The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Category: Grants

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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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Environmental policy Events Grants Science, technology & society

U.N. Environmental Project Concludes; CPPA Looks to Continue Science Policy Initiatives

On June 17, a morning of presentations, panel discussions and small group brainstorming celebrated the conclusion of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s collaboration with the Museum of Science in Boston on the international environmental project known as World Wide Views on Biodiversity. But those gathered also discussed ways that the Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA) and the museum can continue developing forums for public deliberations around issues related to science and technology in our state and globally. Held at the museum, the morning’s activities were sponsored by a UMass Public Service Endowment grant.

During the wrap-up event, Professor Jane Fountain (political science and public policy) discussed the importance of citizen participation in technology assessment and global governance, and introduced Gregory Watson, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture Resources, who talked about his experience with community engagement initiatives that succeeded due to the inclusion of diverse voices.

The museum’s planetarium director, David Rabkin, also spoke of how and why his organization first got involved in facilitating public deliberations of science policy issues. CPPA lecturer Gretchen Gano then highlighted the results of World Wide Views on Biodiversity.

That project brought together last September more than 3,000 citizens in 34 different discussions, throughout 25 countries, to consider how their own governments and world leaders might strengthen regulations that affect biodiversity. World Wide Views organizers then delivered to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity a report that highlighted the consensus of participants from around the world: Political action should be taken in order to stop the planet’s decline in biodiversity.

Those assembled earlier this month at the Museum of Science agreed that projects like World Wide Views are valuable tools in our modern democratic society, as they provide a unique forum in which people can have educated discussions based on scientific research and facts. And thanks to the partnership that World Wide Views had with the U.N., participants felt empowered knowing that their voices would become part of an international policy discussion.

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Faculty Research Grants

$1M Grant to Fund Mednicoff’s Research on Legal Development in Arab Gulf

Assistant Professor David Mednicoff (public policy) has been named the principal investigator on a $1.01 million grant to conduct interdisciplinary research on legal development and practices in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

The three-year project, titled “The Rule of Law in Qatar: Comparative Insights and Policy Strategies,” has been funded by the Qatar National Research Fund. In collaboration with project staff at FIKRA, a policy-oriented research organization based in Doha, Qatar, Mednicoff will produce policy suggestions for ongoing legal reform in the Arab Gulf.

“From its former status as a small trading port, Qatar has risen to global prominence,” said Mednicoff, explaining that the country’s government has created a long-term national development strategy based on oil and natural gas revenues. “In such a crucible of hyper-globalized change, nested in the midst of a sensitive geopolitical environment, Qatar has particular need for sociopolitical tools to optimize the balance between growth and stability. The rule of law is perhaps the most central such tool.”

This study will build on Mednicoff’s previous work on legal ideals and institutions in several Arab countries. In addition to his role at the Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA), Mednicoff serves as the director of the Middle Eastern Studies program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has been a Fulbright scholar in both Morocco and Qatar.

The Qatar National Research Foundation is that country’s major funding entity for peer-reviewed scholarly work. Mednicoff’s is among the largest of the grants awarded this year as part of the foundation’s National Priorities Research Program, which funds original research on Qatar.

CPPA is the hub for interdisciplinary public policy research, teaching and engagement at UMass Amherst.

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Care policy Grants Social inequality & justice

CPPA Faculty and Staff to Work on Collaborative Youth Sexual Justice Project

The Ford Foundation has just approved funding for a two-year $500,000 collaborative project, “Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice,” based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and led by Aline Gubrium in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and Elizabeth Krause in the Department of Anthropology. The competitive proposal was submitted in response to the Ford Foundation’s Sexuality Research Initiative, “Sexuality, Health and Rights Among Youth in the United States: Transforming Public Policy and Public Understanding Through Social Science Research.”

Gubrium was a participant in the Center for Public Policy and Administration’s 2009-2010 grants workshop, an interdisciplinary fellowship program aimed at helping social sciences and public policy faculty develop effective grant proposals. Krause is a CPPA faculty associate, and CPPA Director M.V. Lee Badgett and Associate Director for Communications Michal Lumsden will sit on the “Hear Our Stories” advisory board.

“Hear Our Stories” involves six local, state and national partners, including the Care Center in Holyoke, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the Center for Digital Storytelling, the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy, the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at UMass Boston, and the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program at Hampshire College.

The project uses new media and sensory ethnography to reveal how diasporic youth experience and negotiate sexual health disparities, and prioritizes uprooted young parenting Latinas, whose material conditions and cultural worlds have placed them in tenuous positions, both socially constructed and experientially embodied. The aim is to transform assumptions about young parenting Latinas through the novel use of digital storytelling to recalibrate the conversation on young motherhood and sexuality, health, and rights across generations.

