOG; n=10) and healthy controls (n=10). Methods: Participants walked through a doorway in three experimental conditions: no cue; cue before gait initiation; and cue after gait initiation. The light cue was presented at the end of the pathway and signified that individuals must walk to the cue, turn around and return to starting position. Results: Step-to-step variability (a known precursor to FOG) revealed a significant main effect of group (F2,27=32.83, p\u3c0.001), where PD FOG walked with greater step length variability than PD non-FOG and the control group. A significant interaction (F4,54=3.035, p=0.025) demonstrated that only the PD FOG group was most variable when the cue was present before gait initiation. Conclusion: This study concludes that motor planning deficits affect gait, specifically in individuals who experience FOG. This may have important implications for the design of therapeutic interventions in PD FOG

Predicting the readability of transparent text

Will a simple global masking model based on image detection be successful at predicting the readability of transparent text? Text readability was measured for two types of transparent text: additive (as occurs in head-up displays) and multiplicative (which occurs in see-through liquid crystal display virtual reality displays). Text contrast and background texture were manipulated. Data from two previous experiments were also included (one using very low contrasts on plain backgrounds, and the other using higher-contrast opaque text on both plain and textured backgrounds). All variables influenced readability in at least an interactive manner. When there were background textures, the global masking index (that combines text contrast and background root mean square contrast) was a good predictor of search times (r = 0.89). When the masking was adjusted to include the text pixels as well as the background pixels in computations of mean luminance and contrast variability, predictability improved further (r = 0.91)