Community Non-profit Organizations Research Articles

Moral minds: How and when does servant leadership influence employees to benefit multiple stakeholders?

AbstractServant leadership's unique focus on care and concern for multiple stakeholders has caught the attention of academic and practitioners alike. Its theoretical novelty, however, remains underutilized as a means to contribute unique insights to the leadership literature. We draw on servant leadership's moral foundation—utilitarian consequentialism—and social learning theory to identify cognitive mechanisms (follower other‐orientation and cognitive reflection) through which servant leadership affects employee behavior benefiting two stakeholder groups: a community nonprofit organization and the employing organization. Furthermore, we evaluate the degree to which an employee's moral identity internalization acts as a boundary condition of servant leadership's effects. Data were collected from 274 employee‐supervisor dyads across three waves with objective cognitive reflection scores and objective measures of workplace charitable giving and employee performance. Results supported all hypothesized predictions even after accounting for three alternative mediators. In particular, servant leadership had a positive indirect effect on workplace charitable giving through follower other‐orientation; it also had a positive indirect effect on objective follower financial performance through other‐orientation and cognitive reflection. Both indirect effects were significant at low levels of moral identity internalization but not at high levels. We discuss the implications of these findings and delineate directions for future research.

Creative Community and Academic Collaboration Approach in the Development of the Micronesian Early Education Toolkit for Easing Access into Early Childhood Learning Through an Experiential Process of Improvement

Introduction The Micronesian and Pacific Islander community experiences adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) at rates higher than other ethnic groups. Exposure to ACEs increases the risk of negative outcomes, including heart disease, cancer, and psychosocial problems into adulthood. Early childhood learning (ECL) provides resilience against ACEs. However, Micronesian and Pacific Islander children reportedly have 53.8% not enrolled in ECL. Approach The purpose is to describe a creative community and academic collaboration approach, including culturally responsive partnership building exercises with inspirational reflections as a communication process between partners in the Micronesian Islander Community non-profit organization and Washington State University College of Nursing that led to the development of a culturally responsive, web-based, Micronesian Early Education Toolkit with Micronesian Islander Parent Leader Champions. We engaged a local school district to participate. Tenets of Popular Education guided partnership building. The Early Childhood Education Access Framework guided toolkit development and experiential improvement process. The toolkit includes both text and videos on what is ECL and importance, ECL program types, and navigation of the application process. We used a Plus/Delta evaluation. Findings Nine Parent Leader Champions representing Chamarro, Chuukese, Kapingamarangi, Marshallese, and Pohnpeian communities reported that the toolkit respects cultural values; easy to comprehend and navigate; the process makes it feasible to help enroll Micronesian Islander preschool students; and will be helpful at expanding access to ECL programs. Discussion The toolkit development and experiential improvement process centered the voice of Micronesian Islander Parent Leader Champions. This helped the toolkit to be interactive, clear with specific utility for diverse English-speaking levels, respectful language, and creativity on how families can start. Conclusion This creative community and academic collaboration approach, including Micronesian Islander Parent Leader Champions and engaging a local school district achieved development of a culturally responsive ECL toolkit that was a helpful foundation to begin ECL enrollment.

The Relationship Between Self-Compassion, Childhood Maltreatment and Attachment Orientation In High-Risk Adolescents

The purpose of the current study was to explore whether selfcompassion predicted psychological distress over and above childhood maltreatment and attachment orientation in high-risk youths. Fifty-one youths (31 males, 20 females) aged 17 to 24, recruited from a community non-profit organization in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, were administered validated measures of childhood maltreatment, attachment orientation, self-compassion, and psychological distress. Results indicated that self-compassion was inversely associated with childhood maltreatment, attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance, and psychological distress. However, results did not support the hypothesis that self-compassion was a significant predictor of psychological distress over and above attachment anxiety and childhood maltreatment in high-risk youths. Our results indicated that self-compassion is not well developed in street-involved youths and may be a vital intervention target to heal negative internalized views of the self, while maintaining vigilance to threats inherent in the street environment.

