Grace Kennan Warnecke's memoir is about a life lived on the edge of history. Daughter of one of the most influential diplomats of the twentieth century, wife of the scion of a newspaper dynasty and ...mother of the youngest owner of a major league baseball team, Grace eventually found her way out from under the shadows of others to forge a dynamic career of her own.Born in Latvia, Grace lived in seven countries and spoke five languages before the age of eleven. As a child, she witnessed Hitler's march into Prague, attended a Soviet school during World War II, and sailed the seas with her father. In a multi-faceted career, she worked as a professional photographer, television producer, and book editor and critic. Eventually, like her father, she became a Russian specialist, but of a very different kind. She accompanied Ted Kennedy and his family to Russia, escorted Joan Baez to Moscow to meet with dissident Andrei Sakharov, and hosted Josef Stalin's daughter on the family farm after Svetlana defected to the United States. While running her own consulting company in Russia, she witnessed the breakup of the Soviet Union, and later became director of a women's economic empowerment project in a newly independent Ukraine.Daughter of the Cold Waris a tale of all these adventures and so much more. This compelling and evocative memoir allows readers to follow Grace's amazing path through life - a whirlwind journey of survival, risk, and self-discovery through a kaleidoscope of many countries, historic events, and fascinating people.
NGO/NPO effectiveness remains a prominent concern for scholars and practitioners, but the literature on this issue is increasingly fragmented along disciplinary lines. We address this problem by ...presenting a comprehensive and interdisciplinary review of the literature on NGO and NPO effectiveness using citation analysis. In order to uncover commonalities across disciplines concerned with similar questions, we deploy a structured literature review using snowball sampling within citation networks. This approach limits author biases, fosters an interdisciplinary perspective, and adds a different methodological approach to conventional content-based literature reviews. Our review uncovers three trends: (1) there is broad scholarly consensus that unidimensional measures of effectiveness are not useful—even though such measures are commonly used by NGO/NPO rating agencies; (2) the scholarship on NGO/NPO effectiveness is dominated by conceptual works, while empirical studies remain rare; (3) a consensus on how to operationalize effectiveness remains elusive. These results suggest that progress in our understanding of NGO/NPO effectiveness requires enhanced efforts at crossing disciplinary divides, adding empirical analyses, and increasing attention to develop shared categories and methodologies.
Contribution: This study contributes to efforts to diversify the field of engineering by studying the influence of co-curricular activities on African American students' development of key ...nontechnical professional skills. Background: The 21st Century workforce requires significant collaboration and communication. For engineering graduates to meet workforce challenges, they must graduate with nontechnical skills. This study operationalized these skills using traits identified in the National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) "Engineer of 2020" report. The NAE also points to the urgent need for the United States to diversify its workforce; broadening the participation of African American engineers is key to doing so. Co-curricular activities help students develop nontechnical professional skills and are particularly important to African Americans at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Research Question: How do African American engineering students attending PWIs in the United States develop nontechnical professional skills through participation in ethnic-specific co-curricular activities? Methodology: This qualitative study explored the lived experiences of 16 participants from one of six engineering disciplines. Each participant was a member of at least one of the following organizations: a Black fraternity or sorority (termed Black Greek Letter organizations), their campus student chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers, or an institution-sponsored program for racially underrepresented students such as a minority engineering program. Findings: Data analysis revealed significant evidence that involvement in one or more of the studied ethnic-specific co-curricular activities enhanced African American engineering students' educational experiences by providing resources and opportunities to help them develop professional skills.
Small-scale fisheries are large contributors to regional economies and livelihoods in coastal communities of Latin America. While Mexico is one of the cases where small-scale fisheries play an ...important role, overfishing and poor management strategies have led to the collapse of many of its fisheries. The callo de hacha scallop fishery of the Ensenada de La Paz in Baja California Sur is an example of such a fishery which, after years of mismanagement, was closed by the Mexican authorities in 2009. The present study evaluated the recovery efforts in the cove and the potential outcomes of a collaboration between a non-governmental organization and a fishing community working towards the restoration of this pen-shell fishery. After more than four years of closure and active monitoring of the recovering process, the callo de hacha population has shown a significant population recovery, with potential solvency for reopening fishing activities. Four scenarios of uncertainty are evaluated with two of them providing positive net present values from reopening the fishery. We also document the involvement of a non-governmental organization with a fishing community, which created social capital and, in our opinion, was essential for a successful restoration. Having an actively involved community helped raise funds for the fishing closure so fishers were able to comply with Mexican legislation; it also fostered community building and self-organization that will be crucial to maintaining the sustainability of the fishery.
In the past twenty-five years, a number of countries have made the transition to democracy. The support of international organizations is essential to success on this difficult path. Yet, despite ...extensive research into the relationship between democratic transitions and membership in international organizations, the mechanisms underlying the relationship remain unclear.With Organizing Democracy, Paul Poast and Johannes Urpelainen argue that leaders of transitional democracies often have to draw on the support of international organizations to provide the public goods and expertise needed to consolidate democratic rule. Looking at the Baltic states' accession to NATO, Poast and Urpelainen provide a compelling and statistically rigorous account of the sorts of support transitional democracies draw from international institutions. They also show that, in many cases, the leaders of new democracies must actually create new international organizations to better serve their needs, since they may not qualify for help from existing ones.
