Suchergebnisse

This article presents an analysis of a Latino parent group and an African American parent group in California who struggled to engage with a contentious urban school reform. Using Bourdieu's cultural capital framework, the study focuses on the institutional responses to parent involvement, and the inequality in access that occurs as capital from different parent groups is validated or dismissed. Findings suggest that researchers also focus on school district responses to parents' efforts at engagement and help highlight institutional obstacles.

Participatory planning has faced challenges engaging predominantly Spanish-speaking immigrants beyond the bottom rungs of Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation. Participating at any level of the ladder requires individual civic skills, or capacities, that are integral to participatory processes. However, the specific skills necessary for collective action are less certain, due in part to a lack of clear definitions and a lack of clarity about how these capacities work in practice. Drawing on two years of data from a participatory budgeting process in an immigrant community in Chicago, Illinois, the authors identify key civic capacities that Spanish-speaking immigrants activated while engaging in civic discourse, and they explore the role these capacities played in moving ideas toward collective decision making. The authors present an organizational schema that aligns the study's findings of 17 unique civic capacities with capacities identified in the literature as helping participants engage more meaningfully in decision-making processes.

This article reports on the contradictory role of parent involvement coordinators charged with increasing participation of low-income immigrant parents. This urban ethnographic study investigates the success of one program that engages Latino, Asian, and African American parents in the governance of their Southern California urban elementary school. It illustrates the dilemmas and tensions that arise as institutional agents serve as cultural brokers, as a bridge between the dominant culture and parents' diverse cultures while also serving as institutional agents. The authors use theories of social and cultural capital to examine the strategies used by a school-based cultural broker to provide bridging social capital to underserved agents seeking an equal role in policy making at their school. They provide examples of three tensions that block bridging social capital, including tension over resources, power sharing, and institutional decision making.

Philanthropic organizations or foundations are a major source of the funding needed in community revitalization efforts, particularly in the USA. Catalysts for Change provides new models and new thinking for how philanthropic groups can work to better their communities. With the current economic climate forcing shrewd spending, foundations need all the guidance they can find on how to appropriately channel their funds in the best way. But how can these sorts of community projects be analyzed for effectiveness? Is there a quantitative rather than qualitative element that can be studied to give real feedback to those investing in projects? Arguing against a one-size-fits-all model, the authors illustrate the importance of context and relationships in the success of these projects. Filling a gap in the literature on the many ways in which philanthropic organizations and community development intertwine, the authors use their own first-hand experiences and research to forge a new path for academic research in an area where it has been lacking. Drawing first on the history of philanthropic funding, the authors then look at developments in the last 20 years in detail, focusing on four key case studies from across the United States.