A Roadmap to Clinic Expansion: Meeting the Needs of an Underserved Community

In today’s medical education, student-run clinics play an integral role in helping to prepare students at all levels in their medical training. The Morehouse School of Medicine Health Equity for All Lives (MSM-HEAL) student-run clinic was established in 2011 as a place dedicated to meeting the needs of Atlanta’s underserved population. Today, the MSM-HEAL Clinic has grown in three areas: clinical sites, interdisciplinary leadership and volunteer teams, and community outreach initiatives. The purpose of this descriptive report is to demonstrate the roadmap to a clinic expansion to meet the needs of a community and how the MSM-HEAL Clinic grew in one year, marshaling financial and community resources and establishing a community outreach initiative. The MSM-HEAL Clinic has served over 1,400 individuals as of December 2017. With the expansion came the demand for funding clinic operations and patient care. A grant proposal was submitted to a community nonprofit organization. In one year, over $20,000 was raised to support MSM-HEAL. These funds made healthcare access possible by providing transportation to patients for their appointments, medication assistance, supplies for medical screenings, and seasonal community vaccination initiatives. During this one-year period the MSM-HEAL Clinic provided services to an increased number of patients and greater education for the interdisciplinary student volunteers, creating a shared benefit. The free clinic will continue to benefit the community by providing no-cost services for uninsured and underinsured patients and improve professional student clinical education while upholding the core values of family medicine.

Abstinence Education Changes Perceptions of Middle School Students

Abstinence education lessons were designed to address teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection (STI) among adolescent youth. A community nonprofit organization with extensive experience in abstinence education trained youth leaders and high school students to collaborate with public school health education teachers. The lessons were based on Promoting Health Among Teens! [PHAT] Abstinence-Only, School Edition (Jemmott, Jemmott, & McCaffree, 2014). Originally developed for use in schools with a high proportion of African Americans, they were adapted for use in schools with a high proportion of Latinos. Over 1000 students from nine middle schools in the northwest part of the United States participated. Responses to pre- and post-intervention survey items were compared and indicated improvements in knowledge of the benefits of sexual abstinence and changes in attitudes toward abstinence. The outcomes of the It’s Legit II: Promoting Health Among Teens! Project indicated that it was implemented well, received well, and had a beneficial effect.

Designing and Implementing a Unique Website Design Project in an Undergraduate Course

The following paper describes a distinctive collaborative service-learning project done in an undergraduate class on web design. In this project, students in a web design class contacted local community non-profit organizations to create websites (collections of web pages) to benefit these organizations. The two phases of creating a website, planning and implementation, are an integral part of the project and are explained in this paper. The project, suitable for both online and face-to-face instruction, required that students keep a journal. The instructor did a follow-up investigation to assure that the resulting websites were indeed what the non-profits wanted.

A Qualitative Evaluation of Student Learning and Skills Use in a School-Based Mindfulness and Yoga Program.

Previous studies on school-based mindfulness and yoga programs have focused primarily on quantitative measurement of program outcomes. This study used qualitative data to investigate program content and skills that students remembered and applied in their daily lives. Data were gathered following a 16-week mindfulness and yoga intervention delivered at three urban schools by a community non-profit organization. We conducted focus groups and interviews with nine classroom teachers who did not participate in the program and held six focus groups with 22 fifth and sixth grade program participants. This study addresses two primary research questions: (1) What skills did students learn, retain, and utilize outside the program? and (2) What changes did classroom teachers expect and observe among program recipients? Four major themes related to skill learning and application emerged as follows: (1) youths retained and utilized program skills involving breath work and poses; (2) knowledge about health benefits of these techniques promoted self-utilization and sharing of skills; (3) youths developed keener emotional appraisal that, coupled with new and improved emotional regulation skills, helped de-escalate negative emotions, promote calm, and reduce stress; and (4) youths and teachers reported realistic and optimistic expectations for future impact of acquired program skills. We discuss implications of these findings for guiding future research and practice.

Clinical nurse leaders in the community: Building an academic faculty practice partnership

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) emphasis on preventive care and primary health has given community organizations and outpatient care environments renewed attention. Nursing has been offered the opportunity to lead healthcare into a new era. One of the two new nursing programs to be given life in this movement is the Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL). The CNL is a graduate level educated nurse who specializes in healthcare systems leadership, a facilitator of care in the complex healthcare environments of today. They are equipped to see the wider and broader perspective of things, assess needs, research the best interventions for problems identified, implement these interventions, and evaluate the processes and outcomes of the interventions. This paper describes the experience of a school of nursing and health professions and a community non-profit organization in developing a community faculty practice partnership allowing for CNL, nurse practitioner, and Doctorate of Psychology students to be placed at a community clinic serving high-risk patients. The Synergy Model of community partnership formation by Lasker and Weiss is used as the complimentary model to show how the CNL approach to a microsystem can be effectively adopted into the community setting with beneficial outcomes to both parties of the partnership.

Information Literacy Instruction for Community Members: An Academic Partnership with a Community Nonprofit Organization

Research is accelerating in fields such as autism, resulting in new information being published and made available on the web almost daily. Advocates and caregivers for persons with disabilities are typically too old to have been “born digital” and often do not have the skills necessary to efficiently locate and effectively evaluate information found on the web. By learning information literacy skills, advocates can locate and evaluate information in order to be effective caregivers. The focus of this column is the creation of an information literacy workshop aimed at helping health consumers find information about disability-related issues.

