Journal articles on the topic 'United States. Public Building Service'

How do international audiences evaluate the legitimacy of secessionist insurgencies? Although secessionists often propagate their behavioral choices, such as state-building and non-violence, to international audiences in the hopes of generating support, scholars know little about the effects of this information. In this article, we use survey experiments in the United States and the United Kingdom to examine how international audiences respond to two commonly used strategies of secession: civilian killings and social service provision. We find that international audiences view secessionists who avoid civilian killings and provide social services as more legitimate than secessionists who kill civilians and do not provide services, respectively. Further, we show that service provision can allow secessionists to reduce—and, in some cases, eliminate—the public costs of civilian killings. These findings have important implications for ongoing secessionist conflicts across the globe.

Historically, the health care needs of poor men and men of color have been neglected in the United States, resulting in significant disparities in health and health outcomes. Dedicated resources to address the particular needs of men are necessary to eliminate the health disparities that afflict underserved men. The following article compiles and shares some of the lessons learned as experienced by three Community Voices sites that have been active in men's health. Community Voices Miami's Overtown Men's Health Study, Denver Health Men's Health Initiative, and Baltimore Men's Health Center are working to address the health needs of men in some of the most vulnerable communities in the United States. Examples of community-specific assessment of men's needs, community engagement, service delivery, service to special populations, marketing, addressing sustainability, and advances in public policy to improve men's health are presented.

Expanding mandatory selective service registration in the United States to include women would seem to be good public policy that increases national security and reduces gender bias. Despite the recent recommendation of a congressionally-mandated commission, recent efforts to implement this important reform have repeatedly stalled. Why? In this article, we explain the failure of selective service reform through the lens of American political institutions. Neither the composition of the Supreme Court, nor the institutional incentives facing legislators, are conducive to movement on this issue. Building on the legislative entrepreneurship literature, we argue that recent trends in congressional representation and the adoption of new issue framings are the most likely factors that will increase the probability of selective service reform. The absence of selective service reform in the United States reveals important facts about agenda-setting in defense policy and how political institutions shape the relationship between the public and the military.

Abstract National, state, and local arts networks help build the capacity of public and private sector organizations to serve older adults through quality arts engagement opportunities. The National Endowment for the Arts has worked closely with state arts agencies to build networks through a community of practice to facilitate partnerships with artists, arts organizations, aging services, and the healthcare system. With more than 40 states participating, the initiative has resulted in new state partnerships, new state grant initiatives, and new arts learning programs for older adults. Arts service organizations also have a role to play in this work. For example, the American Alliance of Museums is building a network of museums that will develop and implement high-quality, intensive arts learning opportunities for older adults across the United States. This presentation will address how these networks are helping build capacity across the country to improve the health and well-being of older adults

AbstractNew Public Governance’s approach to public management seeks to both decrease costs and to increase the overall efficiency and effectiveness of publicly-funded services. It further emphasizes effective, efficient collaborations among service providers, and well-functioning networks of service-providers connected with government funders. One conceivable vehicle to promote collaborations among nonprofits providing contracted services is to establish co-located nonprofit centers. In such a multi-tenant building, its owner or master lease-holder, which is usually a nonprofit, would recruit other nonprofits to rent space and use shared resources and/or services in its shared-space workplace. Typically, these workplaces are more affordable, stable, efficient, and of higher quality than their current offices. Also, nonprofit centers often enthusiastically promote cooperation and collaboration among their tenants. Several hundred such centers already exist in the United States and Canada. Two profiles of two nonprofit centers where co-located organizations collaboratively provide social services, as well as some survey results, are presented to illustrate that nonprofit center sites are indeed operational and could be a vehicle to help support collaborative goals of New Public Governance.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to determine the types of collaborative activities public youth services and school librarians in rural locations engage in and to ascertain whether there are methods that youth service librarians believe can be employed to improve collaborative activities with public school librarians. Design/methodology/approach – A mixed method design was implemented with an online self-administered survey. The survey contained open and closed-ended questions. Findings – The findings indicate that many public librarians serving youth in rural locations find it important to collaborate with school librarians. Yet, they struggle to build strong collaborative relationships. Factors such as time, a lack of school librarian administrative support, and a lack of understanding about the roles of school librarians and public librarians, are collaborative barriers. Research limitations/implications – The study was limited to a purposive sample of 80 public librarians serving youth in rural areas in the United States. Practical implications – Librarianship training programs can help school librarians and youth services librarians learn how to form collaborative partnerships through mentorship programs, requiring pre-service school and youth services librarians to collaborate on projects, and educating them about the similarities in their goals. School and public librarians can also benefit from training to teach them how to build community partnerships. Originality/value – The results provide evidence that public librarians serving youth in rural areas favor building stronger collaborative relationships with school librarians. Building these relationships can improve the quality of education for youth in these locations. This article also includes proposed strategies for improving these relationships.

Community-based organizations (CBOs) provide HIV prevention services throughout the United States, including the South where HIV/AIDS burden is high. We assessed Southern CBO response to changes in the HIV prevention landscape, including the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) High Impact Prevention. Both strategies aim to improve outcomes for people living with or at high risk for HIV. Inductive qualitative analysis of interviews and consultations with CBOs, capacity building assistance providers, and CDC staff revealed CBOs are building clinical service capacity and cross-agency partnerships to adapt, but face inadequate or reduced funding. A holistic approach to HIV prevention and care in the South is critical, where stigma and other socio-structural factors limit health care options for persons affected by HIV. Health care organizations may benefit by partnering with CBOs because CBOs have the skillsets and community rapport to effectively improve health outcomes of persons living with HIV.

Public Service, in popular culture, can be viewed through many artistic lenses. Although there has been a consistent negative portrayal of government through art forms such as film and television, this research looks to review how government institutions in the United States have used art to provide a positive portrayal of public service. Eight forms of public service art are outlined through a content analysis of the holdings at the Virtual Museum of Public Service. The findings show that government and public entities have historically and continually engaged in promoting public service through art. Many of these public art examples are accessible year round, without limitations, such as buildings, statues, and public structures.

AbstractThis article examines the current debate in the United States (primarily) and Britain regarding government-funded social service provision via faith-based institutions. By highlighting the tension between the 'priestly' and 'prophetic' roles of public religion, it argues for the critical importance of protecting religion's prophetic role even as society moves toward more extensive public financing of priestly social service provision. The article first outlines contemporary prophetic religion in the United States, especially faith-based community organizing (also known as broad-based community organizing) efforts, emphasizing three facets of the field: its scale, its role in building social capital, the issues it has addressed. Secondly, the article argues that, despite the narrow partisan tenor of recent faith-based social service provision in the US, it may have redeeming features that new leaders will want to preserve. However, H. R. Niebuhr's (1951) analysis of the relationship between religion and culture is invoked to characterize four key tensions between priestly and prophetic religion that may be exacerbated by governmental funding. The conclusion outlines several approaches through which practitioners, policymakers, the press, and scholars can help society maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of such funding.

Fire protection is an essential public service but also one of the costliest ones. Considerable resources are devoted to fire protection including equipment, staff, training, and the facilities to house them. Fire stations, in particular, have a significant cost impact on state and municipal budgets. Fire stations are required in most local governments and like other municipal buildings are central to identity. To limit the cost of operating a fire station, municipalities have looked to more green building options. Green-rating systems such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system have been used in the U.S. to assess green buildings. Thus, this paper aims to analyze 95 certified fire stations under the LEED-NC 2009 version (v3) that are located in the United States. A scorecard analysis (credits and points) of public data available serve as the foundation to describe the status of the green design and construction of these fire stations. The findings indicate that the points in the Material Resources (MR) category are achieved at the lowest rate compared to the other categories, on average 38% of 14 available points were earned. In addition, the points in the Energy and Atmosphere (EA) category are one of the lowest achievement rates, equal to 40.2%. The data also shows that 82% of LEED-certified fire stations belong to career or mostly career type, which are municipality fire departments funded by local governments. The significance of this study is to demonstrate the importance of both MR and EA categories for the design and construction phases of green fire stations.

