Grassroots Efforts Research Articles

Community Forums to Address the Opioid Crisis: An Effective Grassroots Approach to Rural Community Engagement.

Purpose:With opioid overdose deaths on the rise in rural Minnesota and across the nation, the call for community-based grassroots efforts is stronger than ever. Recognizing that substance use prevention and recovery programming rely upon community resources, collaborative teams planned and implemented a series of nine community forums focused on opioid and heroin use across rural northeast Minnesota to educate and unite invested community members on the critical public health issue. This article examines the outcomes of the forums and the ingredients of a successful forum.Methods:Surveys were distributed at seven rural community forums to assess measures of growth in knowledge and awareness, as well as demographic characteristics of respondents.Findings:Forums planned by university faculty and community members were effective in increasing overall awareness and knowledge of the opioid crisis within each community. Forums that were rated more highly by attendees included speakers from varied professional backgrounds and integrated cultural strengths. Communities that planned forums together have reported increased collaboration to prevent and address substance use and increased community member engagement on local grassroots coalitions since the time of the forum.Conclusions:Community forums have functioned as an effective grassroots approach to engaging rural community members in opioid use prevention and intervention efforts.

DEVELOPING A SUSTAINED AND COORDINATED U.S. COASTAL RESEARCH PROGRAM

To address societal needs along the coast, a community of researchers from Federal agencies, academia, industry, & NGOs are developing a National science plan. The goal is to identify and address research priorities through better coordinated Federal activities to enhance funding sources, strengthen academic programs, and build a skilled workforce. This abstract describes a grassroots effort, initiated by researchers, that has led to meaningful engagement from the coastal community and swift action to build a National plan. The effort began in Mar 2014 when academic & Federal researchers, convened the Future of Nearshore Processes Workshop to develop a research vision to address societally-relevant coastal science challenges. They organized science needs in three broad research themes, 1) long-term coastal evolution 2) extreme events and 3) human and ecosystem health, identified a need to strengthen science infrastructure (e.g. observations and modeling) and recommended creation of a U.S. Coastal Research Program and Nearshore Advisory Council (NAC) to support the vision (Nearshore Processes Community 2015).

298: Pregnancy-related death review of ten years - Florida 2007-2016

Objective: The U.S. pregnancy-related mortality ratio (PRMR) increased since 2004. Since 1999, Florida has performed systematic review of pregnancy-related deaths (PRDs). One goal has been to identify opportunities for prevention. We sought to describe the PRMR trend in Florida and record share the risk factors associated with PRDs. Study Design: The Florida Pregnancy Associated Mortality Review Committee (PAMR) identifies pregnancy- associated deaths by linking death certificates of reproductive age women to birth and fetal death certificates as well as Florida prenatal screens. Health records of possible PRDs are abstracted, reviewed and assessed by the multi -disciplinary PAMR team. PRD cases from 2007-2016 were analyzed for PRMR trend as well as risk factors. Results: In 2007-2016, Florida experienced 406 PRDs and 2,217,018 live births. Florida’s PRMR fluctuated from a high of 26.2 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2009, to 12.9 in 2016; 2016 is the lowest PRMR since 1999. Although not significant, there was a trend towards a reduced PRMR from 2009 through 2016. For the period 2007-2016, five causes of death accounted for 68% of PRDs: hemorrhage (21%), infection (15%), hypertensive disorders (14%), cardiomyopathy (9%), and thrombotic embolism (8%). Risk factors associated with PRD were class III obesity (RR 5.7), cesarean delivery (RR 4.2), age 35 or older (RR 3.0), no prenatal care (RR 2.7), non-Hispanic black (RR 2.7), and high school or less education (RR 1.4). PRDs due to ectopic pregnancy and flu-like infections increased between 2009 and 2013. Conclusion: Contrary to an increasing national trend, Florida’s PRMR trend declined between 2009 and 2016. Hemorrhage and infection were leading causes of PRDs. Obesity and cesarean delivery were leading risk factors. This may reflect combined Florida activities including Florida PAMR efforts, grass roots efforts of the Florida Perinatal Quality Collaborative, and efforts from other professional and community organizations. Florida PAMR should continue focusing on developing Urgent Maternal Mortality Messages, other educational efforts and promote needed women’s health policies and actions. The Florida Perinatal Quality Collaborative should continue to promote quality efforts that contribute to understanding leading causes, risk factors and disparities around maternal mortality.