Research, training and strategic communication components are included. Four Ford Ph.D. fellows, four masters-level students, and youth participants will all have opportunities to participate in these components toward the goal of using social science research methods and collaborating with partners to analyze and transform the problem-oriented, stigmatizing discourse on young motherhood and youth sexuality.

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Environmental policy Grants Science, technology & society Student news

CPPA Team Helps Organize U.N. Environmental Project

A team from the Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA) helped organize a successful and robust Massachusetts component of a recent international day of dialogue about environmental regulations and policies.

CPPA lecturer Gretchen Gano and students Maria Delfin Auza (MPPA ’13) and Lindie Martin (MPP ’14) spent the summer recruiting nearly 200 applicants from across Massachusetts to fill 100 spots for a guided discussion last month about biodiversity in our region and policies that affect our natural environment. The Massachusetts conversation, held at the Museum of Science in Boston, was one of 34 that took place that day in 25 countries as part of the World Wide Views on Biodiversity project. CPPA is involved thanks to a university Public Service Endowment grant to the Science, Technology and Society Initiative (STS), a CPPA-affiliated endeavor that conducts multidisciplinary research on the intersection of science and technology with today’s social, political and economic issues.

“We are incredibly honored to participate in such a creative project,” said STS Director Jane Fountain. “What’s so innovative about the World Wide Views in Biodiversity project is that it gives everyday people, who are not scientists or environmental experts, a voice in international environmental policymaking discussions.”

Results from all of the sessions around the world have been compiled into a report, which is being released this week at the meeting in Hyderabad, India, of the U.N. Secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity. When looked at altogether, the results indicate significant similarities of opinion between countries, across continents and among different age groups.

Participants in Boston and the other three U.S. locations — Denver, Phoenix and Washington, D.C., — agreed with their counterparts around the world: Political action should be taken in order to stop the global decline in biodiversity. Many also thought education at all levels is one of the most important steps to help protect the Earth’s biological diversity.

Despite the general consistency between views in developed and developing countries, a significant difference emerged regarding who should pay for preserving biodiversity. The majority of participants in all of the sessions thought developed countries should pay the main part of costs for preserving biodiversity. But people in developing countries were more likely than those in developed countries to say that developing countries should pay the main part of the cost for preserving biodiversity.

Martin, a senior majoring in environmental conservation and a member of CPPA’s accelerated Master of Public Policy program, said this project has helped strengthen her social science research skills and has given her a sense of personal satisfaction. “I am passionate about helping people and giving our community a voice that can be heard on an international level,” Martin said. “This project tested a fundamental model that has the potential to change the direction of our planet’s future.”

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Alumni news Faculty Research Grants

CPPA Hosts Five College Faculty Development Workshop

Last week the Center for Public Policy and Administration hosted a three-day workshop kicking off a Five College project that will develop strategies for bridging liberal arts and professional education for students who want to pursue careers in social change.

Brenda Bushouse, UMass associate professor of political science and public policy, co-directed the workshop with Molly Mead, director of the Center for Community Engagement and contributing faculty in American Studies at Amherst College. The two-year project is supported by a grant to Five Colleges, Inc., from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Ten faculty members, including representatives from all five campuses and two of the three professional schools involved in the project, participated in the workshop. Participants discussed the commonalities and differences in liberal arts and professional education, and how their individual campuses or programs currently prepare students to make a difference in the world. A panel of student and alumni social change leaders spoke to workshop participants about what in their educational experiences had helped them to become effective advocates for change.

Participants concluded their work by identifying important issues involved in effectively bridging professional and liberal arts education on the five campuses and possible collaborative activities in the coming academic year, including faculty and student development workshops around teaching and learning for social change. These activities will be broadly available to members of the Five College community.

Faculty participants in the workshop included Riché Barnes (Afro-American studies, Smith College), Carleen Basler (American studies and sociology, Amherst College), Myrna Breitbart (geography and urban studies, Hampshire College), Megan Briggs-Lyster (social entrepreneurship, Hampshire College), Brent Durbin (government, Smith College), Elizabeth Markovits (politics, Mount Holyoke College), David Mednicoff (public policy, UMass Amherst), Thomas Moliterno (management, UMass Amherst), Becky Wai-Ling Packard (psychology and education, Mount Holyoke College), and Eleanor Townsley (sociology, Mount Holyoke College).

Student panelists included Jake Hawkesworth (Hampshire College ’12, UMass Amherst ’13), Vanessa Megaw (Mount Holyoke College ’04, UMass Amherst ’13), Marcie Muehlke (Brown University ’06, UMass Amherst ’12), and Destry Sibley (Amherst College ’09).

