Background: Active social and spiritual support for persons with cancer and other serious illnesses has been shown to improve psychological adjustment to illness and quality of life. Objective: To evaluate a community-based support team intervention within the African American community using stakeholder interviews. Methods: Support team members…

Building relationships and community collaborations--especially on an institutional level--is a slow and long-term process. These types of innovative, experimental, and long-term collaborations with community organizations and groups often lead art institutions to reflect on the value and place of their institutional structures when engaging in…

Broadly defined as the combination and/or integration of participation in a community service activity with formal learning and reflection (Clark, 1999; Reising, Allen, & Hall, 2006; Tucker, McCarthy, & Lenk, 1998; Yan & Rodgers, 2006), service-learning activities range from voluntary student organized initiatives to mandatory…

In "Streetsmart Schoolsmart", two respected scholars present original research on youth gangs and school success to explain why some boys become disengaged and join gangs while others do not. Chapters vividly describe how urban boys from different ethnic backgrounds (Asian, African American, and Latino) approach schooling and identify the…

Policy debates about undocumented immigration in the United States focus most often on adults and adolescents. Yet 5.5 million U.S. children currently reside with at least one undocumented immigrant parent, with 4.5 million of these children U.S.-born citizens. Given that children with undocumented parents constitute nearly one-third of all…

New York City's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, represents a dramatic shift from his predecessor Michael Bloomberg in the area of education. Bloomberg was a national trendsetter on market reforms focused on privatization, testing, and competition. De Blasio was elected on an agenda of classroom investments, student supports, parent and community…

A change in political leadership typically signals a growth in organizing campaigns to find and endorse the candidate with ideas most similar to their own. However, what if instead of focusing on finding the best candidate, organizing groups decided to focus on the conversation? How would you then use an election to engage the members of the…

Research exploring the impact of social class on family and school relationships indicates that families with high levels of socioeconomic status (SES) possess resources that enable participation in traditionally accepted forms of family engagement (Henderson and Mapp, in, A new wave of evidence: The impact of school, family, and community…

This study examines the relationship between school violence and involvement of community organizations in school safety planning. The study is a secondary analysis of data from the School Survey on Crime and Safety 2003-2004 (U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, 2006). This survey collects data on crime and safety from…

Community workers and community services are a typical part of the second grade curriculum in many American schools. However, the content provided in textbooks often lacks depth and the personal connection that students need to make their learning meaningful. How many times have seven year olds already learned about fire fighters and mail…

Where does education happen? In classrooms. Teachers can provide the ultimate reform of education and teachers can be the ultimate reformers of education. Still, teachers cannot create all of the needed improvements in education alone. Input from, involvement from, ideas from, and participation from many other people can combine with what only…

We describe the process of adapting a community-level, evidence-based behavioral intervention (EBI), Community PROMISE, for HIV-positive African American men who have sex with men (AAMSM). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Map of the Adaptation Process (MAP) guided the adaptation process for this new target population by two…

The article describes a community organizing course that was as dynamic as community organizing itself. By employing a combination of teaching approaches, community organizing philosophy, and pedagogical and andragogical techniques for student training, the course challenged students to discover their beliefs and the role of the community and the…

This paper reports on a research project completed with graduate students of the adult-education programme at the Leuven University in Flanders, Belgium. The research focused on cultural policies and practices in urban contexts that try to facilitate the learning of democratic citizenship in non-formal settings. In the first part we introduce some…

The ideal of community engagement suggests that both a student's career and his college's mission are (or ought to be) inextricable from the community in which they are embedded. That students, faculty, and academic institutions should serve community purposes, actively engage in community affairs, and network themselves in real and virtual…