The Theological Potentials of Local Ecumenical Efforts in Ordinary and Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Study of South Indian Context

The concept and practice of ecumenism has played a crucial role in the theological construction of ecclesiology for the last few decades. In spite of the various steps taken for promoting local ecumenism in different parts of the world, the continuing challenge for ecclesiology (and also for theology in general) is to place grassroots efforts for ecumenism in the centre of theological discussions. While local ecumenism is defined and practiced in a number of ways, this essay discusses the ordinary and everyday efforts for church unity among Christians in South India, and the theological potentials of such efforts. A study of local ecumenism can contribute to the discussions in ecclesiology and ethnography, and such discussions in turn can help further to encourage local ecumenism by bringing to the centre the everyday experiences of Christians that have not often been focused or highlighted in mainline academic ecclesiology or theology.

Resisting Invisibility through Creative Expressions: Immigrant Students and Families’ Voices and Actions

This study examines a grassroots effort to work collaboratively with a group of immigrant students, their families, and educators at an urban high school. Using PAR as a methodological tool, we explore how a group of high school students along with their families resist racial stigmatization and marginalization. These young people and families were part of a university intergenerational collective, Family School Partnership (FSP) that worked along-side teachers in an urban high school located in Salt Lake City, Utah. This article focuses on how PAR can be a pedagogical tool to support immigrant young people and their families as they resist oppressions in schools while offering teachers, pre-service teachers and graduate students unique preparation experiences for working with and learning from immigrant students.

I Ke Ēwe ʻĀina o Ke Kupuna: Hawaiian Ancestral Crops in Perspective

Indigenous crops, tremendously valuable both for food security and cultural survival, are experiencing a resurgence in Hawaiʻi. These crops have been historically valued by agricultural researchers as genetic resources for breeding, while cultural knowledge, names, stories and practices persisted outside of formal educational and governmental institutions. In recent years, and following conflicts ignited over university research on and patenting of kalo (Hāloa, Colocasia esculenta), a wave of restoration activities around indigenous crop diversity, cultivation, and use has occurred through largely grassroots efforts. We situate four crops in Hawaiian cosmologies, review and compare the loss and recovery of names and cultivars, and describe present efforts to restore traditional crop biodiversity focusing on kalo, ʻuala (Ipomoea batatas), kō (Saccharum officinarum), and ʻawa (Piper methysticum). The cases together and particularly the challenges of kalo and ‘awa suggest that explicitly recognizing the sacred role such plants hold in indigenous worldviews, centering the crops’ biocultural significance, provides a foundation for better collaboration across multiple communities and institutions who work with these species. Furthermore, a research agenda that pursues a decolonizing approach and draws from more participatory methods can provide a path forward towards mutually beneficial exchange among research, indigenous, and farmer communities. We outline individual and institutional responsibilities relevant to work with indigenous crops and communities and offer this as a step towards reconciliation, understanding, and reciprocity that can ultimately work to create abundance through the restoration of ancestral crop cultivar diversity.

