Save the Date: The Arts & Social/Civic Innovation Webinar
Our next webinar will be on Oct. 30, 2019, from 2:00 - 3:30 p.m. ET. We are inviting researchers from the National Endowment for the Arts to explore the role of artists, designers, and cultural organizations in transforming communities within cities, towns, and rural places across the country. The focus is on research studies and measurement approaches to understand the relationships between place-based arts projects and civic engagement, social cohesion, and other community-level outcomes.
Stay tuned for more information on how to register in the coming weeks.
Flint National Service Accelerator
In 2011, leaders from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, and the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Flint established the Flint National Service Accelerator, an initiative exploring national service as a civic strategy.
In 2014, Flint became a demonstration site with the goal of expanding its annual numbers to 250 national service members by 2019 – a ten-fold increase from the baseline – and engaging them to carry out in the new 20-year “Imagine Flint” Master Plan.
During the past few years, the Accelerator has exceeded expectations. Between September 2016 and September 2017, 444 national service participants – including Senior Corps, AmeriCorps State and National, AmeriCorps VISTA, VISTA Summer Associates, and AmeriCorps NCCC teams – served in the broader Flint community’s organizations, neighborhoods, and schools. Many of these participants were long-term residents of Flint.
The Accelerator, which became a program of the United Way of Genesee County in 2015, is at the center of these efforts. In September 2016, the United Way of Genesee County hired Social Policy Research Associates (SPR) to conduct a year-long process and outcomes evaluation of the Accelerator initiative. Through a series of interviews, focus groups, site visits, and surveys, the evaluation focused on understanding the outcomes and added value of service and participation in the Accelerator for service members, organizations, and Flint community residents.
SPR created a series of reports and case studies to highlight different aspects of the Accelerator model, as well as a toolkit highlighting strategies that local leaders can use to launch or improve similar initiative.
In 2018, the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) awarded 16 research grants to 18 different institutions of higher education and their community partners in the Community Conversations research competition. The cohort represents researchers from institutions of higher education that work with and in local communities to use a participatory research approach to:
- Actively engage residents and other local stakeholders in a research process
- Identify a local issue of concern to the community
- Understand what may facilitate or hinder participation to address the issue
- Create a collaborative action plan to increase civic engagement and build relationships to tackle the community-identified issue
To highlight the important work they are doing in their communities, we developed profiles for each of our grantees. Click here to view the grantee profiles and see what the 2018 cohort is up to.
We also updated the profiles for the 2015 and 2017 research competition grantees and the 2017 evidence-based intervention planning grants.
What’s New on the Evidence Exchange
Check out some of the new resources added to the Evidence Exchange:
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