Incentivized debt conversion is a financing mechanism that can assist countries with a heavy debt burden to bolster their long‐term domestic investment in nature conservation. The Nature Conservancy, ...an international conservation‐based nongovernmental organization, is adapting debt conversions to support marine conservation efforts by small island developing states and coastal countries. Prioritizing debt conversion opportunities according to their potential return on investment can increase the impact and effectiveness of this finance mechanism. We developed guidance on how to do so with a decision‐support approach that relies on a novel threat‐based adaptation of cost‐effectiveness analysis. We constructed scenarios by varying parameters of the approach, including enabling conditions, expected benefits, and threat classifications. Incorporating both abatable and unabatable threats affected priorities across planning scenarios. Similarly, differences in scenario construction resulted in unique solution sets for top priorities. We show how environmental organizations, private entities, and investment banks can adopt structured prioritization frameworks for making decisions about conservation finance investments, such as debt conversions. Our guidance can accommodate a suite of social, ecological, and economic considerations, making the approach broadly applicable to other conservation finance mechanisms or investment strategies that seek to establish a transparent process for return‐on‐investment decision‐making.
Priorización de las Oportunidades de Conversión de Deudas para la Conservación Marina
Resumen
La incentivación de la conversión de deudas es un mecanismo financiero que puede apoyar a los países con una gran carga deudora a impulsar su inversión doméstica a largo plazo en la conservación de la naturaleza. The Nature Conservancy, una organización internacional no gubernamental basada en la conservación está adaptando las conversiones de deudas para que apoyen a los esfuerzos de conservación marina realizados por países en desarrollo ubicados en pequeñas islas y por los países costeros. La priorización de las oportunidades de conversión de deudas según su rendimiento potencial de la inversión puede incrementar el impacto y la efectividad de este mecanismo financiero. Desarrollamos una guía de cómo lograr esto con una estrategia de respaldo a las decisiones que depende de una adaptación novedosa basada en amenazas de un análisis de rentabilidad. Construimos escenarios por medio de la variación de los parámetros de alcance (incluyendo a las condiciones de habilitación), los beneficios esperados y las clasificaciones de las amenazas. La incorporación de las amenazas abatibles e imbatibles afectó a las prioridades en todos los escenarios de planeación. De manera similar, las diferencias en la construcción de los escenarios resultaron en un conjunto de soluciones únicas para las principales prioridades. Así demostramos cómo las organizaciones ambientales, entidades privadas y los bancos de inversión pueden adoptar marcos de trabajo de priorización estructurada para la toma de decisiones sobre la inversión en el financiamiento de la conservación, como lo son las conversiones de deudas. Nuestra guía puede satisfacer un conjunto de consideraciones sociales, ecológicas y económicas, lo que vuelve a la estrategia en general pertinente para otros mecanismos de financiamiento de la conservación o estrategias de inversión que busquen establecer un proceso transparente para la toma de decisiones de rendimiento de la inversión.
Article Impact Statement: Prioritizations that explicitly incorporate abatable and unabatable threats can improve conservation return on investment decision‐making.
The implementation of accountable care organizations (ACOs), a new health care payment and delivery model designed to improve care and lower costs, is proceeding rapidly. We build on our experience ...tracking early ACOs to identify the major factors-such as contract characteristics; structure, capabilities, and activities; and local context-that would be likely to influence ACO formation, implementation, and performance. We then propose how an ACO evaluation program could be structured to guide policy makers and payers in improving the design of ACO contracts, while providing insights for providers on approaches to care transformation that are most likely to be successful in different contexts. We also propose key activities to support evaluation of ACOs in the near term, including tracking their formation, developing a set of performance measures across all ACOs and payers, aggregating those performance data, conducting qualitative and quantitative research, and coordinating different evaluation activities.
While a number of significant campaigns since the early 1990s have resulted in bans of particular weapons, at least as many equivalent systems have gone unscrutinized and uncondemned by transnational ...campaigners. How can this variation be explained? Focusing on the issue area of arms control advocacy, this article argues that an important influence on the advocacy agenda within transnational networks is the decision-making process not of norm entrepreneurs nor of states but of highly connected organizations within a given network. The argument is illustrated through a comparison between existing norms against landmines and blinding laser weapons, and the absence of serious current consideration of such norms against depleted uranium and autonomous weapons. Thus, the process of organizational issue selection within nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations (IOs) most central to particular advocacy networks, rather than the existence of transnational networks around an issue per se, should be a closer focus of attention for scholars interested in norm creation in world politics.
Health care in America is undergoing great change. Soon, accountable care organizations—health care organizations that tie provider reimbursements to quality metrics and reductions in the cost of ...care—will be ubiquitous. But how do you set up an ACO? How does an ACO function? And what are the keys to creating a profitable ACO?
Pathways to a Successful Accountable Care Organization will help guide you through the complicated process of establishing and running an ACO. Peter A. Gross, MD, who has firsthand experience as the chairman of a successful ACO, breaks down how he did it and describes the pitfalls he discovered along the way. In-depth essays by a group of expert authors touch on
• the essential ingredients of a successful ACO
• monitoring and submitting GPRO quality measures
• mastering your patients' responses to the Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Survey
• how bundled payments and CPC+ can meld with your ACO
• how MACRA and MIPS affect your ACO
• the role of an ACO/CIN
• the complexities of post-acute care
• data analytics
• engaging and integrating physician practices
• and much more
Dr. Gross and his colleagues are in a perfect position to guide other health care leaders through the ACO process while also providing excellent case studies for policy professionals who are interested in how their work influences health care delivery. Readers will come away with the necessary knowledge to thrive and be rewarded with cost savings.
Contributors: Joshua Bennett, Allison Brennan, Glen Champlin, Kris Corwin, Guy D'Andrea, Joseph F. Damore, Mitchel Easton, Andy Edeburn, Seth Edwards, Jennifer Gasperini, Kris Gates, Shawn Griffin, Peter A. Gross, Brent Hardaway, Mark Hiller, Beth Ireton, Thomas Kloos, Jeremy Mathis, Miriam McKisic, Morey Menacker, Denise Patriaco, Elyse Pegler, John Pitsikoulis, Michael Schweitzer, Bryan F. Smith
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