Making The Invisible Visible: Capturing the Multidimensional Value of Volunteerism to Nonprofit Organizations

Volunteers represent an important part of the nonprofit labor pool, and their contributions are diverse and significant. Yet, the assessment of the value that they bring to nonprofit organizations often is reduced to a few numbers and understood to be an economic decision based on their absence of wages. This value is traditionally reported as volunteer numbers, hours, and an hourly financial value assigned to volunteer time. These data are important tools for articulating volunteer contributions. However, the emphasis on numbers and economic value sometimes obscures important dimensions of service. Therefore, the purpose of this dissertation was to reveal more dimensions of volunteer value by assessing perceptions of the traditional metrics and introducing new lenses for interpreting volunteer value. It was written using the three-paper format. The first paper used Q methodology to study the perceptions of funders, nonprofit executives, and volunteer administrators. Thirty participants ranked their preferences for 41 diverse indicators of volunteer value in a Q sort and discussed how they made meaning of their sorts. Factor and qualitative analyses of the data revealed that participants gave the traditional volunteer numbers, hours, and financial value metrics mixed reviews. Their preferences did not align by stakeholder group. However, all participants demonstrated a more nuanced understanding of service than is found in traditional volunteer value measures. The second paper introduced the gift economy as a companion framework for the economic model that undergirds the common measures of volunteer value. It named and integrated additional dimensions of service (e.g., spiritual, social, meaning making) with notions of economic value. The third paper combined the Q data with interview data from 10 experts on volunteer value. The analysis showed two value propositions of volunteers: volunteers as cost savings or as mission support/value add. The paper concluded with adaptive leadership principles that can support nonprofit leaders in blending both value propositions. Collectively, the papers demonstrate dimensions of volunteer service that are important but overlooked by those who rely on traditional volunteer metrics. Identifying and studying these dimensions can contribute to a holistic understanding of volunteerism that supports more strategic volunteer practices and more robust explanations of volunteer value

Domestic Labor and the Earnings of Professionals.

This dissertation focuses on how time allocated to domestic responsibilities affects the earnings of professionals. Although the earnings gap between women and men has narrowed, women are paid less than their male counterparts and a substantial part of the gender earnings gap remains unexplained. Women\u27s growing entry into the full-time labor force has created new challenges for working women and dual-earner families. Professionals may manage domestic responsibilities differently than non professionals because they are likely to have jobs that offer higher pay and more autonomy. With fewer domestic demands placed on these households, we would expect to observe more gender equality in professionals\u27 earnings than between women and men in the population as a whole. However, the earnings gap is largest between men and women with the highest levels of education. Using two waves of data from the National Survey of Families and Households, I examine how various domestic labor tasks including daily grind tasks, female- and male-type tasks, parent-child interaction activities, and elder care affect earnings. My study revealed expected and unexpected findings that taken together lack a convincing explanation. For example, as expected, professional women earned less than professional men, net of controls. The results also show that in the late 1980s, performing daily grind tasks reduced both women\u27s and men\u27s earnings and these inflexible tasks explained an additional 18 percent of the gender gap in earnings. I found evidence that female- and male-type tasks affected earnings differently than daily grind tasks by either increasing or not affecting professionals\u27 earnings. This finding is consistent with the idea that flexible tasks do not interfere with paid labor and thereby do not reduce earnings. However, what was unexpected was that female-type tasks actually increased earnings. Contrary to expectations, there was no evidence that domestic labor affected professionals\u27 earnings five years later in the early 1990s, although a substantial gender gap in earnings remained. Explanations for why the domestic labor effects on earnings found in the late 1980s did not persist in the 1990s are not clear-cut. It appears that domestic labor inconsistently affects the earnings of professionals

2013 Volunteering in San Diego: A Needs Assessment

In Fall 2011, Volunteer San Diego closed its doors leaving a perceived gap in volunteer matching services in the region. Nonprofit and corporate leaders anecdotally indicated that the remaining volunteer matching services and programs were not meeting local needs sufficiently. The University of San Diego\u27s Caster Center for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Research conducted a needs assessment with support from local funders to better understand the nature of San Diego\u27s volunteer matching needs.https://digital.sandiego.edu/npi-volunteering/1000/thumbnail.jp

Teaching Students with Disabilities: A Web-based Examination of Preparation of Preservice Primary School Teachers