Statistics: Harnessing the Power of Information

Statisticians are harnessing the power of information buried in today’s massive and complex data. High-dimensional data sets, often the result of combining multiple databases, have led to important challenges in mathematical statistics. The increasing quantity of high-dimensional complex data and the ability of statisticians to uncover the information in it have led to ever greater demand for their expertise. For example, many businesses seek to build analytic capabilities, and statisticians are essential to this effort. To meet the increased demand, the academic community has been called on to provide more statistics courses, faculty, and graduates. Although statisticians who can meet these demands of modern data are highly sought after, the employment prospects for statisticians are not easy to track, because the term “statistician” often is not used for relevant positions. However, the trend is unmistakable for statisticians who can unlock the power of these new data sets. Statistics graduate students are uncovering the value of information in data for local government and community nonprofit organizations through Statistics in the Community (STATCOM), an American Statistical Association student volunteer organization for pro bono statistics. STATCOM provides statistics students with real-world experiences while providing invaluable community assistance.

Community Service Programs: A Model for At-Risk Long-Term-Suspended Students

Each year in the United States, millions of students experience suspension from public schools (Mendez & Knoff, 2003). Community service programs provide one means to address the school suspension problem. These initiatives are characterized by volunteer service placements within community nonprofit organizations for skill and personal development. During 2003–2005, a pilot community service program was implemented in nine school districts throughout the state of North Carolina. This article provides a comprehensive review of that project. Promising results from this initiative emphasize the significance of community service and public school collaborations in assisting youth to stay in school and become productive citizens.

The Community Reintegration Project: Occupational Therapy at Work in a County Jail

The incarcerated population in U.S jails has more than doubled in the last thirty years while prison populations have quintupled. Over half of those released from incarceration return to correctional systems within one year of release. One of the reasons for these high rates of recidivism is that many inmates lack the community living skills necessary for community reintegration. Successful community reintegration for ex-offenders requires a skill set that occupational therapists have long addressed in their domain of practice. Compared to practitioners in the United Kingdom and Australia, U.S. practitioners have been slow to develop occupational therapy programming in correctional settings. This article describes a community reintegration program for jail inmates built through a collaborative partnership between a university occupational therapy program, community non-profit organizations and a county jail.

The Meaning and the Method of Social Participation Learning in Cooperation with Community Non-Profit Organizations

The Meaning and the Method of Social Participation Learning in Cooperation with Community Non-Profit Organizations

The Community Reintegration Project: Occupational Therapy at Work in a County Jail

The incarcerated population in U.S jails has more than doubled in the last thirty years while prison populations have quintupled. Over half of those released from incarceration return to correctional systems within one year of release. One of the reasons for these high rates of recidivism is that many inmates lack the community living skills necessary for community reintegration. Successful community reintegration for ex-offenders requires a skill set that occupational therapists have long addressed in their domain of practice. Compared to practitioners in the United Kingdom and Australia, U.S. practitioners have been slow to develop occupational therapy programming in correctional settings. This article describes a community reintegration program for jail inmates built through a collaborative partnership between a university occupational therapy program, community non-profit organizations and a county jail.

Municipal Government-Nonprofit Sector Collaboration in Bulgaria

The worldwide phenomenon of devolution of power to local governments and growth of community nonprofit organizations increases opportunities for municipal government-nonprofit sector collaboration. Successful collaboration between the two institutions is seen as a promising trend because it stimulates development of a healthy civil society and delivery of a broader array of social services. This article presents an analysis of survey data that measured attitudes of Bulgarian municipal officials toward municipal-nonprofit collaboration. Municipal officials’ orientation toward working cooperatively with nonprofit organizations is critical to success. The survey data indicate that Bulgarian municipal officials are supportive of the general notion of municipal-nonprofit collaboration, but they retain serious reservations about the capacity of community nonprofit organizations to contribute meaningfully to service delivery in cooperation with local government. They perceive financial and human resource constraints within the nonprofit sector as well as within their own structures, thus making successful collaboration and its benefits problematic.

Designing Agendas to Reflect Board Roles and Responsibilities: Results of a Study

AbstractOver a nine‐month period the board agendas of a community nonprofit organization were redesigned to reflect a particular board agenda tool titled “Strategic Activities, Resource Planning, and Operations.” Feedback from the board members and executive director indicate strong support for the framework in focusing the work of the board. The framework also has implications for how the executive director and board members prepare for meetings and how the shared leadership of the meetings is played out.