As one of the main means to deliver service, Public Funded Projects (PFPs) always play a vital part in the development of the human society. Accordingly, research interests concerning PFPs from the construction industry have led to a great number of published papers during the past decades. Aimed at identifying the emerging research trend of researches addressing PFP issues, this study obtained target publications from selected international journals, and analyzed those articles in terms of the number of annual publications, authors and affiliations as main contributors, popular research themes, and preferred research methods. This study indicated that the number of PFP articles have been increasing, which could imply the growing importance of PFPs to the construction industry at large. What is more, the findings suggest that researchers from the United States are the most active in this discipline, followed by those from the United Kingdom, Australia, China, Hong Kong and Spain. And the origins of productive affiliations follow a similar way. With respect to emerging hot research topic, integration research, delivery method, sustainable exploration, governance issue, financial concern, performance study, risk management and decision-making challenges tend to attract more concerns of researchers within this discipline. Meanwhile, it was also found that the target articles of this study can be catalogued into three groups, field report, theoretical analysis, and quantitative calculation respectively. In addition, more vigorous modeling and simulation techniques such as stochastic frontier regression modeling and fuzzy synthetic evaluation simulation have been adopted in related researches. Moreover, investigations of content analysis also exhibit that sustainability should be the essential characteristic of PFPs, but there is still a long way to go concerning current sustainability performance of most PFPs. More relative research efforts are needed to ensure a sustainable development of PFPs as well as the construction industry.

AbstractObjectivesCommunity resilience (CR) is emerging as a major public policy priority within disaster management and is one of two key pillars of the December 2009 US National Health Security Strategy. However, there is no clear agreement on what key elements constitute CR. We examined exemplary practices from international disaster management to validate the elements of CR, as suggested by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 21 (HSPD-21), to potentially identify new elements and to identify practices that could be emulated or adapted to help build CR.MethodsWe extracted detailed information relevant to CR from unpublished case studies we had developed previously, describing exemplary practices from international natural disasters occurring between 1985 and 2005. We then mapped specific practices against the five elements of CR suggested by HSPD-21.ResultsWe identified 49 relevant exemplary practices from 11 natural disasters in 10 countries (earthquakes in Mexico, India, and Iran; volcanic eruption in Philippines; hurricanes in Honduras and Cuba; floods in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Mozambique; tsunami in Indian Ocean countries; and typhoon in Vietnam). Of these, 35 mapped well against the five elements of CR: community education, community empowerment, practice, social networks, and familiarity with local services; 15 additional practices were related to physical security and economic security. The five HSPD-21 CR elements and two additional ones we identified were closely related to one another; social networks were especially important to CR.ConclusionsWhile each disaster is unique, the elements of CR appear to be broadly applicable across countries and disaster settings. Our descriptive study provides retrospective empirical evidence that helps validate, and adds to, the elements of CR suggested by HSPD-21. It also generates hypotheses about factors contributing to CR that can be tested in future analytic or experimental research. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2013;7:292-301)

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has rapidly wrought havoc on the world, exposing the gaps in public health systems of countries that were previously considered most prepared for infectious disease outbreaks. Notably, despite being ranked highest on the Global Health Security Index, the United States has been severely hit with nearly two million confirmed cases and one hundred thousand deaths by the end of May 2020. In addition to the public health fragmentation from the federal to the state level and lagging regulations, early reports highlight substantial socioeconomic disparities and health system barriers contributing to the spread and impact of the pandemic in the United States. In this review, we explore the impact of COVID-19 on public health systems by assessing systems through the lens of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Ten Essential Public Health Services. Building on prepandemic and COVID-19 observations and lessons, we propose recommendations moving forward to prepare for future waves and other disease outbreaks.

Background Twitter is a potentially valuable tool for public health officials and state Medicaid programs in the United States, which provide public health insurance to 72 million Americans. Objective We aim to characterize how Medicaid agencies and managed care organization (MCO) health plans are using Twitter to communicate with the public. Methods Using Twitter’s public application programming interface, we collected 158,714 public posts (“tweets”) from active Twitter profiles of state Medicaid agencies and MCOs, spanning March 2014 through June 2019. Manual content analyses identified 5 broad categories of content, and these coded tweets were used to train supervised machine learning algorithms to classify all collected posts. Results We identified 15 state Medicaid agencies and 81 Medicaid MCOs on Twitter. The mean number of followers was 1784, the mean number of those followed was 542, and the mean number of posts was 2476. Approximately 39% of tweets came from just 10 accounts. Of all posts, 39.8% (63,168/158,714) were classified as general public health education and outreach; 23.5% (n=37,298) were about specific Medicaid policies, programs, services, or events; 18.4% (n=29,203) were organizational promotion of staff and activities; and 11.6% (n=18,411) contained general news and news links. Only 4.5% (n=7142) of posts were responses to specific questions, concerns, or complaints from the public. Conclusions Twitter has the potential to enhance community building, beneficiary engagement, and public health outreach, but appears to be underutilized by the Medicaid program.

The Galway Consensus Conference articulated key definitions, principles, values, and core domains of practice as the foundation for the diffusion of health promotion across the globe. The conference occurred in the context of an urgent need for large numbers of trained health workers in developing countries, which face multiple severe threats to the health of their people. In this article, the authors draw on the experience acquired by the health promotion profession in the United States to illustrate what might be done to build health promotion capacity in developing countries. They examine the profession's experience in the areas of accreditation and certification, research and publications, advocating for the profession, and advocating for public health policy. Finally, the authors direct a challenge to the profession in the United States to extend a hand to developing countries to assist them in expanding their capacity to prepare health promotion professionals and deliver health promotion services.

Nonprofit organizations play an essential role in the provision of collective goods. Focusing on a unique subsector in the United States, this study examines the extent to which nonprofit hospitals’ provision of community benefits is related to their revenue streams. Building on existing theories, we postulate that as the proportion of a certain revenue source (i.e., government grants, private contributions, and program fees) increases, its corresponding benefits also increase. Using data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 filed by tax-exempt hospitals nationwide, we performed panel data analysis with year and id fixed effects using robust standard errors. The findings show that the proportion of private donations is positively associated with community benefits, whereas that of program income is negatively related to community benefits. Overall, nonprofits’ decision to serve disadvantaged groups and larger communities is associated with their income sources. The study raises implications that are pertinent to nonprofit management, public administration, and health administration.

United States public health and security capabilities are vulnerable to the magnitude and complexity of infectious diseases. Recently, human cases of a new H7N9 influenza in China have underscored the unpredictability of outbreaks. This article analyzes the federal government’s role in addressing an imminent pandemic threat from an organizational perspective, beginning with the Cabinet Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Health and Human Services (HHS), which jointly lead pandemic planning and response. This article recommends that these departments, their agencies, and international partners continue building and maintaining a heterarchy, the most optimal interorganizational structure for securing against and responding to a pandemic threat. This requires establishing clear, yet flexible responsibilities and shared systems, terminology, and tools. Given a hypothetical scenario in which a disease is introduced into the United States by a potentially infected foreign migrant entering through a maritime port of entry, current protocol and operations are promising. However, further heterarchical coordination is necessary to appropriately manage all plausible scenarios.

Background: To assess residents’ attitudes towards the United States (U.S.) Department of Housing and Urban Development’s new smoke-free public housing policy, perceptions about barriers to policy implementation, and suggestions for optimizing implementation. Methods: In 2017, we conducted 10 focus groups among 91 residents (smokers and nonsmokers) living in New York City public housing. Results: Smokers and nonsmokers expressed skepticism about the public housing authority’s capacity to enforce the policy due to widespread violations of the current smoke-free policy in common areas and pervasive use of marijuana in buildings. Most believed that resident engagement in the roll-out and providing smoking cessation services was important for compliance. Resident expressed concerns about evictions and worried that other building priorities (i.e., repairs, drug use) would be ignored with the focus now on smoke-free housing. Conclusions: Resident-endorsed strategies to optimize implementation effectiveness include improving the access to cessation services, ongoing resident engagement, education and communication to address misconceptions and concerns about enforcement, and placing smoke-free homes in a larger public housing authority healthy housing agenda.

