The Game of Credit: A High Stakes Game That Perpetuates the Racial Wealth Gap

Everyone deserves the opportunity to build a financially secure future for themselves and their families. Access to equal opportunities is the cornerstone of America's core values and is also a necessity to growing a healthy economy. Unfortunately, the reality is a far shot from that piece of the American dream. Income and wealth inequality are at levels that we have not seen since the Great Depression. The Great Recession further expanded an already growing racial wealth gap. Many families have little hope of upward mobility. In fact, day-to-day life is more expensive for those struggling to make ends meet due to unequal access to the tools we all need to build financially secure futures. This includes a basic checking & savings account, a retirement savings account, a college savings account, home and student loans with low interest rates, and a solid credit score that gives you access to these important loans. Many households of color have been denied access to these crucial financial tools needed to build credit and put them on a path to financial health. As this report will show, this inequity has led to a stark racial disparity in credit scores as well as related indicators, such as education level, student loan debt, employment, income, homeownership, and home loan debt. Fortunately, there are programs and policies that can help close the gap and therefore strengthen the economy, which are also outlined in this report

Teaching creatively, teaching for creativity : QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty Showcase Panel

In this panel, we showcase approaches to teaching for creativity in disciplines of the Media, Entertainment and Creative Arts School and the School of Design within the Creative Industries Faculty (CIF) at QUT. The Faculty is enormously diverse, with 4,000 students enrolled across a total of 20 disciplines. Creativity is a unifying concept in CIF, both as a graduate attribute, and as a key pedagogic principle. We take as our point of departure the assertion that it is not sufficient to assume that students of tertiary courses in creative disciplines are ‘naturally’ creative. Rather, teachers in higher education must embrace their roles as facilitators of development and learning for the creative workforce, including working to build creative capacity (Howkins, 2009). In so doing, we move away from Renaissance notions of creativity as an individual genius, a disposition or attribute which cannot be learned, towards a 21st century conceptualisation of creativity as highly collaborative, rhizomatic, and able to be developed through educational experiences (see, for instance, Robinson, 2006; Craft; 2001; McWilliam & Dawson, 2008). It has always been important for practitioners of the arts and design to be creative. Under the national innovation agenda (Bradley et al, 2008) and creative industries policy (e.g., Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2008; Office for the Arts, 2011), creativity has been identified as a key determinant of economic growth, and thus developing students’ creativity has now become core higher education business across all fields. Even within the arts and design, professionals are challenged to be creative in new ways, for new purposes, in different contexts, and using new digital tools and platforms. Teachers in creative disciplines may have much to offer to the rest of the higher education sector, in terms of designing and modelling innovative and best practice pedagogies for the development of student creative capability. Information and Communication Technologies such as mobile learning, game-based learning, collaborative online learning tools and immersive learning environments offer new avenues for creative learning, although analogue approaches may also have much to offer, and should not be discarded out of hand. Each panelist will present a case study of their own approach to teaching for creativity, and will address the following questions with respect to their case: 1. What conceptual view of creativity does the case reflect? 2. What pedagogical approaches are used, and why were these chosen? What are the roles of innovative learning approaches, including ICTs, if any? 3. How is creativity measured or assessed? How do students demonstrate creativity? We seek to identify commonalities and contrasts between and among the pedagogic case studies, and to answer the question: what can we learn about teaching creatively and teaching for creativity from CIF best practice

Harvest Commons: Housing, Health, and Financial Security Under One Roof

In this report, IMPACT sets the stage for an evaluation of Harvest Commons, a supportive housing program that brings together Heartland Housing, Heartland Human Care Services, Heartland Health Outreach and St. Leonard's Ministries -- all in one building (with garden and chicken coop)! Through resident surveys, program data analysis, and staff interviews, we learned that living at Harvest Commons is making a significant, meaningful impact on residents' lives, especially in a few key areas: stability and safety, and health and wellness. Read more about the building, residents, services, and impacts of the program in the report

Running on Empty: Nutritional Access for Children in Cook County, IL, Executive Summary

In an effort to make informed program expansion and improvement decisions, the Greater Chicago Food Depository commissioned the Social IMPACT Research Center of Heartland Alliance to conduct a study of child nutrition program coverage and child nutrition and hunger in Cook County, Illinois. ** This study examined the geographic coverage of child nutrition programs to identify areas that have the greatest number of unserved children and have the worst program coverage. The study also took an in-depth look at the nutritional lives of children attending summer nutrition programs. Insights in these two areas are vital to helping organizations like the Greater Chicago Food Depository make sound programmatic and expansion decisions that will best meet the nutritional and hunger needs of Cook County's most vulnerable children

The seamless integration of Web3D technologies with university curricula to engage the changing student cohort