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Grants

Five Colleges, Inc., Grant Supports Graduate-Undergraduate Curricular Development

The Five Colleges Public Policy Initiative has received $194,667 from Five Colleges, Inc., for activities that will help bridge liberal arts and professional education across the five campuses. The award is made possible by a generous grant to Five Colleges from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Co-directors for the project are Brenda Bushouse, associate professor of political science and public policy at UMass Amherst, and Molly Mead, director of the Center for Community Engagement and contributing faculty in American Studies at Amherst College.

A central focus of the project will be developing innovative course modules and pedagogies that help bridge undergraduate and professional training for the next generation of social change leaders.

According to Mead, “Students often arrive on our campuses eager to change the world — and many more develop that desire through coursework that improves their understanding of power, social inequality and the ethics of justice. By working across disciplines and across the undergraduate-graduate divide, we hope to strengthen students’ preparation for producing effective, lasting social change.”

Social entrepreneurship — using business models or managerial principles to organize ventures with a social mission — will be a theme that also will help focus the project’s various activities.

“A good number of Five College undergraduates and graduate students go on to lead, or even found, social change organizations or enterprises,” notes Bushouse. “Our goal is to strengthen their preparation for that work through curricular development that marries strong liberal arts foundations with support for creating and implementing sound management, governance, and fiscal policies and strategies.”

In addition to faculty development workshops and support for curricular development, the two-year grant provides funds for visits by outside experts on social entrepreneurship and bridging liberal arts and professional education; a social enterprise “pitch” competition; various forms of collaboration among graduate and undergraduate students and student groups; and a January term course on social entrepreneurship.

The grant award follows closely the minting of an accelerated Master of Public Policy (MPP) program designed for Five College juniors and seniors and administered by the UMass Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA). According to M.V. Lee Badgett, professor of economics and CPPA director, “This grant will also support collaborations that strengthen the MPP program in its infancy, making cooperation among all five institutions —and a genuine bridge between graduate and undergraduate education — possible.”

Additional information about the project will soon be available at the FCPPI website.

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Environmental policy Faculty Research Grants

Schweik and State Conservation Dept. Launch Smartphone Project to Track Invasive Species

Through the use of popular mobile phone technology, a UMass professor of environmental conservation and public policy and the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) are collaborating to engage more people in governmental and scientific efforts to collect valuable data about invasive species.

Charles Schweik, associate professor of environmental conservation and public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Jennifer Fish, director of DCR’s Service Forestry program in Amherst, have received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to enlist the help of “citizen scientists” to map invasive species using smartphone technology.

“Invasive species can hurt the environment, businesses and communities,” Fish said. She pointed out that the 2008 outbreak of the Asian longhorned beetle in Worcester led to the loss of 30,000 trees, a costly blow to the city and the urban canopy. “With more people equipped with the tools to identify and report invasive species in their hands while out in the field, we hope to prevent destructive outbreaks like these,” she said.

The new Outsmart Invasive Species Project lets people learn about, identify and report invasive species in their own time, using the Outsmart Invasive Species iPhone application, which will be available for free through iTunes in mid-March. It’s like a scavenger hunt, but for plants and insects that threaten native habitat. Citizen lookouts will be able to cover more ground than scientists could alone, thereby improving invasive-species monitoring throughout Massachusetts.

Schweik said having extra sets of eyes in the field is particularly important for spotting invasive species that are not yet prevalent, but pose an imminent threat, such as the Asian longhorned beetle and the emerald ash borer.

“We’re trying to build a ‘citizen militia,’ much like the Minutemen who mobilized in Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War,” said Schweik. “But today the enemy is invasive species, and citizens can be the Paul Reveres, armed with iPhones or digital cameras rather than muskets.”

Unlike programs where volunteers must receive time-intensive training on how to identify invasive species, anyone who spends time outdoors and has an iPhone or a digital camera and access to the Web can take part in the Outsmart project without a formal commitment.

After downloading the free Outsmart Invasive Species application, participants simply keep a look out for the species on their target lists. The application provides images and descriptions of each species, and enables participants to take photographs tagged with GPS coordinates to submit to an online database. Expert biologists will then review the observations. Participants who don’t have iPhones but do have digital cameras and World Wide Web access can submit data by registering through the free Early Detection and Distribution Mapping System at www.eddmaps.org/outsmart/join.cfm. All Massachusetts data submitted through this website will be sent to the Outsmart project team.

In addition to collecting a wider range of data than scientists could alone, the Outsmart project aims to connect organizations that are already involved in monitoring in the state and beyond.