With increasing expectations that preservice teachers will be prepared to teach students with special needs in regular classrooms, it is timely to review relevant units in teacher education courses. Units relevant to special education/inclusion in primary undergraduate teacher preparation courses in Australian tertiary institutions, delivered in 2009, were examined. Information was gathered through a series of Google searches, and available information was very limited for some units. Sixty-one units in 34 courses met criteria for inclusion. Units typically ran for one semester with 30-40 hours of instruction. Just under half the instructors for whom relevant information was available had an active interest in special education/inclusion of students with disabilities. The most commonly included content was on instructional strategies, with few units aimed at promoting positive attitudes to people with disabilities and only 10% stating that the content was evidence or research-based

Case studies in deinstitutionalisation: implementing supported housing programs in two Australian states

This paper is one of a pair examining implementation in two states of programs that provide housing and support to people discharged from psychiatric hospitals. The first paper describes the implementation in Victoria of a program established in 1995 by a non-government agency called Neami. This second paper takes the Neami Community Housing Program as a point of reference against which to examine the implementation since 2005 in South Australia of a program called Returning Home. The paper begins by outlining some of the debates that have informed the delivery of mental health services in Australia, and considers ways in which mental health reform objectives articulate with changes in public and private provision of housing. It describes some of the programs developed in Australia to provide housing and support to people with psychiatric disabilities, and identifies similarities and differences in the models adopted in different states. After introducing the current study, the paper outlines findings in relation to two programs implemented in Victoria and South Australia. It concludes with a discussion of critical differences in context, program design and approach to implementation that influence the capacity of these programs to meet their objectives. Compared with the situation in Victoria a decade previously, planning for redevelopment of mental health services in South Australia has been advanced in an environment that is suspicious of deinstitutionalisation and in which public discussion of mental health policy has been politically sensitive in the extreme. In addition, attempts to find housing for people with high and complex needs were hampered by problems with supply of housing that had not existed when the National Mental Health Strategy was established

Next Generation Print-based Manufacturing for Photovoltaics and Solid State Lighting

For the grand challenge of reducing our energy and carbon footprint, the development of renewable energy and energy efficient technologies offer a potential solution. Energy technologies can reduce our dependence on foreign oil as well as the energy consumed by the petroleum industry, the leading consumer of energy by a U.S. industry sector. Nonetheless, the manufacturing processes utilized to manufacture equipment for alternative energy technologies often involve energy-intensive processes. This undermines some of the advantages to moving to 'green' technologies in the first place. Our answer to the Industrial Technology Program's (ITP) Grand Challenge FOA was to develop a transformational low cost manufacturing process for plastic-based photovoltaics that will lower by over 50% both energy consumption and greenhouse emissions and offer a return-of-investment of over 20%. We demonstrated a Luminescent Solar Concentrator fabricated on a plastic acrylic substrate (i.e. no glass) that increases the power output of the PV cell by 2.2x with a 2% power efficiency as well as an LSC with a 7% power efficiency that increased the power output from the PV cells by 35%. S large area 20-inch x 60-inch building-integrated photovoltaic window was fabricated using contract manufacturing with a 4% power efficiency which improved the power output of the PV cell by over 50%. In addition, accelerated lifetimes of the luminescent material demonstrate lifetimes of 20-years

The Influence of Environmental Temperature and Substrate Initial Moisture Content on \u3cem\u3eAspergillus niger\u3c/em\u3e Growth and Phytase Production in Solid−State Cultivation

Aspergillus niger is being used commercially for phytase production utilizing solid-state cultivation; however, no studies have been published that investigated the optimal environmental temperature and initial substrate water content to maximize fungal growth and/or phytase production. Solid-state cultivations of Aspergillus niger on wheat bran and soybean meal were conducted at three temperatures (25°C, 30°C, and 35°C) and three initial moisture contents (50%, 55%, and 60% wet basis) in a split-plot full-factorial experimental design. Fermentations were conducted for 0, 24, 48, 72, and 120 h. The containers were sampled destructively and assayed for phytase activity and glucosamine concentration as an estimate of fungal biomass. Temperature affected phytase activity production, but substrate initial moisture content did not. The highest phytase activity was found at 30°C, 50% to 60% initial moisture content, and 72 h of fermentation. Initial substrate moisture content affected glucosamine production after 72 and 120 h of fermentation. The maximum glucosamine was produced at 35°C, either 50% or 60% initial moisture content, and 120 h of fermentation. The results show that the optimal biomass growth conditions are not the same as the optimal phytase production conditions, suggesting that phytase production is not entirely correlated with fungal growth