Social Movements and Energy Democracy: Types and Processes of Mobilization

An important but sometimes overlooked dimension of the study of energy, democracy, and governance is the role of social movements. Industrial transition movements (ITMs) emerge when there is resistance from incumbent organizations, such as large utility companies in the electricity industry, to grassroots efforts to change the industry. A classification of ITM goals is developed based on two types of sociotechnical transition goals (developing alternative technologies and ending existing technologies) and two types of societal change goals (the democratization of industrial organizations and political processes and the equitable access to jobs and industrial products). The study of processes and outcomes of ITMs also has implications for social movement theory, which are outlined. This approach enables a comprehensive analysis of the relations among the state, industry, civil society, and social movements that can identify causal mechanisms in the effects of social movements on industrial transitions and energy democracy.

The Machine Taxers

Despite lack of support from professional economists, the idea of a tax on labor-saving machinery as a policy to help displaced workers had widespread popular appeal in the US throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s. A response to concerns about technological unemployment, loosely organized and widely spread across the United States, the machine tax movement evolved from conversations among friends and letters to the editor in local newspapers to policy proposals at the federal level. The grassroots effort ultimately failed. In the context of the rise of Keynesian analysis, persistent accusations of an antiprogress bias, and the provision of few details about policy applications, the machine tax proposals faded rapidly after 1940. Given familiarity with an active government role in economic policy and knowledge about taxes as tools of these policies, it should not be a surprise that machine tax ideas reappear when the labor displacing effects of technological change are a major concern. The US economy in the 2010s had these elements.

Developing a Culture of Mentorship to Strengthen Academic Medical Centers.

Mentorship is central to academic medicine and its missions, and it has long played a critical role in the training and career development of physicians and scientists. A growing body of literature has documented the positive impact of mentorship on various outcomes, including research productivity, academic promotion, faculty retention, and career satisfaction. These benefits span academic medical centers’ missions and have the potential to enhance biomedical research, patient care, education, and faculty diversity and leadership.In this Invited Commentary, the authors argue that a dynamic culture of mentorship is essential to the success of academic medical centers and should be elevated to the level of a major strategic priority. This culture of mentorship would capitalize on an institution’s intellectual resources and seek to develop leaders in biomedical discovery, patient care, and education. The bidirectional transmission of knowledge between mentors and mentees, through both formal programs and informal relationships, can foster the growth of faculty members needed to meet the complex challenges currently confronting medical schools and teaching hospitals.Developing a culture of mentorship requires a strong commitment by leaders at all levels to nurture the next generation of physicians and scientists as well as grassroots efforts by trainees and faculty to seek out and create mentorship opportunities. The authors conclude by outlining possible mechanisms and incentives for elevating mentorship to the level of a strategic priority to strengthen academic medical centers across their missions.

Building a movement for the right to housing in Hungary

ABSTRACTAfter short overview of the official policies as well as grassroots efforts around housing in twentieth century Budapest, this article introduces the struggles of a growing housing movement that originated in the work of the grassroots housing advocacy group, The City is for All and then led to the birth of further grassroots organizations focused on the right to the city.

A Community Based Participatory Approach to Training Young Adults to Design and Implement a Social Marketing Framed Lifestyle Intervention on Their College Campus

Background: Using a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approach may increase the likelihood of relevance and acceptability of the designed intervention, especially on a college campus. Furthermore, recruiting and training college students to design a social marketing framed healthy lifestyle intervention for their peers will allow the intervention to be tailored to the needs of the campus. Objectives: To describe the process of online-course training college students to develop a campus-based, social marketing health promotion intervention. Methods: Four universities recruited current college students (18+ y.o.) to develop a social marketing and environmental intervention (SMEI), which was completed during a 16-week, online/in-person hybrid semester course. Researchers and Extension professionals trained students to design 24 weeks of intervention events that would be implemented the upcoming year. Results: Seventy-eight students enrolled in the study and social marketing and environmental intervention course among the four intervention states (Florida = 30, South Dakota = 8, Tennessee = 13, West Virginia = 27); students were predominately Caucasian (65.8%), females (84.0%), and sophomore status in college (64.9%). Throughout the semester, students assessed their campus environments, set priorities, and developed weekly events and resources needed to implement the intervention on their campuses. By the end of the semester, with researcher support, students had designed 24 weeks of intervention events (marketing, recruiting, and implementation) focusing on nutrition/food/diet, physical activity, stress management, sleep, and time management. These events and resources were catalogued into a digital toolkit of instructions and activities for each week of intervention events. Conclusion: Using a Community-Based Participatory Research approach with college students interested in health allows for the development of an intervention that stems from grass roots efforts and is tailored to the acceptability and needs of their peers.