Objectives: Lung cancer screening (LCS) with low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) has been a reimbursable preventive service covered by Medicare since 2015. Geographic disparities in the access to LDCT providers may contribute to the low uptake of LCS. We evaluated LDCT service availability for older adults in the United States (US) based on Medicare claims data and explored its ecological correlation with smoking prevalence. Materials and Methods: We identified providers who provided at least 11 LDCT services in 2016 using the Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data: Physician and Other Supplier Public Use File. We constructed a 30-mile Euclidian distance buffer around each provider’s location to estimate individual LDCT coverage areas. We then mapped the county-level density of LDCT providers and the county-level prevalence of current daily cigarette smoking in a bivariate choropleth map. Results: Approximately 1/5 of census tracts had no LDCT providers within 30 miles and 46% of counties had no LDCT services. At the county level, the median LDCT density was 0.5 (interquartile range (IQR): 0–5.3) providers per 1000 Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries, and cigarette smoking prevalence was 17.5% (IQR: 15.2–19.8%). High LDCT service availability was most concentrated in the northeast US, revealing a misalignment with areas of high current smoking prevalence, which tended to be in the central and southern US. Conclusions: Our maps highlight areas in need for enhanced workforce and capacity building aimed at reducing disparities in the access and utilization of LDCT services among older adults in the US.

Access to affordable fresh food is an ongoing challenge for underserved urban neighborhoods across the United States. Several are designated food deserts with no access to a full-service grocery store within a one-mile radius. The Urban Food Hubs of the College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability, and Environmental Sciences (CAUSES) of the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) exemplify the University’s commitment to building capacity in the food desert neighborhoods of Washington D.C. The four components of the Urban Food Hubs are food production, food preparation, food distribution, and waste and water recovery (http://www.udc.edu/category/causes). They are designed to not only provide access to fresh food, but also to create jobs, improve public health, mitigate water management problems, and create urban resiliency. The contributions in economic, social/cultural, and physical/environmental impacts, and the five pillars of economic development that track the broader impacts of urban capacity building are described here. The Urban Food Hubs demonstrate the investment metropolitan universities could make to ensure the long-term economic, social, and environmental health of each community. The model is scalable and replicable in other metropolitan areas including those that experience high pressure on land-use and those experiencing decline.

Abstract The City of Toronto is creating a standalone housing corporation to focus on the specific needs of low-income older adults living in social housing. A key focus of this new corporation will be to provide housing, health and community support services needed to optimize older adult tenants’ ability to maintain their tenancy and age in place with dignity and in comfort. To support this work, we conducted an environmental scan of service delivery models that connect low-income older adults living in social housing with health and support services. Desktop research was undertaken to identify relevant programs. For each model, key details were extracted including housing type, services offered, provider information, rent structure and funding sources. The scan identified 34 examples of social housing programs for older adults run by public, private and non-profit agencies across Canada, the United States and Europe that integrated health and supportive services. Successful models were those that understood the needs of tenants and developed collaborative partnerships with health and social service providers to create flexible place-based programs. A common challenge across jurisdictions was privacy legislation that made it difficult to share health and tenancy data with program partners. The presence of on-site staff that focused on building trust and community among tenants was considered key for identifying tenants requiring additional supports in order to age in place. These insights offer important considerations on how integrated supportive housing service models promote housing stability and support better health and wellbeing among older adults residing in social housing.

ABSTRACTIn this commentary on recent planning for multidisciplinary research on ageing in the United States, we argue that Sir Douglas Black's pessimistic conclusion about the irrelevance of such planning is off the mark. Created by the U.S. Congress in 1975, the National Institute on Ageing (NIA) was a novelty in the National Institutes of Health. NIA was mandated to have a broadly multidisciplinary research agenda that included behavioural and social sciences and to produce periodic reports to the Congress on a consensual agenda for future research. Two previous research agendas were developed internally by NIA. The recently released third agenda, which is of interest here, was organized externally by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), National Academy of Sciences. While the subagendas in ageing research for basic biology, clinical medicine, and health services research will be of interest to some, the focus here is specifically on the behavioural and social scientific agenda. High priority substantive issues were identified. Beyond the building of a consensus concerning research priorities, other functions of national research planning are identified in the field of ageing.

In the United States and elsewhere in North America, acoustics requirements for nonresidential buildings in Federal acts, codes, official standards and unofficial guidelines and rating systems tend to be voluntary, grass-roots and bottom-up instead of being mandatory, top-down or governmentally mandated. This relates to the governmental viewpoint that noise is merely a nuisance, not a health risk as viewed in other parts of the world. Existing requirements associated with noise control - whether they are related to environmental/community noise, transmission of transportation noise through the building envelope or occupant noise through the interior construction assemblies or minimizing noise from building services - are more prevalent in these standards. Requirements for good room acoustics related to sound absorption, speech intelligibility and distraction-free and comfortable interiors that promote human health and well-being are appearing in more standards and being updated to have more stringent values. Much improvement is still needed in older standards that do not have regular revision cycles and open, public, review periods. An overview of the types of room acoustics metrics used, their evolving values, advantages/disadvantages and the research behind them will be provided. Recommendations for future advancements will be offered.

The benefits of prescribed fires are recognized throughout the United States, but the ability to assist with prescribed fire application on private land by government agencies has many possible constraints and challenges. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a federal agency, is mandated to assist private landowners with meeting land management objectives, but the ability of employees to utilize prescribed fire as a management tool is complex. We conducted a regionally stratified online survey of NRCS employees across the United States to determine the barriers inhibiting their ability to assist private landowners with prescribed fire application. In January of 2020, we recruited 101 NRCS rangeland and grazing land specialists to participate in the survey with 50 completing the survey (regional sample size: Central n = 14, Northeast n = 5, Southeast n = 12, West n = 19). A majority (82%) of respondents thought prescribed fires were staying the same or increasing in number. Regional differences in assistance types were significant for conducting burns and providing technical education, but not for other assistance types. Regional differences for perceived constraints were also significant for how the public understands the risks of prescribed fire and the ecological constraints but not for state policy, federal policy, liability, or public understanding of prescribed fire benefits. Overall and across regions, the NRCS survey participants perceived federal policies, liability, and private landowners’ lack knowledge of prescribed fire limits their ability to assist in the utilization of prescribed fire. Creating a national policy that allows a streamlined process for NRCS employees to assist with prescribed fire implementation and collaborative initiatives to improve private landowner knowledge gaps has the potential to improve prescribed fire application across the United States.

Force health protection (FHP) is defined as “the prevention of disease and injury in order to protect the strength and capabilities” of any service population. FHP was the foundational principal of the US Public Health Service (USPHS). President John Adams’ signing of An Act for Sick and Disabled Seamen on July 16, 1798, marked the first dedication of US federal resources to ensuring the well-being of US civilian sailors and Naval service members. On January 4, 1889, President Cleveland enacted the USPHS Commissioned Corps, creating the world’s first (and still only) uniformed service dedicated to promoting, protecting, and advancing the health and safety of the United States and the world. Building on the lessons of the 2014-2015 response to the Ebola virus pandemic, the Corps Care program was formalized in 2017 to establish and implement a uniform and comprehensive strategy to meet the behavioral health, medical, and spiritual needs of all Commissioned Corps officers. Its role was expanded in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which has placed unprecedented demands on health care workers and spotlighted the need for FHP strategies. We describe the FHP roles of the Corps Care program for the resiliency of Commission Corps officers in general and the Corps’ impact during the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Qualitative analysis of FHP discussions with deployed officers highlights the unique challenges to FHP presented by the pandemic response.

