The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Category: Events

Watch for CPPA events, such as guest speakers, throughout the semester.

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Care policy Events Grants Social inequality & justice

Holyoke Youth Present Video Narratives about Sexual Disparities and Parenting

Young parents from Holyoke will publicly present digital stories next week that were produced as part of “Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice,” a collaborative project between the University of Massachusetts Amherst and several grassroots advocacy organizations.

The first-person video narratives feature parents who have been involved in the Care Center, a Holyoke-based alternative education program for pregnant and parenting teens who have dropped out of high school. They will present their short videos on Wednesday, May 7 from noon to 2:00 p.m. at the Visitor’s Center at Holyoke Heritage State Park. In addition to screening digital stories, this event will include a project overview, participatory activities for the audience and a panel from the storytellers.

Holyoke has the highest rate of births in Massachusetts to young women ages 15 to 19. Although there are many young parents in the community, they seldom have an opportunity to share their experiences with the public. The Hear Our Stories project is funded by the Ford Foundation and uses personal stories to educate the public about how young parenting women experience and negotiate sexual disparities. With training and production help from the Center for Digital Storytelling, the participating parents combined audio recordings, still and moving images, and music or other sounds to communicate an experience in the form of a video story.

This project is a collaboration of the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences, Department of Anthropology and the Center for Public Policy and Administration; the Care Center; the Center for Digital Storytelling; the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy; the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at UMass Boston.

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Events Student news

2014 Capstone Schedule Announced

Faculty, students and others involved with the Center for Public Policy and Administration are invited to attend the 2014 Capstone Conference on May 5 and 6. Graduating students will present the findings from their capstones and answer questions from the audience. Presentations will be in Gordon Hall 302-304 on Monday and in Campus Center 904-908 on Tuesday, starting at 8:30 a.m. and concluding at 1:15 p.m. both days. The full schedule is below.

Monday, May 5
8:30 a.m.
Chris Palmer: The Labyrinth of the Last Mile: An Analysis of Municipal Intervention in the Broadband Marketplace in Massachusetts
8:55 a.m.
Bryan Smith: The Use of Public Participation in the Municipal Budget and Priority Setting Process: A consideration of practices in Massachusetts Cities and Towns
9:20 a.m.
Russell Pandres: Improving Building Flexibility to Increase Housing Affordability
9:45 a.m.
Patrick Kenney: Addressing the Skills Gap in Massachusetts: An Analysis of the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act and “America Makes”
10:15 a.m.
Sarah Malek: Identifying the Innovation in Massachusetts Innovation Schools
10:40 a.m.
Kimberley Beachell: Girls Inc. of Holyoke: A Case for Out of School Care
11:05 a.m.
Clint Palermo: The Effect of the NIH Public Access Mandate on Faculty Self-Archiving in the Institutional Repository of UMass Amherst
11:30 a.m.
Nicholas Cummings: Labeling Delinquent Youth and the Impact on Education and Labor Participation
12 p.m.
Olive Munene: The Effect of Financial Development on the Transmission of Monetary Policy through Private Sector Credit-International Evidence
12:25 p.m.
Kumma Jung: Lessons learned from the history of Results Based Management in managing aid effectiveness: Best practices recommended to Korea International Cooperation Agency
12:50 p.m.
Katie Fox: Analysis, Lessons, and Recommendations from the First Three Years of the Piper Fund Broadening the Movement Grant-Making

Tuesday, May, 6
8:30 a.m.
Jeff Stupak: A Novel Environmental Justice Analysis of Allergens and Particulate Matter
8:55 a.m.
Natalie Costa Unda: Environmental Highest Court Decisions: Investigating the factors that influence extractive activities cases in Ecuador
9:20 a.m.
Nodar Kereselidze: The European Union’s Diversification of Natural Gas Supplies: A Policy Analysis
9:50 a.m.
Ana Velásquez- Giraldo: Factors of Health Claim success: case study of Calcium-Osteoporosis  and Whole grain- Cancer and heart disease food labeling claims
10:15 a.m.
Wendy Dagle: An Evaluation of State Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Policy
10:40 a.m.
Stefanie Robles: An Analysis and Comparison of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Based Workplace Discrimination
11:05 a.m.
Jonathan Ward: From battery cages to barns: A cost-benefit analysis of a national standard for cage-free egg production
12:05 p.m.
Hasmik Hayrapetyan: The Framing Analysis of Magnitsky Act in the US and in Russia
12:30 p.m.
Gordon Adams: U.S. Drone Policy in the Execution of the Global War on Terrorism
12:55 p.m.
Joanna Springer: Assessing donor strategies in the West Bank using the Fragile States Principles

