Suchergebnisse

As of September 2017, 560,200 Veterans lived in the state of Washington. One of the leading challenges facing Veterans is re-integration back into their communities (Sayer, 2010). Team River Runner (TRR) is one program developed to address this challenge. Founded in 2004 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Team River Runner offers weekly paddling sessions in more than 60 locations across the nation (https://www.teamriverrunner.org/about-us/). This winter, students from the EWU Therapeutic Recreation and Mechanical Engineering programs have found the ability to connect course content to real-world application and make an impact on these individuals' lives. _x000D_ The current partnership was established between Team River Runner, the EWU Therapeutic Recreation Academic Program, and EWU EPIC Adventures, to match interested veterans with student volunteers and access to the pool and equipment. From this, an interdisciplinary project began to evolve when the Mechanical Engineering program added a capstone project to design adapted kayaking equipment for the participants. Each organization and program has been able to bring specific design and usability expertise and ideas to collaborate in a problem-based project and develop a real-world solution that could potentially provide expanded recreational opportunities for individuals with physical disabilities. The interdisciplinary partnership has resulted in various prototypes of an adaptive rowing paddle. The end designs have had an initial level of evaluation and all partners continue to meet and build on this foundation. This session will demonstrate the teams' work.

European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculis) have been a problem since their introduction to Victoria, Australia in 1834. In North Central Victoria, a regional rabbit action plan was developed to harness and coordinate community action to achieve long-term benefits. This plan focuses the efforts of the community and the resources of government to achieve community and government objectives. Extensive consultation and involvement of all interested stakeholders resulted in joint ownership and commitment to implementation of the action plan. The success of this plan is due to community ownership of the problem and the committed coordinated efforts of all stakeholders. Land managers have the responsibility to implement the control works on the ground, and the Victorian government provides support to encourage landholders to work together by providing technical assistance and some funding to offset the high cost of ripping warrens. At the ground level, community groups develop local action plans (under the Regional Action Plan framework) for their area. Groups demand 80% involvement of all landholders prior to commencing control programs. On-ground works are coordinated from property to property; there are no gaps in control activity. Where landholders do not undertake control efforts that meet the community standard they are recommended to government for enforcement action, which may result in prosecution. The community ownership of the rabbit problem has resulted in an attitude change that believes "rabbit free" is essential and achievable.

This article discusses the ways in which the community is involved in Portuguese school management. It is based on an analysis of the external evaluation reports of 298 Portuguese schools for the academic years 2006–07, 2007–08 and 2008–09. The corpus analysed allowed the identification of two main aspects of the participation processes: (1) local community involvement in school life and (2) the processes and limitations on the involvement of two groups of actors – parents/guardians and pupils. Although the growing involvement of different actors in school management activities has been verified, the participation processes are not consolidated in the same way in different school organisations and in the different territories in which they are located. The presence and involvement of different actors in the schools studied is congruent with a larger understanding of the school community including pupils, teachers, parents/guardians and other actors from the local community to which the school belongs. This involvement increasingly implies in-depth knowledge of the construction processes of cultural learning taking place in school organisations.

The government of Malaysia has implemented various measures in the environmental management system, such as organizing an urban environmental management program.However, the environmental degradation problem in urban areas in the country is still alarming especially associated with the community engagement in protecting the urban environment.This study attempted to identify the level of community involvement in urban environmental management program in Malaysia based on 320 respondents.The results showed that the planning and enforcement activities by the community in the urban environmental management program were very low.In fact, the study also found that all the respondents in this survey did not execute their monitoring activities due to they assumed that the task should be undertaken by the government.The study concluded that contributing factors to the impairment of urban ecosystems in the study area is due to the vulnerability level of community involvement. Therefore, a better urban environmental management system is important to ensure higher community involvement in the urban environmental management program in strong collaboration with other concerned parties, especially the relevant government departments and the local authority.