The article is devoted to the consideration of the scientific-source basis of the issues of investment activity in housing construction. On the basis of historical analysis, the main stages of the evolution of the problems of reducing investment attractiveness in the housing market in Ukraine are determined. The foreign practice of state regulation of investment and construction processes relevant for borrowing, or refinement, in such developed countries as Ukraine, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden and the United States of America is considered. Summarizing the experience of developing mortgage lending abroad, it should be noted that mortgage lending was one of the main factors of economic development in the United States (new Roosevelt course), in Germany (post-war reforms of Erhard), in Argentina («Kovalio plan») and in Chile (Pinochet reforms). It is proved that the development of housing construction is significantly dependent on the level of development of mortgage lending, as this is one of the main sources for obtaining additional funds for the further development of construction.It is noted that the problems existing today in the housing and construction complex of the country are largely provoked by the ineffectiveness of the system of investment activity that was established even in a planned economy. The Soviet housing finance system was based on the centralized allocation of budgetary resources for the construction of public housing and its free provision to citizens who were officially recognized, in due course, in need of better housing conditions. It is concluded that the system of state construction and housing distribution inevitably led to a spiraling growth in demand for housing and stagnation of its supply, which caused a steady deficit of housing stock.The processes of stabilization, reformation and development of investment in housing construction are always experienced by all developed countries of the world. Seeking a way of output from a difficult situation, governments are pursuing a policy that should provide state financial support to construction companies and, at the same time, facilitate the wider involvement of the private sector in providing construction services, resulting in the emergence and development of a competitive construction environment in general.

Purpose. ABC's World News Tonight (WNT) promotion of 800-QUIT-NOW allowed for a nationwide introduction of the QUIT-NOW number; this study examined the impact on call volume. Design. Pre-postassessment. Setting. National health promotion campaign. Subjects. U.S. population (smokers). Measures. Monthly call attempts to the quitline at national and state levels. Intervention. During November 2005 ABC's WNT highlighted the National Network of Tobacco Cessation Quitlines' toll-free number, 800-QUIT-NOW, during the month-long series, “Quit to Live: Fighting Lung Cancer.” Analysis. We compared changes in call volume prepromotion, during promotion, and postpromotion by percent and regional differences, range, and average number of calls. Results. Overall call volume in the United States (49 states and the District of Columbia) increased markedly in November; 37,049 calls compared with 16,145 in October. Although there was large variability across states, there was an average of 317 calls prepromotion, 726 calls during the promotion, and 397 calls postpromotion. Conclusion. The promotion highlighted the need for capacity building in terms of both sustained promotion and ability of quitlines to provide service as the number of calls increased, as well as the importance of coordinating efforts so adjustments to individual state quitlines can be made. The series served as the first national promotion and drew attention to the potential impact on the National Network of Tobacco Cessation Quitlines.

A free public library is the cornerstone of most American communities. Libraries offer a variety of far-reaching services, ranging from books for self-education and leisure reading, to informational and cultural programs. Carnegie libraries constructed in the early 1900s through the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie played a significant role in transforming the library movement from subscription libraries for special interest groups to free public libraries with services accessible by all. Of the 1,412 communities in the United States to build Carnegie libraries, twenty-nine communities in New Jersey benefitted from this program. This research project draws primarily on original correspondence between New Jersey communities seeking library building funds and Andrew Carnegie. The letters supporting funding applications create a unique demographic and economic snapshot of New Jersey communities during the early 1900s when the Carnegie libraries were erected in the state. This study offers historical insights and informs the role that the Carnegie libraries played in their respective communities.

The Food Safety Modernization Act mandates building a national Integrated Food Safety System, which represents a seamless partnership among federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal agencies. During multistate foodborne illness outbreak investigations, local and state partners, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), or the United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety Inspection Service, depending on the regulated food product, become engaged and assist in coordinating the efforts between partners involved and determine the allocation of resources. The FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) Office of the Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation (CORE) Network coordinates foodborne illness outbreak surveillance, response, and post-response activities related to incidents involving multiple illnesses linked to FDA-regulated human food, dietary supplements, and cosmetic products. FDA has implemented the National Incident Management System (NIMS) Incident Command System (ICS) principles across the agency to coordinate federal response efforts, and CORE has adapted NIMS ICS principles for the emergency management of multistate foodborne illness outbreaks. CORE’s implementation of ICS principles has provided several benefits to the operational cycle of foodborne illness outbreak investigations, including establishing a consistent, standardized, and transparent step-by-step approach to outbreak investigations. ICS principles have been instrumental in the development of a national platform for rapid and systematic laboratory, traceback, and epidemiologic information sharing, data analysis, and decision-making. This allows for partners across jurisdictions to reach a consensus regarding outbreak goals and objectives, deploy resources, and take regulatory and public health actions.

Latinx men in the southern United States are affected disproportionately by HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). However, few evidence-based prevention interventions exist to promote health equity within this population. Developed by a well-established community-based participatory research partnership, the HoMBReS por un Cambio intervention decreases sexual risk among Spanish-speaking, predominately heterosexual Latinx men who are members of recreational soccer teams in the United States. Scale-up and spread, an implementation science framework, was used to study the implementation of this evidence-based community-level intervention within three community organizations that represent typical community-based providers of HIV and STI prevention interventions (i.e., an AIDS service organization, a Latinx-serving organization, and a county public health department). Archival and interview data were analyzed, and 24 themes emerged that mapped onto the 12 scale-up and spread constructs. Themes included the importance of strong and attentive leadership, problem-solving challenges early, an established relationship between innovation developers and implementers, organizational capacity able to effectively work with men, trust building, timelines and incremental deadlines, clear and simple guidance regarding all aspects of implementation, appreciating the context (e.g., immigration-related rhetoric, policies, and actions), recognizing men’s competing priorities, and delineated supervision responsibilities. Scale-up and spread was a useful framework to understand multisite implementation of a sexual risk reduction intervention for Spanish-speaking, predominately heterosexual Latinx men. Further research is needed to identify how constructs, like those within scale-up and spread, affect the process across the implementation continuum, given that the uptake and implementation of an innovation is a process, not an event.

Dr. Ella Gertrude Smith Ayer Stanton Jones (1863-1931), better known as Gertrude Stanton, was the first woman licensed to practice optometry in the United States. A native of Iowa, Stanton began her career as a teacher, but eventually moved to Minnesota where she received training and began to work as an itinerant refracting optician or optometrist, building her professional reputation through clever marketing. In 1901, shortly after the passage of the first optometry licensure law in Minnesota, Stanton applied for and received a license by exemption. Stanton went on to become an in-store optometrist at Dayton’s Department Store and eventually set up her own storefront where she employed her daughter and ran an optical business run entirely by women. During her career, she participated in optometry and professional associations and public service projects and was active in her community. Thrice married with three children, Stanton’s abiding popularity with her patients and the public as well as her financial success despite leading an unconventional life for a woman at the turn of the twentieth century is a testament to her fierce independence, indomitable spirit and impressive business acumen. This article, constructed from meticulous research in archival records, paints a detailed portrait of Stanton’s life and career as an optometric pioneer.

AbstractHow will emerging autonomous and intelligent systems affect the international landscape of power and coercion two decades from now? Will the world see a new set of artificial intelligence (AI) hegemons just as it saw a handful of nuclear powers for most of the twentieth century? Will autonomous weapon systems make conflict more likely or will states find ways to control proliferation and build deterrence, as they have done (fitfully) with nuclear weapons? And importantly, will multilateral forums find ways to engage the technology holders, states as well as industry, in norm setting and other forms of controlling the competition? The answers to these questions lie not only in the scope and spread of military applications of AI technologies but also in how pervasive their civilian applications will be. Just as civil nuclear energy and peaceful uses of outer space have cut into and often shaped discussions on nuclear weapons and missiles, the burgeoning uses of AI in consumer products and services, health, education, and public infrastructure will shape views on norm setting and arms control. New mechanisms for trust and confidence-building measures might be needed not only between China and the United States—the top competitors in comprehensive national strength today—but also among a larger group of AI players, including Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.

