The first six to eight years of a child's life, known as early childhood, have been globally acknowledged to be the most critical years for life-long development of children, when the pace of development is extremely rapid. Early experiences at home, in communities, and at other care settings play a crucial role in brain architecture development…

The University of Louisville guided the development of community engagement plans by its academic and administrative units to strengthen their ability to assess and improve their partnership, outreach, and engaged scholarship with community partners. Using a common template, each unit developed a process for engaging with the community, building…

The community engagement professional (CEP) plays a critical role in engaging faculty, staff, and students with communities. In order to do this in the most effective way, this essay advocates for CEPs to become familiar with the Cooperative Extension system and develop competency for engaging Extension personnel, even when those personnel are not…

This paper reflects upon a three-step process to expand the problem definition in the early stages of an action learning project. The process created a community-powered problem-solving approach within the action learning context. The simple three steps expanded upon in the paper create independence, dependence, and inter-dependence to aid the…

Given the current economic constraints facing the country, school districts in the U.S. have been pushed to develop annual budgets through a new lens and to accept the reality that budget adoption is a complex, political process. Whether a school district is rich or poor, growing or declining in enrollment, serving a specialized population or…

School administrators need a better understanding of community education, which is defined as both a process and a place for bringing communities and their resources together. A Georgia Southern course examines the meaning and techniques of community education and addresses administrators' fears about school building damage or disruption and about…

This report provides information on the fifth year of operation (1979) of the National Right to Read Program, a national effort to develop and improve the reading skills of all citizens through the coordinated involvement of every segment of society. The various sections of the report contain (1) a statement of the mission and strategy of the…

There is a lack of systematic methods for effective implementation of meaningful consumer and community participation, which is a major factor contributing to critical deficiencies and imbalances in the planning and implementation of human services programs. A constituency-based approach for the development of service acquisition systems is…

Right to Read, a national effort to develop and improve the reading skills of all citizens, promotes the cooperative involvement of all segments of society, both public and private, in the achievement of this overall objective. This report details the development and implementation of each component of the National Reading Improvement Program…

This publication highlights lessons learned by participants at the May 2006 AYPF field trip to Philadelphia about the best practices the city uses to sustain its comprehensive out-of-school time system. In May of 2006, the American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) led a field trip to Philadelphia, Pa., in an effort to expose Washington, DC policymakers…

The case histories of water and sanitation schemes described in this volume can best be understood by identifying the moments at which critical hurdles were encountered and surmounted. The first case study, which concerns Bangladesh, discusses promising prospects that existed amid the pollution and the technical and managerial expansion of the…

A guide for providing after school day care for school age children is presented in this document. Tips are given on how to get a program started (e.g., how to meet with community members, survey needs, and consider alternative forms of day care). Steps in establishing non-profit status are listed. These include obtaining legal assistance,…

This primer introduces the basics of Program Management and Budgeting (PMB) in an effort to demonstrate how PMB can benefit school systems. Short quotes from previous publications on the topic are paired with cartoons designed to clarify the purposes and workings of the program. The publication begins by defining PMB as an alternative financial…

This Idaho State Department of Education Annual Evaluation Report on programs, projects, services and activities funded in whole or in part under Title I Elementary Secondary Education Act is organized in eight parts, as follows. Part One, "Basic State Statistics" includes three sub-sections dealing with project data, student enrollment,…

Focusing on problem-solving organizational structures, this report traces the history of the community education project of the Austin (Texas) Independent School District, which sought to involve neighborhood communities in the education process. After a brief profile of Austin, the report describes how the project started in a poor inner-city…