The increasing tendency of many university students to study at least some courses at a distance limits their opportunities for the interactions fundamental to learning. Online learning can assist but relies heavily on text, which is limiting for some students. The popularity of computer games, especially among the younger students, and the emergence of networked games and game-like virtual worlds offers opportunities for enhanced interaction in educational applications. For virtual worlds to be widely adopted in higher education it is desirable to have approaches to design and development that are responsive to needs and limited in their resource requirements. Ideally it should be possible for academics without technical expertise to adapt virtual worlds to support their teaching needs. This project identified Web3D, a technology that is based on the X3D standards and which presents 3D virtual worlds within common web browsers, as an approach worth exploring for educational application. The broad goals of the project were to produce exemplars of Web3D for educational use, together with development tools and associated resources to support non-technical academic adopters, and to promote an Australian community of practice to support broader adoption of Web3D in education. During the first year of the project exemplar applications were developed and tested. The Web3D technology was found to be still in a relatively early stage of development in which the application of standards did not ensure reliable operation in different environments. Moreover, ab initio development of virtual worlds and associated tools proved to be more demanding of resources than anticipated and was judged unlikely in the near future to result in systems that non-technical academics could use with confidence. In the second year the emphasis moved to assisting academics to plan and implement teaching in existing virtual worlds that provided relatively easy to use tools for customizing an environment. A project officer worked with participating academics to support the teaching of significant elements of courses within Second LifeTM. This approach was more successful in producing examples of good practice that could be shared with and emulated by other academics. Trials were also conducted with ExitRealityTM, a new Australian technology that presents virtual worlds in a web browser. Critical factors in the success of the project included providing secure access to networked computers with the necessary capability; negotiating the complexity of working across education, design of virtual worlds, and technical requirements; and supporting participants with professional development in the technology and appropriate pedagogy for the new environments. Major challenges encountered included working with experimental technologies that are evolving rapidly and deploying new networked applications on secure university networks. The project has prepared the way for future expansion in the use of virtual worlds for teaching at USQ and has contributed to the emergence of a national network of tertiary educators interested in the educational applications of virtual worlds

Meaning-filled metaphors enabling schools to create enhanced learning cultures

It is interesting to speculate on metaphor as an instrument capable of facilitating actions leading to powerful consequences. Metaphors remain in the consciousness longer than facts and therefore actions based on specific facts in one context become transferrable to another context through the use of metaphoric symbolism. Current research in schools that have undertaken the Innovative Designs for Enhancing Achievements in Schools (IDEAS) improvement process indicate that collectively developed metaphor use has the dynamic power to facilitate cognitive connections across whole school communities. In so doing, schools engaged in the IDEAS process are developing and utilising significant new knowledge for whole school achievement through cultures of collaboration and commitment. This chapter recognises that when schools are constantly bombarded with the need to undertake substantial changes in practice, the utilisation of a contextual unifying metaphor is capable of assisting wide spread and aligned change processes to unfold

An economic assessment of a proposed dry land Leucaena development within the Brigalow Belt of Central Queensland: An operational case study perspective

This following case study focuses on beef production using dry land leucaena to increase production on a property of alluvial scrub flats south of Biloela, Queensland. The investment proposal is for development of the property through the growing of the fodder legume tree crop leucaena. The benefit of finishing cattle on leucaena is estimated using partial budgeting techniques. The case study reports on aspects of agronomic, managerial, production and economic considerations for 174 hectares of dry land leucaena development, staged over four years. A discounted cash flow approach was applied in order to model expected returns over time. Net cash flows between the existing grass based operation and the proposed leucaena supplemented operation are estimated. Comparison between grass only and leucaena supplemented gross margins provide the marginal benefit from developing leucaena. These future cash flows were discounted to assign their present values. Productive capacity estimates were used in the analysis. Expected yields and weight gain from grass fed operations were available from detailed management records. However, given the lack of scientifically verified data on expected leucaena production across land types, production estimates were based on localised production results and sourced from technical extension experts. The use of adult equivalents and accounting for the opportunity cost of maintaining particular herd structures allows for direct comparison of gross margins across different land types and herd structures. By choosing to plant leucaena, the owner is $144,939 better off, achieves a 22% internal rate of return, a benefit-cost ratio of 3.2:1, and breaks even on the investment in seven years.Production Economics,

2010 Report on Illinois Poverty

This 2010 report caps a decade of Heartland Alliance's annual reports on poverty. The project was initiated at a time when economic prosperity seemed widespread and the future outlook was infused with optimism. The goal with these reports at that time was simple: to serve as a caution that the rising tide of prosperity in the late 1990s had not lifted all boats and that many in our communities were being left behind.Today the situation is very different. The Great Recession has crumbled economic stability for millions of families in the form of massive job loss, cut backs in hours, the elimination of work benefits, skyrocketing foreclosures and bankruptcies, and the eroding value of retirement investments.The implications of massive service cuts to those experiencing poverty -- many of whom rely on state-funded services in their communities literally for survival, particularly those in extreme poverty -- will be nothing short of devastating. Without leadership to enact a responsible budget, Illinois can expect to see deepening hardship and further entrenchment of social problems