Objective: The Care and Prevention in the United States (CAPUS) Demonstration Project was a 4-year (2012-2016) cross-agency demonstration project that aimed to reduce HIV/AIDS-related morbidity and mortality among racial/ethnic minority groups in 8 states (Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia). Its goals were to increase the identification of undiagnosed HIV infections and optimize the linkage to, reengagement with, and retention in care and prevention services for people with HIV (PWH). We present descriptive findings to answer selected cross-site process and short-term outcome monitoring and evaluation questions. Methods: We answered a set of monitoring and evaluation questions by using data submitted by grantees. We used a descriptive qualitative method to identify key themes of activities implemented and summarized quantitative data to describe program outputs and outcomes. Results: Of 155 343 total HIV tests conducted by all grantees, 558 (0.36%) tests identified people with newly diagnosed HIV infection. Of 4952 PWH who were presumptively not in care, 1811 (36.6%) were confirmed as not in care through Data to Care programs. Navigation and other linkage, retention, and reengagement programs reached 10 382 people and linked to or reengaged with care 5425 of 7017 (77.3%) PWH who were never in care or who had dropped out of care. Programs offered capacity-building trainings to providers to improve cultural competency, developed social marketing and social media campaigns to destigmatize HIV testing and care, and expanded access to support services, such as transitional housing and vocational training. Conclusions: CAPUS grantees substantially expanded their capacity to deliver HIV-related services and reach racial/ethnic minority groups at risk for or living with HIV infection. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of implementing novel and integrated programs that address social and structural barriers to HIV care and prevention.

Breast cancer among Filipinas in the United States is a major but largely neglected cancer disparity. In 2004, a community– university partnership resulted in the first Filipina breast cancer support group in the San Francisco Bay Area. Building on this partnership, we explored the social and cultural contexts of Filipinas’ experiences with breast cancer to inform development of culturally appropriate and sustainable support services and outreach. We utilized multiple qualitative methods (participant observation, individual and small group in-depth qualitative interviews) to identify meanings of survivorship and support. Interviews and observations revealed the influences of social context and immigration experiences on women’s understandings of cancer, what “surviving” cancer means, and what it means to take care of someone with breast cancer (or be taken care of). Our findings highlight the importance of a transnational perspective for the study of immigrant women’s experiences of cancer and survivorship.

Medical historians have recently become interested in the veterinary past, investigating the development of animal health in countries such as France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. An appreciation of the German context, however, is still lacking – a gap in the knowledge that the present article seeks to fill. Providing a critical interpretation of the evolution of the veterinary profession, this investigation explains why veterinary and medical spheres intersected, drifted apart, then came back together; it also accounts for the stark differences in the position of veterinarians in Germany and Britain. Emphasis is placed on how diverse traditions, interests and conceptualisations of animal health shaped the German veterinary profession, conditioned its field of operation, influenced its choice of animals and diseases, and dictated the speed of reform. Due to a state-oriented model of professionalisation, veterinarians became more enthusiastic about public service than private practice, perceiving themselves to be alongside doctors and scientists in status, rather than next to animal healers or manual labourers. Building on their expertise in epizootics, veterinarians became involved in zoonoses, following outbreaks of trichinosis. They achieved a dominant position in meat hygiene by refashioning abattoirs into sites for the construction of veterinary knowledge. Later, bovine tuberculosis helped veterinarians cement this position, successfully showcasing their expertise and contribution to society by saving as much meat as possible from diseased livestock. Ultimately, this article shows how veterinarians were heavily ‘entangled’ with the fields of medicine, food, agriculture and the military.

Background Although jail screening programs have an important role in the diagnosis and treatment of sexually transmissible infections (STI) and HIV among incarcerated individuals, many arrestees are not screened before release. Justice-involved women are at particularly high risk for these conditions because of individual risk behaviour as well as other network-level risk factors. Court-based programs could provide a critical bridge between these women, STI risk counselling and health services. This formative study explored the features of a program that would encourage STI testing among court-involved women. Further, we describe how community-based participatory research principles were adapted for use in a court setting and the resulting justice–public health partnership. Methods: Using semistructured interviews and focus group discussions, we explored issues related to health-seeking behaviours, perceived gaps in services for high-risk women and the components of a court-based screening program. Results: Six focus groups were conducted with women with a history of commercial sex work and staff from the court, as well as local organisations providing HIV and social support services for high-risk women. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles facilitated development of relevant research questions and equitable processes, and assisted partners to consider individual and sociostructural sources of health disparities. Discussion: Although not every principle was applicable in a court setting, the CBPR framework was helpful for building cohesion and support for the project. We provide a description of how CBPR principles were operationalised, describe the key lessons learned and discuss the implications for CBPR projects in a community court.

What does it mean for a student to be critically literate in the Twenty First Century? How do we teach critical literacy within university humanities programs in the United States? And what are the implications of critical literacy for the conception and praxis of the global good? Using Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams’ conceptions of critical literacy, I outline a pedagogical approach to literature and cultural studies that offers a conceptual space for students to imagine and engage with ideas of the global good. From the perspective of student learning, this approach to community engagement offers students opportunities to “read” their own social context critically and engage with, as well as, contribute to various local, national and global communities in meaningful, material ways. But what is important is that in doing so, such contributions come from the starting point of disciplinary knowledge, rather than from a problematic volunteerism or service framework that are often associated with the term community engagement. A critically literate approach to community engagement enables students to understand how literary studies can enrich an understanding of their global context in ways that other disciplines cannot and, therefore, the type of knowledge that the field produces. Drawing upon concrete examples of student learning from a range of university classes in which I have employed this pedagogical approach, I conclude that the student learning experience that results from such a process is qualitatively different—both with respect to the sorts of knowledge that students’ produce, as well as the dispositional affects it engenders in students’ lives. Such a learning experience holds the promise of achieving Raymond Williams’ vision of adult education as a process of “building social consciousness” and “real understanding of the world”—a substantive critical literacy for a globalized world.

Objective: The objective of this study was to determine the number, risk factors, and demographic characteristics of potential human trafficking victims from tips reported to a social services agency in a major Midwest metropolitan area from 2008 through 2017. Methods: The agency, comprising 90 employees serving more than 10 000 persons annually, received federal funding to raise awareness about trafficking and to identify and support persons who are at risk for trafficking through training, coalition building, direct outreach and service, and case management. We, the authors, counted the numbers of tips and potential victims reported to the agency by year, type of trafficking, economic sector, sex, region of origin, and age and looked for new risk factors for trafficking. Results: Data were available for 213 tips received from September 1, 2008, through June 30, 2017, and for 82 potential victims identified from July 1, 2011, through June 30, 2017. Labor trafficking (126 tips, 57 potential victims) was more common than sex trafficking (59 tips, 17 potential victims). The number of tips varied during the study period. Tips and potential victims were diverse and included male and female children and adults. Most victims were from Mexico (n = 68), the United States (n = 47), Asia (n = 31), and Central and South America (n = 23). Potential victims were exploited in several industries including agriculture, construction, commercial sex, and landscaping. New risk factors for trafficking were exploitation within marriage and work in the sales industry. Conclusions: Domestic and foreign-born men, women, and children are all at risk for labor and sex trafficking. Direct outreach to foreign-born victims should be a priority. The new risk factors should be explored.

Large-scale disasters simultaneously deplete capital stock and services which then requires many complex rebuilding and societal activities to happen in a compressed time period; one of those is governance. Governments often create new institutions or adapt existing institutions to cope with the added demands. Over two years following the 4 September 2010 and 22 February 2011 Canterbury earthquakes, governance transformations have increasingly centralized recovery authority and operations at the national level. This may have helped to strengthen coordination among national agencies and expedite policy and decision making; but the effectiveness of coordination among multiple levels of government, capacity building at the local and regional levels, and public engagement and deliberation of key decisions are some areas where the transformations may not have been as effective. The Canterbury case offers many lessons for future disaster recovery management in New Zealand, the United States, and the world.

