Suchergebnisse

What do you do if your alley is strewn with garbage after the sanitation truck comes through? Or if you're tired of the rowdy teenagers next door keeping you up all night? Is there a vacant lot on your block accumulating weeds, needles, and litter? For a century, Chicagoans have joined block clubs to address problems like these that make daily life in the city a nuisance. When neighbors work together in block clubs, playgrounds get built, local crime is monitored, streets are cleaned up, and every summer is marked by the festivities of day-long block parties. In Chicago's Block Clubs, Amanda I. Seligman uncovers the history of the block club in Chicago--from its origins in the Urban League in the early 1900s through to the Chicago Police Department's twenty-first-century community policing program. Recognizing that many neighborhood problems are too big for one resident to handle--but too small for the city to keep up with--city residents have for more than a century created clubs to establish and maintain their neighborhood's particular social dynamics, quality of life, and appearance. Omnipresent yet evanescent, block clubs are sometimes the major outlets for community organizing in the city--especially in neighborhoods otherwise lacking in political strength and clout. Drawing on the stories of hundreds of these groups from across the city, Seligman vividly illustrates what neighbors can--and cannot--accomplish when they work together.

Seligman's article asserts that Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty brings many strands together in a single narrative of the struggles of northern African Americans to combat discrimination in the twentieth century. By discovering the breadth of racial exclusion in the north and linking activists with diverse agendas and strategies, Sugrue does an important scholarly service. He particularly emphasizes the significance of actors—especially women—at the grassroots, who pushed the NAACP to pursue legal cases it might not have otherwise taken. Seligman's writes that the book, however, largely follows the traditional line of civil rights movement historiography in recognizing which areas were targets of urban activism: housing, education, and employment. If Sugrue had investigated the breadth of causes that African American community organizations were involved with, the book would have been much richer and much longer. Sweet Land of Liberty opens up the question of the relationship between the civil rights movement and the community organizing movement but does not close it.

This volume discusses why faculty and administrators of academe should care about implementing family-friendly policies and practices, as well as how faculty and administrators can advocate for policy changes. Faculty and administrators can benefit from these case studies' guidance on how to create family-friendly campuses at their institutions.