“Given the tough economic times, it is increasingly important that government agencies at all levels work together, as well as with nonprofit and citizen groups, to tackle environmental conservation issues,” said Schweik.

The project team at UMass collaborated with developer Chuck Bargeron at the University of Georgia’s Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health to create the Outsmart Invasive Species application specifically for Massachusetts. The project has also received technical support from UMass Extension’s Mass Woods Forest Conservation program. Other collaborators include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the nonprofit Trustees of Reservations.

To learn more about how you or your organization can get involved — even if you don’t have an iPhone — visit the project website at www.masswoods.net/outsmart. You can also check out the Outsmart Invasive Species Project on Facebook, contact the project team by e-mail at outsmart@eco.umass.edu, or subscribe to the Twitter feed @outsmartapp.

This work was funded through a grant (11-DG-11420004-294) awarded by the Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry, USDA Forest Service.

Categories
Environmental policy Events Grants Social inequality & justice

Inaugural Five College Public Policy Resident to Focus on Environmental Justice

Environmental justice champion Nia Robinson will kick off the Five College collaborative public policy practitioner residency program this semester. Robinson will spend the first two weeks of March on the campuses of each of the five colleges, offering lectures, participating in panel discussions and leading teach-ins.

The Social Justice Public Policy Practitioner-in-Residence program was created to offer Five College students and faculty opportunities to engage with and learn from individuals who have hands-on policymaking experience. By offering occasions to interact with those who have chosen lives of service, the residency program will help students imagine careers of their own that might advance the common good.

Robinson is the first of the program’s four residents, who were chosen for their commitment to social justice and their tireless efforts to effect change through policy reform. She co-authored A Climate of Change: African Americans, Global Warming and a Just Climate Policy in the U.S. and currently serves as the environmental justice representative for SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective.

While a resident, Robinson will be hosted by the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College, to which she has long-standing ties. Robinson has spoken several times at the annual conference held at Hampshire that focuses on reproductive rights as one strand of the broader social justice tapestry. And last fall, she helped organize a national climate justice convention co-hosted by the Population and Development Program, SisterSong and the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Katie McKay Bryson, assistant director of the Population and Development Program, said she and her colleagues were “excited by the opportunity to nominate Nia Robinson for this residency because of the innovative way that she approaches the intersections between environmental and climate challenges, reproductive health and racial justice. She lives these connections herself, and so can make them come alive for other activists and students.”

The residency program is one component of the Five College Public Policy Initiative, a collaboration that includes the UMass Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA). This budding partnership aims to enhance collaboration among Five College faculty and students who are interested in curricula, research and outreach related to public policy. The residency program was made possible by a generous grant from Five Colleges, Incorporated, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

CPPA is the hub of interdisciplinary public policy research, teaching and engagement at UMass Amherst. Its faculty and alumni are effective policy leaders, from the local to the global levels, in addressing topics such as family and care policy, environmental issues, emerging technologies, social inequalities and governance. The CPPA program is the 2011 recipient of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration’s Social Equity Award, created to honor a public administration, affairs or policy program with a comprehensive approach to integrating social equity into its academic and practical work.

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Creative Economy/Springfield Initiatve Grants Social inequality & justice Springfield Initiative

Wellspring Initiative Keeps Growing

The Wellspring Initiative, the Springfield economic development project led by the Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA) and the Center for Popular Economics (CPE), has received a $12,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts.

This is the third award the initiative has received so far this academic year. The funding will pay for the research and planning needed to move the initiative from a concept into a reality.

Wellspring is coordinating with the region’s largest employers to identify key areas where the purchase of goods and services could be shifted to new worker-owned businesses in Springfield neighborhoods. These businesses would provide entry-level jobs and valuable skills to unemployed and underemployed city residents. Worker-owned businesses would not only offer inner-city residents the opportunity of steady employment; they would also help revitalize Springfield, one of the poorest cities in the United States.

This winter, Wellspring partners plan to identify the first of three business models to pursue. The Community Foundation grant will support Wellspring’s market research into the type of cooperative businesses that would be most likely to succeed in Springfield.

The Wellspring Initiative was one of 86 projects to receive funding from the Community Foundation in 2011. This award comes through the Community Foundation from the Eugene A. Dexter Charitable Fund administered by Bank of America, Trustee.

CPPA is the hub of interdisciplinary public policy research, teaching and engagement at UMass Amherst. Its faculty and alumni are effective policy leaders, from the local to the global levels, in addressing topics such as family and care policy, environmental issues, emerging technologies, social inequalities and governance. The CPPA program is the 2011 recipient of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration’s Social Equity Award, created to honor a public administration, affairs or policy program with a comprehensive approach to integrating social equity into its academic and practical work.