This study draws from the broad range of cross-disciplinary theories examining digitally networked action (DNA) to offer a rhetorical topology that traces the repeated patterns of communication and digital actions marking the formation and maintenance of protest counterpublics. Grounded in the concepts of collective identity building and network theory, the rhetorical characteristics and digital tactics that scholars have uncovered over the past 10 years were synthesized into a series of a priori classifications (i.e., topoi). These topoi were then applied to the exploration of how Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists used Twitter in service of protest. While the topoi constituting the topology guided the analysis, this study also details the unique and contextually specific personalized communication styles, protest action approaches, and digital affordances used by BLM advocates to constitute a movement that has brought the persistent oppression of Black individuals living in the United States to the forefront of political conversation. This approach sheds light on the elements contributing to the subject positions that encouraged others to commit to BLM as well as provides a resource for those seeking to integrate unified findings from studies focused on the nexus of digital media and social movements in their work.

ABSTRACTObjectives: Racially/ethnically diverse communities suffer a disproportionate burden of adverse outcomes before, during and after a disaster. Using California as a locus of study, we sought to identify challenges and barriers to meeting the preparedness needs of these communities and highlight promising strategies, gaps in programs, and future priorities.Methods: We conducted a literature review, environmental scan of organizational Web sites providing preparedness materials for diverse communities, and key informant interviews with public health and emergency management professionals.Results: We identified individual-level barriers to preparing diverse communities such as socioeconomic status, trust, culture, and language, as well as institutional-level barriers faced by organizations such as inadequate support for culturally/linguistically appropriate initiatives. Current programs to address these barriers include language assistance services, community engagement strategies, cross-sector collaboration, and community assessments. Enhancing public-private partnerships, increasing flexibility in allocating funds and improving organizational capacity for diversity initiatives were all identified as additional areas of programmatic need.Conclusions: Our study suggests at least four intervention priorities for California and across the United States: engaging diverse communities in all aspects of emergency planning, implementation, and evaluation; mitigating fear and stigma; building organizational cultural competence; and enhancing coordination of information and resources. In addition, this study provides a methodological model for other states seeking to assess their capacity to integrate diverse communities into preparedness planning and response.(Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2011;5:227–234)

Objective: The Hyde Amendment and related policies limit or prohibit Medicaid coverage of abortion services in the United States. Most research on cost-related abortion barriers relies on clinic-based samples, but people who desire abortions may never make it to a healthcare center. To examine a novel, pre-abortion population, we analyzed a unique qualitative dataset of posts from Reddit, a widely used social media platform increasingly leveraged by researchers, to assess financial obstacles among anonymous posters considering abortion. Methods: In February 2020, we used Python to web-scrape the 250 most recent posts that mentioned abortion, removing all identifying information and usernames. After transferring all posts into NVivo, a qualitative software package, the team identified all datapoints related to cost. Three qualitatively trained evaluators established and applied codes, reaching saturation after 194 posts. The research team used a descriptive qualitative approach, using both inductive and deductive elements, to identify and analyze themes related to financial barriers. Results: We documented multiple cost-related deterrents, including lack of funds for both the procedure and attendant travel costs, inability to afford desired abortion modality (i.e., medication or surgical), and for some, consideration of self-managed abortion options due to cost barriers. Conclusions: Findings from this study underscore the centrality of cost barriers and third-party payer restrictions to stymying reproductive health access in the United States. Results may contribute to the growing evidence base and building political momentum focused on repealing the Hyde Amendment.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether energy retrofits need to be directed by public policy intervention or can be encouraged through tax relief that harnesses profit incentives. Existing office space potentially has an economic life of 25 to 40 years. It may be operating inefficiently compared to newer buildings for many years. Designing a market-based incentive system that encourages periodic remodeling which lowers energy usage and carbon emissions would have social benefits. Design/methodology/approach An owner/user case study is developed to test financial feasibility. The empirical study uses publicly available information to examine whether the variables modeled react as anticipated. The regression model incorporates variables of importance to an owner/user. Tax credits and energy deductions, interest rates associated with borrowing and likely electricity and natural gas rate changes are independent variables used to predict the dependent variable new non-residential private construction spending. Findings Investment tax credits (ITCs) coupled with lending has a positive impact on new non-residential commercial construction spending. The value of these benefits is not sufficient to encourage total building energy retrofits, but would encourage low-cost system upgrades. The interest rates associated with borrowing and the debt-service coverage ratio need to be kept low for existing building energy retrofits to be stimulated. Practical implications The case study provides a template that a business can use to determine the financial feasibility of a proposed energy upgrade. It enables the comparison of the marginal cost associated with an update to the present value of the financial benefits likely to be generated. Local real estate tax reductions linked to specific energy upgrades offered by many municipalities can be added to the expected energy savings generated by doing the retrofit. Social implications Tax systems designed to solve environmental pollution problems do not require regulators, inspections or court case decisions and are inherently less intrusive to businesses. Coupling private financial incentives with public policy goals cause energy-saving technologies to be adopted more quickly and with less public outcry. Originality/value The paper specifically considers the factors that influence an owner/user of the property. Rental rates and vacancy losses do not influence a property owner/user. Prior studies looked at revenue enhancements and lower-vacancy rates possibly associated with a green compared to a non-green office building. These studies did not focus on the owner/user paradigm. They reported financial benefits accruing to property owners who lease the office building. Many retrofit studies tended to use CoStar Group’s data, which are collected by a for-profit company and sold to users. The data used in this study come from survey data collected by the Federal Government of the United States of America (USA). It is publicly available to all researchers.

Abstract The year 1917 marked a critical moment in the relationship between the United States and its Puerto Rican colony. It was the year the U.S. Congress approved the Jones Act, which further consolidated the island’s colonial relationship to the empire. Through the Jones Act, U.S. Congressmen granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship. In turn, Puerto Rican men were asked to fulfill the obligations of their new colonial citizenship and join the U.S. military. The Porto Rican Regiment provided 18,000 colonial military recruits to guard the Panama Canal during the war. How did historical actors make sense of this new colonial citizenship? How did they interpret, debate, and adapt to the newly consolidated colonial status? This essay examines how local teachers and educators defined colonial citizenship. Puerto Rican teachers struggled to promote a citizenship-building project that cultivated student commitment to the patria (the island), while acknowledging the colonial relationship to the United States. In the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s, teachers debated military participation in World War I and the rights and obligations of U.S. citizenship. At the core, these debates were informed by anxieties over broader changes in constructions of gender. In the 1920s, Puerto Rico women aggressively and persistently challenged traditional gender norms. Working-class women joined the labor force in ever larger numbers and led labor strikes. Bourgeois women became teachers, nurses, and social workers. Both groups were committed suffragists. The historiography on citizenship and gender in the 1920s has focused on women’s emerging role in public spaces and their demands for just labor rights and the franchise. In this article, I propose we look at teachers, as intermediate actors in the colonial hierarchy, and examine their anxieties over changing gender norms. They debated men’s capacity to serve in the U.S. military and promoted modern physical education for the regeneration of boys and girls in the service of their patria. Debates among teachers in the 1920s sought to define the new category of colonial citizenship. As they did so, they helped liberalize some gender norms, while ultimately reinforcing patriarchy.

In the United States, extensive investments have been made to restore the ecological function and services of coastal marine habitats. Despite a growing body of science supporting coastal restoration, few studies have addressed the suite of societally enabling conditions that helped facilitate successful restoration and recovery efforts that occurred at meaningful ecological (i.e., ecosystem) scales, and where restoration efforts were sustained for longer (i.e., several years to decades) periods. Here, we examined three case studies involving large-scale and long-term restoration efforts including the seagrass restoration effort in Tampa Bay, Florida, the oyster restoration effort in the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and Virginia, and the tidal marsh restoration effort in San Francisco Bay, California. The ecological systems and the specifics of the ecological restoration were not the focus of our study. Rather, we focused on the underlying social and political contexts of each case study and found common themes of the factors of restoration which appear to be important for maintaining support for large-scale restoration efforts. Four critical elements for sustaining public and/or political support for large-scale restoration include: (1) resources should be invested in building public support prior to significant investments into ecological restoration; (2) building political support provides a level of significance to the recovery planning efforts and creates motivation to set and achieve meaningful recovery goals; (3) recovery plans need to be science-based with clear, measurable goals that resonate with the public; and (4) the accountability of progress toward reaching goals needs to be communicated frequently and in a way that the general public comprehends. These conclusions may help other communities move away from repetitive, single, and seemingly unconnected restoration projects towards more large-scale, bigger impact, and coordinated restoration efforts.

