Society for Community Research and Action

The financial health of the nation's nonprofit groups is rapidly deteriorating, according to a survey of some 900 nonprofit leaders around the country.

Recently I attended the first meeting of an Evaluation Advisory Committee and I was reminded once again of the importance of setting up evaluations properly at the start. I have set out below the issues which need to be dealt with when such committees are set up. This list is drawn from my experience on a number of these types of committees. The issues you need to deal with include:

This video features the voices of community members who have worked on community-based research projects in the Toronto area. They discuss how and why they became involved in research, what they did, as well as some of the benefits and challenges of this kind of work.

On Dec. 1, 2005, nearly 40,000 people logged on to participate in the Habitat JAM, a 72-hour event which generated more than 4,000 pages of message-board style discussion, and resulted in 600 ideas to action.

Globalization As neoliberal policies continue to exacerbate poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation, the films in our globalization collection allow viewers to confront the harsh--and often hidden--conditions faced by those on the losing end of the dominant economic paradigm, as well as a framework for analyzing the forces shaping those conditions. They offer an alternative to the mainstream media coverage, reminding us that a different trajectory is not only possible but imperative.

More and more college students want careers where they can help make society more humane, fair, and environmentally sustainable. They want to put their skills, their idealism, and their energy to work promoting social justice. My colleagues around the country tell me that the same thing is happening on their campuses. A growing number of students are asking faculty and staff about internships, summer jobs, and careers working with non-profit, advocacy, and grassroots organizing groups. Why wait on tables when you could be changing the world?

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:

The participatory media learning materials on this site are meant to help people learn and teach the new literacies by inquiring into their significance as well as by learning their use through direct practice

The Media That Matters Film Festival is the premiere showcase for short films on the most important topics of the day. Local and global, online and in communities around the world, Media That Matters engages diverse audiences and inspires them to take action.

This page lists FREE resources for program evaluation and social research methods. The focus is on "how-to" do evaluation research and the methods used: surveys, focus groups, sampling, interviews, and other methods. Most of these links are to resources that can be read over the web. A few, like the GAO books, are for books that can be sent away for, for free (if you live in the US), as well as read over the web.

Improving the Health of Canadians: Exploring Positive Mental Health brings together available information and data analyses that look at one way of defining positive mental health, how we currently measure it, its role in health, the factors associated with high levels of positive mental health and what strategies are, or may be, effective at promoting mental health at a population level.

Esurio is a student refereed academic journal published by the Ontario Association of Food Banks (OAFB) with the proud support of Direct Energy. Esurio publishes articles on issues of hunger and poverty through a youth lens.  The journal features articles written and reviewed by graduate and undergraduate students and is published twice annually.

OnPoverty.org is the work of students, most of them journalism majors, at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.It's intended for professional journalists who cover issues related to poverty, class, and economic justice.

Below are resources to help educators and students explore health equity and deepen understanding of series concepts. These lesson plans, syllabi, facilitation guides and online courses draw the UNNATURAL CAUSES series, this Web site, and carefully selected resources.

The high quality video resources in this collection are, themselves, testimony to the richness, diversity, dynamism and universality of the African American experience. They provide valuable historical, cultural, political and sociological chronicles about the people and events that have shaped America from slavery to present day. This comprehensive perspective provides a powerful context to understand current issues of race and prejudice.

Access to "healthy" food stores associated with lower prevalence of obesity in New York City

The country faces enormous challenges. PublicAgenda.org is designed to provide citizens and leaders with the tools they need to tackle them. You'll be able to get the critical facts, consider the choices and current public opinion, and learn new ways to work together on fundamental problems facing the country. Public Agenda is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to strengthen our democracy's capacity to take on tough issues.

This is the "front page" of a substantial action research site. The links below will take you to some of the other parts of the site, and some of its associated resources