Categories
Events Faculty Research Uncategorized

Pader Speaker at Regional Forum on “Casino Urbanization”

pader_100wAssociate Professor Ellen Pader (regional planning and public policy) was a featured speaker at a recent day-long forum about the impacts of casinos on neighborhoods and immigrant households in Connecticut. Hosted by the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Conn., on March 29, 2014, the forum was held in conjunction with an exhibit titled “Sub Urbanisms,” which explores the role of immigrant Chinese casino workers in southeastern Connecticut and their different cultural understandings of housing and community.

Pader spoke about research that she and her students conducted on housing and zoning regulations in Connecticut that discriminate against immigrant casino workers by imposing values that ignore different cultural traditions. She noted the extra burdens these restrictions place on Chinese casino workers, often requiring that they travel long distances to work or prohibiting them from efficient and affordable housing choices.

Pader, an anthropologist by training, is an expert on the cultural, social and political facets of housing policy and design, with particular focus on subtle forms of housing discrimination.

The exhibit at Lyman Allyn  runs through May 12. Additional information about visiting the Lyman Allyn Art Museum is available here. An article about the forum appeared in The Day, New London’s daily newspaper.

Categories
Creative Economy/Springfield Initiatve Events Social inequality & justice Springfield Initiative

Wellspring’s Upholstery Co-op Stitching Together a Brighter Springfield

Earlier this week, Artwain Davis and Alex Guevara stripped vinyl from banquet hall booths. It was one step in the revitalization of not just the booths, but also the city of Springfield, Mass. (To see more photos from the event, like CPPA on Facebook.)

Davis and Guevara work at the Wellspring Upholstery Cooperative, a new South End business that’s located on Main Street in the Monkey Wrench Building, where that tool was born. But the co-op isn’t your typical upholstery shop. It’s part of the Wellspring Collaborative, a creative economic development project that draws on the purchasing power of the area’s largest employers and anchor institutions to provide a market for new, worker-owned companies.

Fred Rose, a lecturer at the Center for Public Policy and Administration, conceived of and directs the Collaborative. He has put together a broad coalition of the region’s largest employers, as well as community and business leaders from throughout the Pioneer Valley. Many of these leaders joined Springfield Mayor Domenic J. Sarno at a ribbon-cutting ceremony this week at the upholstery shop, Wellspring’s first business.

Wellspring Co-Director Emily Kawano explained the concept at the heart of the Collaborative’s economic development plan: “Income is usually not enough. The difference in having a stable lifestyle is having some assets.”

That’s why employees at the upholstery shop will have the opportunity to become worker-owners after a year on the job. Having a financial stake in the company will not only provide employees with much-needed assets. It will also make the shop itself a more stable and viable business.

“Worker cooperatives have a much higher survival rate,” said Mary Hoyer, from the Cooperative Fund of New England. “Their services and products tend to be of a higher quality because of worker pride.” And because they are owned by people in the community, she added, co-ops as a rule don’t close up and move to where rent is cheaper.

The co-op is just one aspect of the Wellspring upholstery shop that anchors it in the Springfield community. It also has partnerships with the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department and a veteran Springfield upholsterer. The sheriff’s department has run an upholstery training program in the county jail for several decades. By partnering with the sheriff, the Wellspring co-op has access to a pool of potential employees who already have some training and often are in need of a job upon release from jail. The co-op’s other partner, Alliance Upholstery, is an established Springfield business with more than 40 years of upholstering experience and a fully equipped shop, where the Wellspring co-op is located. Alliance’s owner, Evan Cohen, is managing Wellspring Upholstery and training the incoming workforce.

Wellspring’s upholsterers have already completed jobs for the Berkshire Dining Hall at UMass and the Westfield, Mass., mayor’s office. Rose said he hopes that the partnerships the Wellspring Collaborative has developed with the region’s anchor institutions will yield further upholstery contracts.

