The University of Massachusetts Amherst
Categories
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
Student news

Adams Earns Presidential Management Fellowship

When 1st Lt. Gordon Adams (MPPA/MBA ’14) learned last week that he had been chosen as a Presidential Management Fellow, he was covered in mud.

Adams, a commissioned officer in the Marine Corps, was at a two-week training course in Virginia when he got a text message from classmate Chris Palmer (MPPA ’14) congratulating him. He’d been outside all day, completing the fieldwork needed to become certified to coordinate air support missions and call in artillery and mortars. So while he had his cell phone with him, Adams hadn’t had a chance to check his email.

“It’s probably not the typical way PMF finalists find out about their selection,” says the Deerfield, Mass., native.

But then, Adams isn’t the typical PMF finalist.

His studies were put on hold last year when he deployed to Uganda to support the African Union Mission in Somalia. During his seven-month deployment, Adams led a team of Marines, Army and Navy personnel to train Ugandan soldiers. They were preparing the Ugandans to fight against Al Shabaab, the Somali militant group behind last year’s Kenyan shopping mall attack.

That attack was just a few weeks after Adams returned to the United States. And he started classes at the Center for Public Policy and Administration just a couple days after returning home. Since then, Adams has remained active in the Reserves while carrying a more-than-full course load.

He has distinguished himself as a student by integrating at every turn his military experiences with his academic responsibilities. For example, Adams is focusing his capstone on U.S. drone policy, and he completed his internship at the Veterans Affairs facility in Northampton.

“I’d like to leverage all of these experiences I’m having now into some sort of defense, law enforcement or intelligence career,” Adams says.

To that end, he is hoping to land a position through the Presidential Management Fellows Program with the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The two-year program gives finalists the opportunity to work in a federal department or agency while receiving leadership and professional development training.

Adams is among the fewer than 10 percent of PMF applicants to be named finalists, but he knows neither the job nor agency where he will end up working. At the end of April he will attend an orientation in Washington, D.C., and learn which positions he’s eligible for. But the uncertainty doesn’t seem to faze him.

“Everything I’ve done since joining the Marines has been part of a journey,” Adams says. “This is another part of that journey.”

Categories
Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research

Brandt Named 2014-2015 Family Research Scholar

Associate Professor Sylvia Brandt (resource economics and public policy) has been named one of seven 2014-2015 Family Research Scholars at the Center for Research on Families (CRF).

Each scholar receives time, technical expertise, mentorship and consultation with national experts as he or she prepares a significant research grant proposal. The program aims to bring together a diverse group of faculty from throughout the UMass community to foster innovation and collaboration across research areas related to the family.

One aspect of Brandt’s research focuses on how asthma affects a child’s quality of life. As a CRF scholar, she will be preparing a proposal titled “New Methods to Assess the Burden of Childhood Asthma in Massachusetts.” Brandt plans to work with a group of leading epidemiologists and policymakers in Massachusetts to develop a risk assessment of the burden of asthma onset due to pollution exposure.

In 2012, Brandt co-authored a paper titled “Costs of Childhood Asthma Due to Traffic-Related Pollution in Two California Communities” that the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences named one of the top research papers of the year. The paper not only examined direct health care costs related to childhood asthma, as many previous analyses have done, but also calculated the indirect costs of caring for a child with asthma.

CRF’s mission is to increase research on family issues; build a multidisciplinary community of researchers who are studying issues of relevance to families; connect national and internationally prominent family researchers with UMass faculty and students; provide advanced data analytic methods training and consultation; and disseminate family research findings to scholars, families, practitioners and policymakers. The other 2014-2015 scholars are David Arnold (psychology); Gerald Downes (biology); Marsha Kline Pruett (Smith College School for Social Work); Tatishe Nteta (political science); Katherine Reeves (epidemiology); and Lisa Sanders (psychology).

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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
CPPA & university administration

CPPA Seeks Two Full-Time Lecturers

The Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA) is hiring two full-time lecturers to start in September 2014. In addition to research and/or professional experience and a doctorate in public policy, public affairs or a related discipline, successful candidates will also have experience teaching in at least one of the following areas: public management, nonprofit management, program evaluation, public organizations, conflict resolution, personnel management, and/or public finance and budgeting.

CPPA is the hub of interdisciplinary public policy research, teaching, and engagement at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Our faculty teach and conduct rigorous research to realize social change and solve problems for the common good. Our graduate students are mid-career professionals, recent college graduates and everyone in between. They come from around the globe to study public policy and management in small classes in an area famous for its political activity and social activism.

In 2011, CPPA was the recipient of the first-ever Social Equity Award from the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration. The award was created to honor a public administration, affairs or policy program with a comprehensive approach to integrating social equity into its academic and practical work.

Read the full job posting here. Review of applications begins March 17.