Wildlife is declining around the world. Many developed nations have enacted legislation on endangered species protection and provide funding for wildlife recovery. Protecting endangered species is also supported by the public and judiciary. Yet, despite what appear as enabling conditions, wild species continue to decline. Our paper explores pathways to endangered species recovery by analyzing the barriers that have been identified in Canada, the United States, and Australia. We summarize these findings based on Canada’s Species at Risk Conservation Cycle (assessment, protection, recovery planning, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation) and then identify 10 “bridges” that could help overcome these barriers and bend our current trajectory of wildlife loss to recovery. These bridges include ecosystem approaches to recovery, building capacity for community co-governance, linking wildlife recovery to ecosystem services, and improving our storytelling about the loss and recovery of wildlife. The focus of our conclusions is the Canadian setting, but our findings can be applied in other national and subnational settings to reverse the decline of wildlife and halt extinction.

In this issue of Journal of Disaster Research, we introduce nine papers on societal responses to recent catastrophic disasters with special focus on long-term recovery processes in Japan and the United States. As disaster impacts increase, we also find that recovery times take longer and the processes for recovery become more complicated. On January 17th of 1995, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake hit the Hanshin and Awaji regions of Japan, resulting in the largest disaster in Japan in 50 years. In this disaster which we call the Kobe earthquake hereafter, over 6,000 people were killed and the damage and losses totaled more than 100 billion US dollars. The long-term recovery from the Kobe earthquake disaster took more than ten years to complete. One of the most important responsibilities of disaster researchers has been to scientifically monitor and record the long-term recovery process following this unprecedented disaster and discern the lessons that can be applied to future disasters. The first seven papers in this issue present some of the key lessons our research team learned from the studying the long-term recovery following the Kobe earthquake disaster. We have two additional papers that deal with two recent disasters in the United States – the terrorist attacks on World Trade Center in New York on September 11 of 2001 and the devastation of New Orleans by the 2005 Hurricane Katrina and subsequent levee failures. These disasters have raised a number of new research questions about long-term recovery that US researchers are studying because of the unprecedented size and nature of these disasters’ impacts. Mr. Mammen’s paper reviews the long-term recovery processes observed at and around the World Trade Center site over the last six years. Ms. Johnson’s paper provides a detailed account of the protracted reconstruction planning efforts in the city of New Orleans to illustrate a set of sufficient and necessary conditions for successful recovery. All nine papers in this issue share a theoretical framework for long-term recovery processes which we developed based first upon the lessons learned from the Kobe earthquake and later expanded through observations made following other recent disasters in the world. The following sections provide a brief description of each paper as an introduction to this special issue. 1. The Need for Multiple Recovery Goals After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the long-term recovery process began with the formulation of disaster recovery plans by the City of Kobe – the most severely impacted municipality – and an overarching plan by Hyogo Prefecture which coordinated 20 impacted municipalities; this planning effort took six months. Before the Kobe earthquake, as indicated in Mr. Maki’s paper in this issue, Japanese theories about, and approaches to, recovery focused mainly on physical recovery, particularly: the redevelopment plans for destroyed areas; the location and standards for housing and building reconstruction; and, the repair and rehabilitation of utility systems. But the lingering problems of some of the recent catastrophes in Japan and elsewhere indicate that there are multiple dimensions of recovery that must be considered. We propose that two other key dimensions are economic recovery and life recovery. The goal of economic recovery is the revitalization of the local disaster impacted economy, including both major industries and small businesses. The goal of life recovery is the restoration of the livelihoods of disaster victims. The recovery plans formulated following the 1995 Kobe earthquake, including the City of Kobe’s and Hyogo Prefecture’s plans, all stressed these two dimensions in addition to physical recovery. The basic structure of both the City of Kobe’s and Hyogo Prefecture’s recovery plans are summarized in Fig. 1. Each plan has three elements that work simultaneously. The first and most basic element of recovery is the restoration of damaged infrastructure. This helps both physical recovery and economic recovery. Once homes and work places are recovered, Life recovery of the impacted people can be achieved as the final goal of recovery. Figure 2 provides a “recovery report card” of the progress made by 2006 – 11 years into Kobe’s recovery. Infrastructure was restored in two years, which was probably the fastest infrastructure restoration ever, after such a major disaster; it astonished the world. Within five years, more than 140,000 housing units were constructed using a variety of financial means and ownership patterns, and exceeding the number of demolished housing units. Governments at all levels – municipal, prefectural, and national – provided affordable public rental apartments. Private developers, both local and national, also built condominiums and apartments. Disaster victims themselves also invested a lot to reconstruct their homes. Eleven major redevelopment projects were undertaken and all were completed in 10 years. In sum, the physical recovery following the 1995 Kobe earthquake was extensive and has been viewed as a major success. In contrast, economic recovery and life recovery are still underway more than 13 years later. Before the Kobe earthquake, Japan’s policy approaches to recovery assumed that economic recovery and life recovery would be achieved by infusing ample amounts of public funding for physical recovery into the disaster area. Even though the City of Kobe’s and Hyogo Prefecture’s recovery plans set economic recovery and life recovery as key goals, there was not clear policy guidance to accomplish them. Without a clear articulation of the desired end-state, economic recovery programs for both large and small businesses were ill-timed and ill-matched to the needs of these businesses trying to recover amidst a prolonged slump in the overall Japanese economy that began in 1997. “Life recovery” programs implemented as part of Kobe’s recovery were essentially social welfare programs for low-income and/or senior citizens. 2. Requirements for Successful Physical Recovery Why was the physical recovery following the 1995 Kobe earthquake so successful in terms of infrastructure restoration, the replacement of damaged housing units, and completion of urban redevelopment projects? There are at least three key success factors that can be applied to other disaster recovery efforts: 1) citizen participation in recovery planning efforts, 2) strong local leadership, and 3) the establishment of numerical targets for recovery. Citizen participation As pointed out in the three papers on recovery planning processes by Mr. Maki, Mr. Mammen, and Ms. Johnson, citizen participation is one of the indispensable factors for successful recovery plans. Thousands of citizens participated in planning workshops organized by America Speaks as part of both the World Trade Center and City of New Orleans recovery planning efforts. Although no such workshops were held as part of the City of Kobe’s recovery planning process, citizen participation had been part of the City of Kobe’s general plan update that had occurred shortly before the earthquake. The City of Kobe’s recovery plan is, in large part, an adaptation of the 1995-2005 general plan. On January 13 of 1995, the City of Kobe formally approved its new, 1995-2005 general plan which had been developed over the course of three years with full of citizen participation. City officials, responsible for drafting the City of Kobe’s recovery plan, have later admitted that they were able to prepare the city’s recovery plan in six months because they had the preceding three years of planning for the new general plan with citizen participation. Based on this lesson, Odiya City compiled its recovery plan based on the recommendations obtained from a series of five stakeholder workshops after the 2004 Niigata Chuetsu earthquake. <strong>Fig. 1. </strong> Basic structure of recovery plans from the 1995 Kobe earthquake. <strong>Fig. 2. </strong> “Disaster recovery report card” of the progress made by 2006. Strong leadership In the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake, local leadership had a defining role in the recovery process. Kobe’s former Mayor, Mr. Yukitoshi Sasayama, was hired to work in Kobe City government as an urban planner, rebuilding Kobe following World War II. He knew the city intimately. When he saw damage in one area on his way to the City Hall right after the earthquake, he knew what levels of damage to expect in other parts of the city. It was he who called for the two-month moratorium on rebuilding in Kobe city on the day of the earthquake. The moratorium provided time for the city to formulate a vision and policies to guide the various levels of government, private investors, and residents in rebuilding. It was a quite unpopular policy when Mayor Sasayama announced it. Citizens expected the city to be focusing on shelters and mass care, not a ban on reconstruction. Based on his experience in rebuilding Kobe following WWII, he was determined not to allow haphazard reconstruction in the city. It took several years before Kobe citizens appreciated the moratorium. Numerical targets Former Governor Mr. Toshitami Kaihara provided some key numerical targets for recovery which were announced in the prefecture and municipal recovery plans. They were: 1) Hyogo Prefecture would rebuild all the damaged housing units in three years, 2) all the temporary housing would be removed within five years, and 3) physical recovery would be completed in ten years. All of these numerical targets were achieved. Having numerical targets was critical to directing and motivating all the stakeholders including the national government’s investment, and it proved to be the foundation for Japan’s fundamental approach to recovery following the 1995 earthquake. 