How do we begin to assess the reciprocal impacts--or lack thereof--of community service on individuals and communities? Community engagement initiatives are increasingly valued as powerful educational tools and vehicles for social change. Yet, the task of measuring their outcomes remains complex. This article outlines core considerations in…

Neighbourhood Houses in Australia are community place-based organisations that provide education, support services, and develop responses to local issues with local communities. The practices within Neighbourhood Houses are informed by community development. Yet knowledge, understanding and practices of community development vary across the…

Community colleges play a fundamental role in higher education. They are open-access institutions, providing higher education services to individuals from a variety of backgrounds. Community colleges also provide important workforce development and training opportunities to help develop the local economy. Today, states and the federal government…

State efforts to boost the economy--economic development--first came to Pennsylvania in the 1950s with the establishment of the Pennsylvania Industrial Development Authority (PIDA) low interest loan program used to recruit manufacturers to Pennsylvania, including devastated coal regions. Since that time, economic development in Pennsylvania and…

In this paper, four qualitative case studies capture the complex interplay between the social and structural relations that shape community - academic partnerships. Collaborations begin as relationships among people. They are sustained by institutional structures that recognize and support these relationships. Productive collaborations centralize…

Why do we continue to see evidence that nonprofit staff feel like outcome measurement is missing important aspects of their work? Based on an analysis of over 1,000 pages of material in 10 outcome measurement guides and a focused literature review of frontline work in three types of nonprofit organizations, this article shows that existing outcome…

This paper critiques the notion of community capacity building (CCB) and the way it is increasingly being invoked in social policy as a way of tackling disadvantage. The paper argues that CCB and a number of its derivative terms are not as straightforward as they appear. Superficially, CCB presents as a useful way of approaching school and…

Practice and inquiry into school-community connections have been guided by problematic assumptions about the role of neighborhood schools, community based institutions, and local economic development policies in the evolution of urban communities. Formal relationships between schools and urban neighborhoods grounded in these assumptions have been…

In this article, research assessment in Singapore's higher education sector is viewed as part of the broader trend towards changing educational accountabilities in a context of globalisation. However, while on the one hand, recent Singaporean policies resonate with a neo-liberal market ideology where accountability policies are designed to enhance…

Beginning with an overview of historical commitments by AAPI populations to educational advocacy, this article analyzes the current US educational policy context of No Child Left Behind at the national and local level, and argues that both its rhetoric and system of "accountability" have been crafted in ways that are completely…

A quantitative approach to accountability in community development ignores important aspects of the process, and a qualitative approach often fails to demonstrate to the public community development's impact. The use of interpretive methods, such as those used in the natural resources and recreation fields, can help people understand community…

The Coordinator for the Coalition for Block Grant Compliance in Detroit and Executive Director of the Michigan Committee on Law and Housing discusses his organization's involvement in the federal community development block grant programs and the need for other individuals and citizen organizations to become so involved. (JM)

American colleges and universities will play an increasingly important role in revitalizing a national sense of identity and community. Judicial affairs offices can contribute to that process by helping students define and protect values essential to community life. (Author)

This article builds and explores the hypothesis that parent and community participation in school governance can have positive impacts on community development by fostering improvements in school performance and school-community relations and by acting as a catalyst for collective action around community-development issues. It does so through case…

During action research projects a great deal of written material is produced. Some of this is data generated about the project, some about the process of the research and some is reflective writing about the researcher(s). In this article I propose that a deliberate focus on the tracking of texts might be helpful in action research, particularly…