University-community partnerships offer synergistic spaces for communities to address difficulties and universities to meet their missions. Geographers are well positioned to participate in these partnerships, owing to the discipline's integrative nature, spatial perspectives and analytic approaches, and its attention to social and environmental…

Political leaders like to put forward guiding ideas or themes which pull their individual decisions into a broader narrative. For John Major it was Back to Basics, for Tony Blair it was the Third Way and for David Cameron it is the Big Society. While Mr. Blair relied on Lord Giddens to add intellectual weight to his idea, Mr. Cameron's legacy idea…

Social justice counseling, like all humanistic models, recognizes the dignity of each human being, affirms the right of all people to choose and work toward their own goals, and asserts the importance of service to community. The social justice paradigm brings a special emphasis on the role of the environment. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

With the help of Wayne State University, facelifts of a handful of old buildings, many of them once at the heart of the automotive industry, are leading the way in the revitalization of one small corner of Detroit. Building by building, block by block, the university is gradually helping to transform an area that was, until very recently, known…

The high percentage and the steady growth of Hispanic/Latino students in Arizona demand that special attention be placed on improving academic achievement and attainment. The need to support Hispanic/Latino parents in becoming meaningful positive contributors to their children's schooling continues to surface as a critical issue in school…

This article introduces the Citizen Scholars Program, a 2-year service-learning and leadership development program that integrates theory and practice to help students develop the knowledge, skills, and vision the authors believe they need in order to build community, be effective citizens, and advocate for social justice. The authors present 16…

This paper reports an experiment in over 3,000 Indonesian villages designed to test the role of performance incentives in improving the efficacy of aid programs. Villages in a randomly-chosen one-third of subdistricts received a block grant to improve 12 maternal and child health and education indicators, with the size of the subsequent year's…

The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative operationalization of amenities that does not privilege certain kinds of natural resources and climatic conditions and that can be used for assessing the quality of life in small towns. The amenity inventory presented here extends previous literature by including a broad range of amenities…

Many rural North Dakota communities struggle with the loss of services, schools, and population due to a changing landscape, but does a strong sense of community help anchor residents to their town? The purpose of this study was to describe sense of community and its relationship to actions promoting social capital in rural North Dakota towns.…

The article reports on a 2-year higher education music programme for young rock musicians in Sweden called BoomTown Music Education. The pedagogical philosophy behind this programme is developed from the findings of two Swedish music education researchers, and the programme exemplifies how knowledge about popular musicians' learning strategies in…

"Small Schools, Education, and the Importance of Community" focuses on three successful approaches for using the school as a catalyst for community development and revitalization, particularly in rural areas. The strategies also work well in suburban and urban areas. The three approaches described include: leadership by K-12 teachers,…

In the following dissertation, I develop heuristics for collaboratively and sustainably contributing to community infrastructures through writing. Based on the findings of an observational study on how students enrolled in my first year composition and service-learning class created new media writing projects with community partners and were able…

The Advanced Academic Programs (AAP) of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) enrolls approximately 2,700 part-time graduate students across three physical locations. It is a complex organization whose target audience is a sophisticated consumer of higher education. With the support of Eduventures, AAP…

This article explores the practices undertaken by early childhood development practitioners (ECDPs) to support poor and vulnerable children from birth to four years outside centre-based provision. The article draws on part of a UNICEF (United Nations International Children's Fund) commissioned evaluation on family and community-based ECD (Early…

Hardly anyone can have failed to pick up on the recent flurry of stories in the national press about the Big Society, sparked off by Dame Elisabeth Hoodless's remarks that funds for volunteers are disappearing at an alarming rate, and that this is undermining the very idea of a "Big Society". At the same time, under the government's…