Society for Community Research and Action

WLU psychology professors Geoff Nelson, Mark Pancer and Colleen Loomis hope the province takes notice of their ongoing project's latest findings - piling more evidence onto their argument that at-risk children who participate in early prevention programs are more likely to succeed later in life.

Poverty is the single greatest threat to individual human development and it simultaneously creates profound social disruption in the United States and around the world. Unless institutions and citizens take steps now to reduce and prevent poverty--and the growing inequality that deepens and widens its damaging repercussions--we will face a nightmarish future that can be measured in untold numbers of destroyed lives, communities, and institutions.

Organizing Upgrade is an attempt to engage left leaders and innovators in the field of community organizing in a strategic dialogue.  We hope that this project can bring the kind of inspiration, vision and strategic clarity we need to strengthen our political impact, both in our immediate fight and in our longer-term efforts to build the social justice movement and to revitalize a movement-rooted left in the United States.  We hope that, by encouraging some of the leading innovators and leaders from the sphere of community organizing to put pen to paper and to speak their mind, we can develop unity and clarity about the key demands on left organizers in these times.

Psi Chi quarterly magazine, Eye on Psi Chi article on Community Psychology.

only through basic changes in underlying conditions in society, would the world be different.

Chad Nelsen who is the Environmental Director at the Surfrider Foundation where he has worked since 1998.  (He's currently getting his Ph.D in surf economics!) He gave a presentation about how Surfrider Foundation is striving to make its grassroots network more effective.    He touched on how they are using social networks/media in this effort.

More than 13 million American children live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level, which is $22,050 a year for a family of four. 1 The number of children living in poverty increased by 21 percent between 2000 and 2008. There are 2.5 million more children living in poverty today than in 2000. Not only are these numbers troubling, the official poverty measure tells only part of the story. Research consistently shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice the federal poverty level to make ends meet. 2 3 Children living in families with incomes below this level - for 2009, $44,100 for a family of four - are referred to as low income. Forty-one percent of the nation's children - more than 29 million in 2008 - live in low-income families. 4 Nonetheless, eligibility for many public benefits is based on the official poverty measure. This fact sheet - the first in a series focusing on economic and material hardship - details some of the characteristics of American children who are considered poor by the official standard.

Alternative Index to GDP for Measuring Opportunity & Progress Launching Nov. 10 The American Human Development Project, a nonpartisan initiative of the Social Science Research Council, seeks to move beyond an overreliance on GDP as a measure of well-being, today released The Measure of America 2010-2011: Mapping Risks and Resilience (foreword by economist Jeffrey Sachs). The report is the latest update to the pioneering American Human Development (HD) Index, first introduced in The Measure of America 2008-2009.

Compelling multi-part series at Slate.com investigating inequality in the US

nuPOLIS is the Internet presence of the Innovation Network for Communities (INC), a national non-profit helping to develop and spread scalable innovations that transform the performance of community systems such as education, energy, land use, transportation and workforce development.

It's designed to give you and your team an at-a-glance look at the ingredients of advocacy efforts. It can guide you to clarify the elements of your own campaign: goals and impacts; audience; what you bring to your campaign; the activities and tactics you're planning for; and benchmarks along the way to your goals. As you click on your choices in each area, you will see your campaign strategy come into focus. And you'll get some clues about how to gauge your progress and make improvements.

This evidence-based curriculum is intended as a tool for community-institutional partnerships that are using or planning to use a CBPR approach to improving health. It can be used by partnerships that are just forming as well as mature partnerships.

"the best-known experts on leveraging social media for social good out there. "

"Increasing social distance between the poorest and the richest diminishes social cohesion, which in turn means more collective problems and fewer resources for solving all our other collective problems." Göran Therborn on why inequality matters.

educational and inspirational videos about civic engagement;

"tools and techniques to guide practitioners, funders and evaluators as they develop and articulate their theories of change. We have also helped to clarify concepts, indicators and measures of "community building" such as civic and community capacity. More recently, the Roundtable has emphasized the learning dimensions of evaluation, advocating for evaluations to be structured so as to maximize their potential to build field-level knowledge about community change."

Social Edge is a program of the Skoll Foundation that was inspired by Jeff Skoll's commitment to connecting people with shared passions. Social Edge is the global online community where social entrepreneurs and other practitioners of the social benefit sector connect to network, learn, inspire and share resources.

The Community-Engaged Scholarship Toolkit is designed to help community-engaged faculty make their best case for review, promotion and/or tenure.

The current issue of The Drum Beat e-magasine is focused on participatory research