Constructing Collaborative Success for Network Learning: The Story of the Discovery Community Self-Assessment Tool

· Despite conversations about the importance of community collaboration, foundations continue to struggle with how to best frame and support collaborative success. · Existing tools to assess collaboration may not fit with either a foundation’s values or a specific program strategy. · From a foundation perspective, developing a community self-assessment tool reinforced the idea that collaborative functioning is crucial and deserves attention. · This article shares a story of the development and initial use of the Discovery Community Self-Assessment Tool as a process of social construction critical to collective action and a possible indicator of network learning

Shifting From ‘Evaluation’ to Valuing: A Six-Year Example of Philanthropic Practice Change and Knowledge Development

· Knowledge development is an emerging field in philanthropy and sits at the convergence of movement toward engagement, data-based decision-making, and networked learning for social and policy change. · This article explores five knowledge-development trajectories at one family foundation that has funded a long-term change initiative. The trajectories include tools and frames that have been developed for increasing organizational learning, beginning network learning, and informing both program and operations for enhanced strategy implementation. · Making the organizational shift from entrenched notions of third-party evaluation to creating a diversified knowledge development approach opened up new opportunities to think and talk about value in philanthropic work. · This article also chronicles knowledge development from its inception as a dedicated position within a foundation, and raises key challenges and questions that can be useful to other foundations considering a knowledge function

An analytic case study of the evaluation reports of a comprehensive community initiative

This study is a case study of the evaluation reports of the Neighborhood and Family Initiative (NFI). NFI was a ten-year Ford Foundation sponsored comprehensive community initiative (CCI) in four low-income neighborhoods in four United States cities. The NFI evaluation was longitudinal, interdisciplinary, and multi-tiered. Through this study of the eleven publicly released evaluation reports, I found that the evaluators not only wrote about CCIs and evaluation but also evidenced evaluation as part of loosely linked network supporting urban community development. The knowledge community addressed in the study is the Aspen Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives a national coalition supporting the discussion of evaluation appropriate to community initiatives. The study involved the identification of reporting dimensions from descriptive analysis, evaluation lessons from the documented evaluatorsÂ' interpretations, and change constructs from my theoretical concerns. The study resulted in a discussion of issue areas to be addressed in understanding evaluation reporting of complex social and policy initiatives. These issue areas included: community organization building versus coalition formation, comprehensiveness as a lens for change, audience, institutional distancing, and learning, knowledge development and education. With the study, I also provide an innovative methodological approach to analyzing change through the language evaluators put to initiative reporting. The qualitative approach involved devising a process for analyzing description and evaluator written reflection but also analyzing change of evaluator interpretations. Unlike qualitative approaches that emphasize only themes as recurrences over time, the approach to this study centered ideas as clusters that changed in configuration over time

Fortification and bioaccessibility of saffron apocarotenoids in potato tubers

Carotenoids are C40 isoprenoids with well-established roles in photosynthesis, pollination, photoprotection, and hormone biosynthesis. The enzymatic or ROS-induced cleavage of carotenoids generates a group of compounds named apocarotenoids, with an increasing interest by virtue of their metabolic, physiological, and ecological activities. Both classes are used industrially in a variety of fields as colorants, supplements, and bio-actives. Crocins and picrocrocin, two saffron apocarotenoids, are examples of high-value pigments utilized in the food, feed, and pharmaceutical industries. In this study, a unique construct was achieved, namely O6, which contains CsCCD2L, UGT74AD1, and UGT709G1 genes responsible for the biosynthesis of saffron apocarotenoids driven by a patatin promoter for the generation of potato tubers producing crocins and picrocrocin. Different tuber potatoes accumulated crocins and picrocrocin ranging from 19.41–360 to 105–800 μg/g DW, respectively, with crocetin, crocin 1 [(crocetin-(β-D-glucosyl)-ester)] and crocin 2 [(crocetin)-(β-D-glucosyl)-(β-D-glucosyl)-ester)] being the main compounds detected. The pattern of carotenoids and apocarotenoids were distinct between wild type and transgenic tubers and were related to changes in the expression of the pathway genes, especially from PSY2, CCD1, and CCD4. In addition, the engineered tubers showed higher antioxidant capacity, up to almost 4-fold more than the wild type, which is a promising sign for the potential health advantages of these lines. In order to better investigate these aspects, different cooking methods were applied, and each process displayed a significant impact on the retention of apocarotenoids. More in detail, the in vitro bioaccessibility of these metabolites was found to be higher in boiled potatoes (97.23%) compared to raw, baked, and fried ones (80.97, 78.96, and 76.18%, respectively). Overall, this work shows that potatoes can be engineered to accumulate saffron apocarotenoids that, when consumed, can potentially offer better health benefits. Moreover, the high bioaccessibility of these compounds revealed that potato is an excellent way to deliver crocins and picrocrocin, while also helping to improve its nutritional value

Crocins-rich tomato extracts showed enhanced protective effects in vitro

Crocins are high-value water soluble pigments that have long been recognized for their medicinal properties, and whose demand has increased worldwide in recent years. In the present study transgenic tomato fruits engineered for the production of crocins and hp3/Bsh tomato mutants with alterations in the carotenoid metabolism, have been combined to increase the levels of crocins in tomato fruits. Tomato fruits from F4 plants showed high antioxidant capacity and the crocin-rich juice of the produced tomato fruit was protected neuroblastoma cells against oxidative insult, through its ability to activate factor 2 related to nuclear erythroid factor 2 (Nrf2). The bio-accessibility of crocins in the juice showed values similar to the ones observed with saffron. Overall, our results support that crocin-fortified tomatoes could result in higher crocin availability and have additional health-promoting effects and could provide better protection against oxidative stress related chronic diseases in humans.This work was supported by grants BIO2016-77000-R, PID2020-114761RB-I00 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades and SBPLY/17/180501/000234 and SBPLY/21/180501/000064 from the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha (co-financed European Union FEDER funds) and HARNESSTOM, contract number 101000716 Innovation Action EC-H2020-SFS-2020-1. GD and AG are participants of the European COST action CA18210 (ROXY).Peer reviewe