Category: Events

Eric Glustrom, founder and executive director of Educate!, will discuss “Changing Lives, Transforming Communities: On Founding an African NGO,” on Tuesday, March 1, at 4:00 p.m. on Gordon Hall’s 3rd floor. The talk is sponsored by the UMass Center for Public Policy and Administration and is open to the public.

Educate!, an organization that helps to empower the youth of Uganda to create change in their own communities, has its origins in a trip Glustrom made to Africa in 2002 when he was a high school junior. Recognizing the critical educational needs of Ugandans his own age, he launched a scholarship program that supported recipients to attend high school.

Educate! has now grown to include a two-year social enterprise program that equips high school students to create financially sustainable enterprises that support the common good. Recently, the government of Uganda and the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) asked Educate! to create a social entrepreneurship curriculum that will reach 100,000 high school students throughout the country.

In this talk, Glustrom will discuss his experience founding and directing a socially progressive nonprofit in one of the world’s poorest countries, and how he developed an effective model that combines classroom experience with external mentoring, leadership development, and the creation of social enterprises.

Eric Glustrom graduated from Amherst College in 2007 with a degree in biochemistry and is also a “Do Something” award winner. For more information about Glustrom and Educate!, visit their website or view this YouTube video.

Well-known author and social historian Stephanie Coontz will speak at UMass Amherst on Thursday, February 10, at 7:30 p.m. in Mahar Auditorium.  The talk is free and open to the public.

Coontz’s talk, “’Mad Men,’ Working ‘Girls,’ and Depressed Housewives: The 1960s and The Feminine Mystique,” will draw on her new book, “A Strange Stirring”: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.

A Strange Stirring uses personal interviews, cultural and historical analysis, and current scholarship to examine the impact of Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking 1963 best-seller.  Coontz reads The Feminine Mystique as a flawed text that nevertheless had mass appeal and mobilized a generation of women to question their roles in the family and workplace.

Coontz applauds Friedan’s indictment of Madison Avenue and its part in defining postwar women primarily as consumers, and admires her keen analysis of how women’s subjugation supported a postwar economy. At the same time, Friedan exaggerated the image of all postwar women as depressed housewives and was especially oblivious to issues of race and class.  As Coontz points out, in 1960, 64% of upper middle class black mothers held jobs outside the home.

Reviewers are already offering praise for Coontz’s book, calling it “an engrossing and enlightening tour of the past, with wisdom and meaning for the future” (Nancy Cott, Harvard University) and “a sharp revisiting of the generation that was floored by…The Feminine Mystique” (Kirkus Reviews).

Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families.  Her previous award-winning books include The Way We Never Were (1992) and Marriage, A History (2005).

Coontz has testified about family-related issues before Congress, and her research has been featured on the Today Show, Oprah Winfrey, Crossfire, 20/20, NPR, and in other media outlets.  Her articles and op-eds have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Salon.

Coontz’s visit to UMass Amherst has been organized by the UMass Public Engagement Project, which supports and helps to train faculty members who want their research to make a difference in the world, and the Five College Public Policy Initiative.  The talk is funded at UMass by the Center for Research on Families, the Center for Public Policy and Administration, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Social and Demographic Research Institute (SADRI), the History Department, the Sociology Department, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

At Amherst College, sponsors include Women’s and Gender Studies and the Anthropology and Sociology Department; at Smith College, the Sociology Department, the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, and the Smith Lecture Fund; and at Mount Holyoke College, the Sociology Department.  Five Colleges, Inc. is also a sponsor of the talk.

Updated information about Coontz’s visit and talk will be available at www.masspolicy.org and www.umass.edu/family.

Four members of the UMass community will be featured as part of CPPA’s faculty colloquium series this spring. Lorraine Cordeiro, an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition, will kick off the series on February 7 at 12 p.m. in Thompson 620. Cordeiro is a specialist on food policies and food insecurity in the developing world.

The other speakers are Jesse Rhodes, an assistant professor of political science whose current research investigates the effects of education accountability policies on civic engagement (March 7); Cem Emrence, a postdoctoral fellow in History whose research on ethnic insurgency has important implications for policymakers focused on international security (April 4); and David Mednicoff, an assistant professor of public policy whose funding has enabled him to examine the rule of law in Arab states (May 2).

CPPA’s colloquia are held monthly each semester—typically on the first Monday of each month from 12-1 p.m.—and enable members of the UMass community to discuss research that has significant policy implications. The talks are informal and often about works-in-progress, with presenters providing a significant amount of time for audience discussion and feedback.

All talks this spring will be in Thompson 620. They are open to the public and brown bag lunches are welcome.

A screening of This Land is Our Land: The Fight to Reclaim the Commons will take place January 27, 2010 at 4:00 p.m. in the Gordon Hall 3rd floor conference room.

According to the publisher, “For more than three decades, transnational corporations have been busy buying up what used to be known as the commons — everything from our forests and our oceans to our broadcast airwaves and our most important intellectual and cultural works. In This Land is Our Land, acclaimed author David Bollier, a leading figure in the global movement to reclaim the commons, bucks the rising tide of anti-government extremism and free market ideology to show how commercial interests are undermining our collective interests. Placing the commons squarely within the American tradition of community engagement and the free exchange of ideas and information, Bollier shows how a bold new international movement steeped in democratic principles is trying to reclaim our common wealth by modeling practical alternatives to the restrictive monopoly powers of corporate elites.”

Bollier is an Amherst resident, and the film was produced by the Northampton-based Media Education Foundation. To learn more about the film, visit www.mediaed.org.