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Events

Tomaskovic-Devey Explores How Data can Make EEOC More Effective

On April 7, Professor Donald Tomaskovic-Devey (sociology) will discuss his recent work in a talk titled “Identifying Equal and Unequal Opportunity Workplaces.”

As Tomaskovic-Devey will explain, the current regulatory function of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is largely reactive. Individuals, and more rarely groups, file discrimination complaints and the EEOC reviews the complaint. Litigation is rare, and most complaints are at the individual level and are ineffective in changing firm behavior.

But Tomaskovic-Devey asks, What if the EEOC could identify a set of employers with very low representation of women or minorities in the firm or in management and target them for proactive enforcement? His project aims to develop a diagnostic model, using the EEOC’s own data, as to the pool of best and worst organizations in terms of the diversity of their workforce.

Tomaskovic-Devey is past chair of the sociology department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also past secretary of the American Sociological Association and president of the Southern Sociological Society. Tomaskovic-Devey is currently doing research on the income distribution consequences of the financialization of the U.S. economy, long-term trends in workplace sex and race segregation, and developing theoretical and empirical models on the relationship between the labor process and workplace inequality. Recent publications from these projects have appeared in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Work & Occupations, the American Sociological Review, and the American Journal of Sociology.

This is the final lecture in CPPA’s spring 2014 Faculty Colloquium series, which consists of informal talks, often about works-in-progress, with presenters providing a significant amount of time for audience discussion and feedback. All talks are in Thompson 620, from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. They are open to the public and brown bag lunches are welcome.

Categories
Creative Economy/Springfield Initiatve Events

Wellspring Upholstery Co-op Launches Next Week

The Wellspring Collaborative officially launches its first cooperatively owned Springfield business on Wednesday, March 26 at 10:30 a.m. All are welcome.

Springfield Mayor Domenic J. Sarno will be on hand for the formal opening of the Wellspring Upholstery Cooperative, at 141-143 Main St. Charles H. Ruck, former executive director of Springfield Neighborhood Housing Services, will host the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and Frank Robinson, executive director of Springfield’s Partners for a Healthier Community, will offer opening remarks before lunch and a panel discussion on cooperative business development.

The new South End business is partnering with the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department and a veteran upholsterer to provide training and support for new worker-owners. The upholstery cooperative plans to employ six Springfield residents in its first year and expects to double in size within six years.

“This shop is providing much-needed jobs for low-income Springfield residents,” says Fred Rose, Wellspring Collaborative’s director and lecturer at the Center for Public Policy and Administration. “I’m excited to see the Collaborative take the first public step in our far-reaching economic development plan to create a network of locally owned businesses in some of this city’s poorest neighborhoods.”

The Wellspring Collaborative is modeled on the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland and the Mondragón Corporation in Spain. Evergreen, like Wellspring, draws on the purchasing power of the area’s largest employers and anchor institutions to provide a market for new, worker-owned companies. So far the upholstery co-op has performed contracts with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Westfield, Mass., mayor’s office and local banquet facilities.

The sheriff’s department has run an upholstery training program for several decades in the county jail. By partnering with the sheriff, the Wellspring co-op has access to a pool of potential employees who already have some training and often are in need of a job upon release from jail. The co-op’s other partner, Alliance Upholstery, is an established Springfield business with more than 40 years of upholstering experience and a fully equipped shop, where the Wellspring co-op is located. Alliance’s owner, Evan Cohen, is managing Wellspring Upholstery and training the incoming workforce.

“We’re incredibly lucky to have the partnerships we do. By starting off with an operational workspace and an established vocational training program, our business is already sitting on a firm foundation,” Rose says. “The co-op is actively working to build our customer base and increase employment, so if you have any upholstery needs either at home or in your workplace, please call (413) 731-7857.”

Going forward, the co-op will look to capitalize on the Wellspring Collaborative’s relationships with area anchor institutions to secure upholstering contracts. Baystate Health, Sisters of Providence Health System, Mass Mutual, UMass Amherst, Western New England University and Springfield Technical Community College are among the 22 anchor institutions, community groups and development partners currently affiliated with the Wellspring Collaborative.

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Events

Wang to Examine Public Consequences of Rising Obesity

Since the 1980s, the obesity rate in the United States has increased from nearly 15 percent to almost 36 percent. This has generated important economic consequences for society, ranging from greater public health spending to increased health premiums for all citizens.