Observer Effect: Insights for Building Equitable Community-Research Partnerships

Grassroots community efforts intuitively understand the physics of relationships—that you cannot interact with something or someone, even if that interaction is simply observation, without having an impact. Research shapes the way our lives are imagined. There’s no way around it. But developing relationships with researchers or others who can help document and disseminate ‘by and for’ information can be challenging for grassroots and community led initiatives. When institutions seek to include marginalized community priorities into pre-existing frameworks or study initiatives, or when researchers come from the outside, extract information from our community organizations and grassroots efforts, and then leave to analyze and make meaning of it elsewhere, the result is never accurate and our own community led trajectories of learning are disrupted and undermined. From significant changes to how research collaborations are conceived and funded, to simple fixes to approaches used in the field, researchers can be better partners to community led efforts to document and understand our own lives.

Reconceptualizing Liaisons: A Model for Assessing and Developing Liaison Competencies to Guide Professional Development

In an effort to reconceptualize its liaison program, the FSU Libraries initiated a three-phase, grassroots effort to develop a set of core values and competencies, conduct a self-assessment based upon those competencies, and create a strategic training program based upon the results. We determined that our defining values guide our practice, particularly with our hybrid model of liaisons collaborating with functional experts to engage users. The results of the self-assessment indicated that liaisons felt competent in teaching and research services, but less confident engaging faculty members in areas related to scholarly communication and digital tools. Our core competencies and best practices provide benchmarks for superior service and structure for an intentional training program.

Promising Care Paths Emerge on the Transition Trail

Promising Care Paths Emerge on the Transition Trail

The Cost of Community-based Action Research: Examining Research Access and Implementation through the Food Dignity Project Community Support Package

Introduction There’s a world of difference between research funding awarded to institutions of higher learning and what goes for standard program support funding available to the average nonprofit community-based organization (CBO)—in particular, grassroots efforts defined and guided by the constituency living with the problems being addressed. Beyond a baseline difference between research grants that ask questions and program grants that provide services in response to identi­fied needs, access to and internal functioning of research grants versus program grants are often diametrically opposed. On a practical level, research funding is far more likely than CBO funding to provide multiple-year support and large budgets that allow funds to be used for personnel and indirect costs. Very few research opportunities are offered directly to CBOs, with eligibility typically limited to colleges, universities, and other so-called institutions of higher learning. Yet, while CBOs are commonly shut out of major research funding pools at the outset, they are increasingly required to provide an approved “evidence base” to justify funding for the program services they provide. This requirement forces them to draw on information-gathering and analysis processes from which they are essentially excluded.... See the press release for this article.&nbsp

Museums engaging diverse Millennials in community dialogue

ABSTRACTIn 2016, Levine Museum of the New South (LMNS) developed an innovative Sustained Dialogue program aimed at engaging and training a diverse group of Millennials in dialogue. University researchers partnered with museum staff in the program development, implementation, and evaluation. The program led to awareness and critical reflection at multiple scales: individual, group, and the broader community. Participants enhanced their cultural competence and their ability to facilitate conversations about difficult and pressing community issues. The program also helped participants identify solutions and actions to make their communities more inclusive. Participants realized the power of dialogue as a tool for introspection, interaction and social change. Millennials are attracted to programming that is informal, non-hierarchical, involves movement and (inter)activity, and builds skills and networks useful to everyday life. Millennials believe in grassroots efforts and incorporating technology as a way to share experiences, though face-to-face interactions are still viewed as meaningful.

GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE PLANNING ON CAMPUS

INTRODUCTION College campuses pride themselves in being leaders in promoting innovation in both technical and theoretical aspects of all fields of study, including sustainability. The drive for sustainability in higher education has become institutionalized in many college campuses in the form of offices of sustainability, as well as membership in the American Association for Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). In parallel, but not always in concert, are more grass-roots efforts by students to promote sustainability through recycling programs, urban agriculture, and similar initiatives. Students are often frustrated between the classroom lessons they learn about sustainability and the slow adoption of sustainable practices in the “real-world,” including on campus. In order to address this issue, faculty have begun to engage students in the sustainability challenges facing their own campuses. The Journal of Green Building showcases these projects in the New Directions in Teaching and Research section of the journal. As part of this series, this article will highlight a course at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst in which students engage in green infrastructure planning projects for the campus.

Co-Creating the Workplace: Participatory Efforts to Enable Individual Work at the Hoffice

This paper analyzes the self-organizing network Hoffice – a merger between the words home and office – that brings together people who wish to co-create temporary workplaces. The Hoffice concept entails a co-working methodology, and a set of practices inherent in opening up one’s home as a temporary, shared workplace, with the help of existing social media platforms, particularly Facebook. We discuss both the practices of co-creating temporary workplaces, particularly for workers who lack a stable office and orchestrate flexible work arrangements, and the values and rhetoric enshrined in Hoffice. We collected our research materials through interviews, participant observation, and workshops. Our findings draw attention to i) the practical arrangement of Hoffice events, ii) the participatory efforts to get individual work done, and 3) the co-creation of an alternative social model that encourages trust, self-actualization, and openness. To conclude, we discuss how Hoffice is already making change for its members, and how this is indicative of a politics of care. We contribute to research on computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) by highlighting grassroots efforts to create alternative ways of organizing nomadic work and navigating non-traditional employment arrangements.

Care Work in Transition: Transnational Circuits of Gender, Migration, and Care

This article presents a broad overview of the emerging field of scholarship on gender, migration and care work. The first section provides a rationale for linking the embodied intimate labor of sex workers and surrogate mothers to more traditional caregiving among nannies, nurses and eldercare aids. Through an intersectional optic on power and domination in care workers’ everyday lives, we highlight the ways in which love’s labor is lost and devalued in the sphere of the home as workplace, the family and community as employer, the state as labor recruiter, and the labor market as a site of ethnic boundaries and exclusions. Distinguishing different types of care and its institutional and geographic location matters in explaining current care in transition. Care work, in many domains, has become appropriated by markets. We consider how political, institutional, and cultural factors have shaped, and are reshaping, the ideas and norms of care in the context of transnational care worker migration. Too often, studies of gendered care migration fail to account for the differential impacts of state migration and care policies for women across class and social status within single country contexts. Care workers are beginning to challenge new forms of commodified care work. The final section explores how grassroots efforts to organize and advocate for the rights of domestic workers have evolved in countries in both the Global North and South.

‘Toys for Reconciliation’: A Grassroots Peacebuilding Initiative in Bucaramanga, Colombia

In a grassroots effort to counter the institutional and state-centred narratives on disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) processes conceptualised by the Integrated DDR Standards of the United Nations, the NGO Corporación Descontamina has organised local projects around what it has identified as significant problems in previous work carried out in a Bucaramanga men's jail where ex-paramilitaries and ex-guerrilleros live together. In fact, two main problems have been observed: the socioeconomic and emotional situation of the ex-combatants, preventing their reintegration, and the social stigmatisation surrounding their return to civil society. As such, drawing upon decolonial theory, the objective of this article is to present the peacebuilding project ‘Toys for Reconciliation’ that was developed by Corporación Descontamina with the aim of advancing reconciliation in the context of the Colombian armed conflict.