In a talk titled “The Evolution of Nutritional Quality: The Case of the Ready-to-Eat Cereal Industry,” Assistant Professor Emily Wang (resource economics) documents the evolution of the nutritional quality of available food products and the alarming rise in obesity in the U.S. during the last quarter century.

Wang’s research concentrates on empirical industrial organization, with a particular interest in developing and estimating structural dynamic demand models and applying them to public policy analyses.

This event is coordinated by the Food Access Research and Engagement (FARE) Partnership at UMass Amherst and co-sponsored by the Center for Public Policy and Administration, the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, and the departments of Food Science, Nutrition and Resource Economics. The FARE Partnership convenes scholars, community partners, policymakers and students to create multidisciplinary initiatives that promote healthier, more sustainable and equitable food systems, from production to consumption.

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Events

Intersection of Wicked Problems and Social Enterprise Topic of Faculty Colloquium

On March 3, Hampshire College Adjunct Assistant Professor Megan Briggs Lyster will give a talk titled “Addressing Wicked Problems Through Social Entrepreneurship.”

The talk will explore how and where wicked problems — issues too complex for one person, organization or nation to solve alone — and social entrepreneurship intersect. Wicked problems require transformative and purposeful innovation. Social entrepreneurs develop ideas that embrace and are shaped by the kind of complexity inherent in wicked problems. Their ideas engage communities, cross disciplines and have the potential to disrupt and transform systems. To be responsible and effective, social entrepreneurs must understand how their ideas and actions might open new economic and social opportunities, and how that might affect specific people and communities.

In addition to teaching at Hampshire College, Briggs Lyster is the co-curricular director for the Five College Public Policy Initiative’s Curriculum Bridging Project. That project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to strengthen Five College students’ preparation for effective, lasting social change by giving faculty opportunities to investigate and pilot cutting-edge pedagogies that bridge undergraduate and professional education in the areas of public policy, organizational leadership and innovation for social change. Briggs Lyster has spent more than a decade working with both nonprofit and for-profit enterprises in the Pioneer Valley.

This lecture is part of CPPA’s spring 2014 Faculty Colloquium series, which consists of informal talks, often about works-in-progress, with presenters providing a significant amount of time for audience discussion and feedback. All talks will be in Thompson 620, from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. They are open to the public and brown bag lunches are welcome.

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Events

UMass Juniors Invited to Accelerated Master of Public Policy Info Session

UMass juniors are invited to an information session about the Center for Public Policy and Administration‘s Accelerated Master of Public Policy program:

Wednesday, Feb. 26, 5:30-6:30 p.m.
Commonwealth Honors College Events Hall East
Sandwiches served, RSVP by Feb. 24

Why attend?
Today’s complex world needs bright, motivated individuals who can creatively employ advanced management skills to make a difference across the globe.

The accelerated Master of Public Policy program educates students to become public and nonprofit sector leaders, as well as effective advocates for social change. This interdisciplinary degree program allows students to earn a policy-focused master’s degree just one year after completing their undergraduate studies.

Application deadline: April 30, 2014.

For more information about the information session or the program, email Satu Zoller, CPPA associate director.

Categories
Events

Castañeda Explores Intersection of Academic Policies and Motherhood

On Feb. 3, Associate Professor Mari Castañeda (communication) will discuss her recent work in a talk titled “Bearing Witness to Mothers’ Lives in Academia.”

The talk will address the use of testimonial methodology as a tool for generating scholarship about the lived experience of mothers working and learning in an academic context. It will also review some of the central issues affecting academic motherhood, as well as point to some of the institutional policies and practices that can foster a culture of care on campuses.

Castañeda is co-editor of Mothers in Academia, a collection of essays conveying women’s experiences considering and living the reality of motherhood while working in higher education. In addition to her position in the communication department, Castañeda is an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA), the Center for Latin American Caribbean and Latino Studies, and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. She is also the director of diversity advancement for the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

This lecture is part of CPPA’s spring 2014 Faculty Colloquium series, which consists of informal talks, often about works-in-progress, with presenters providing a significant amount of time for audience discussion and feedback. All talks will be in Thompson 620, from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. They are open to the public and brown bag lunches are welcome.