3. Economic Recovery as the Prime Goal of Disaster Recovery In Japan, it is the responsibility of the national government to supply the financial support to restore damaged infrastructure and public facilities in the impacted area as soon as possible. The long-term recovery following the Kobe earthquake is the first time, in Japan’s modern history, that a major rebuilding effort occurred during a time when there was not also strong national economic growth. In contrast, between 1945 and 1990, Japan enjoyed a high level of national economic growth which helped facilitate the recoveries following WWII and other large fires. In the first year after the Kobe earthquake, Japan’s national government invested more than US$ 80 billion in recovery. These funds went mainly towards the repair and reconstruction of infrastructure and public facilities. Now, looking back, we can also see that these investments also nearly crushed the local economy. Too much money flowed into the local economy over too short a period of time and it also did not have the “trickle-down” effect that might have been intended. To accomplish numerical targets for physical recovery, the national government awarded contracts to large companies from Osaka and Tokyo. But, these large out-of-town contractors also tended to have their own labor and supply chains already intact, and did not use local resources and labor, as might have been expected. Essentially, ten years of housing supply was completed in less than three years, which led to a significant local economic slump. Large amounts of public investment for recovery are not necessarily a panacea for local businesses, and local economic recovery, as shown in the following two examples from the Kobe earthquake. A significant national investment was made to rebuild the Port of Kobe to a higher seismic standard, but both its foreign export and import trade never recovered to pre-disaster levels. While the Kobe Port was out of business, both the Yokohama Port and the Osaka Port increased their business, even though many economists initially predicted that the Kaohsiung Port in Chinese Taipei or the Pusan Port in Korea would capture this business. Business stayed at all of these ports even after the reopening of the Kobe Port. Similarly, the Hanshin Railway was severely damaged and it took half a year to resume its operation, but it never regained its pre-disaster readership. In this case, two other local railway services, the JR and Hankyu lines, maintained their increased readership even after the Hanshin railway resumed operation. As illustrated by these examples, pre-disaster customers who relied on previous economic output could not necessarily afford to wait for local industries to recover and may have had to take their business elsewhere. Our research suggests that the significant recovery investment made by Japan’s national government may have been a disincentive for new economic development in the impacted area. Government may have been the only significant financial risk-taker in the impacted area during the national economic slow-down. But, its focus was on restoring what had been lost rather than promoting new or emerging economic development. Thus, there may have been a missed opportunity to provide incentives or put pressure on major businesses and industries to develop new businesses and attract new customers in return for the public investment. The significant recovery investment by Japan’s national government may have also created an over-reliance of individuals on public spending and government support. As indicated in Ms. Karatani’s paper, individual savings of Kobe’s residents has continued to rise since the earthquake and the number of individuals on social welfare has also decreased below pre-disaster levels. Based on our research on economic recovery from the Kobe earthquake, at least two lessons emerge: 1) Successful economic recovery requires coordination among all three recovery goals – Economic, Physical and Life Recovery, and 2) “Recovery indices” are needed to better chart recovery progress in real-time and help ensure that the recovery investments are being used effectively. Economic recovery as the prime goal of recovery Physical recovery, especially the restoration of infrastructure and public facilities, may be the most direct and socially accepted provision of outside financial assistance into an impacted area. However, lessons learned from the Kobe earthquake suggest that the sheer amount of such assistance may not be effective as it should be. Thus, as shown in Fig. 3, economic recovery should be the top priority goal for recovery among the three goals and serve as a guiding force for physical recovery and life recovery. Physical recovery can be a powerful facilitator of post-disaster economic development by upgrading social infrastructure and public facilities in compliance with economic recovery plans. In this way, it is possible to turn a disaster into an opportunity for future sustainable development. Life recovery may also be achieved with a healthy economic recovery that increases tax revenue in the impacted area. In order to achieve this coordination among all three recovery goals, municipalities in the impacted areas should have access to flexible forms of post-disaster financing. The community development block grant program that has been used after several large disasters in the United States, provide impacted municipalities with a more flexible form of funding and the ability to better determine what to do and when. The participation of key stakeholders is also an indispensable element of success that enables block grant programs to transform local needs into concrete businesses. In sum, an effective economic recovery combines good coordination of national support to restore infrastructure and public facilities and local initiatives that promote community recovery. Developing Recovery Indices Long-term recovery takes time. As Mr. Tatsuki’s paper explains, periodical social survey data indicates that it took ten years before the initial impacts of the Kobe earthquake were no longer affecting the well-being of disaster victims and the recovery was completed. In order to manage this long-term recovery process effectively, it is important to have some indices to visualize the recovery processes. In this issue, three papers by Mr. Takashima, Ms. Karatani, and Mr. Kimura define three different kinds of recovery indices that can be used to continually monitor the progress of the recovery. Mr. Takashima focuses on electric power consumption in the impacted area as an index for impact and recovery. Chronological change in electric power consumption can be obtained from the monthly reports of power company branches. Daily estimates can also be made by tracking changes in city lights using a satellite called DMSP. Changes in city lights can be a very useful recovery measure especially at the early stages since it can be updated daily for anywhere in the world. Ms. Karatani focuses on the chronological patterns of monthly macro-statistics that prefecture and city governments collect as part of their routine monitoring of services and operations. For researchers, it is extremely costly and virtually impossible to launch post-disaster projects that collect recovery data continuously for ten years. It is more practical for researchers to utilize data that is already being collected by local governments or other agencies and use this data to create disaster impact and recovery indices. Ms. Karatani found three basic patterns of disaster impact and recovery in the local government data that she studied: 1) Some activities increased soon after the disaster event and then slumped, such as housing construction; 2) Some activities reduced sharply for a period of time after the disaster and then rebounded to previous levels, such as grocery consumption; and 3) Some activities reduced sharply for a while and never returned to previous levels, such as the Kobe Port and Hanshin Railway. Mr. Kimura focuses on the psychology of disaster victims. He developed a “recovery and reconstruction calendar” that clarifies the process that disaster victims undergo in rebuilding their shattered lives. His work is based on the results of random surveys. Despite differences in disaster size and locality, survey data from the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2004 Niigata-ken Chuetsu earthquake indicate that the recovery and reconstruction calendar is highly reliable and stable in clarifying the recovery and reconstruction process. <strong>Fig. 3.</strong> Integrated plan of disaster recovery. 4. Life Recovery as the Ultimate Goal of Disaster Recovery Life recovery starts with the identification of the disaster victims. In Japan, local governments in the impacted area issue a “damage certificate” to disaster victims by household, recording the extent of each victim’s housing damage. After the Kobe earthquake, a total of 500,000 certificates were issued. These certificates, in turn, were used by both public and private organizations to determine victim’s eligibility for individual assistance programs. However, about 30% of those victims who received certificates after the Kobe earthquake were dissatisfied with the results of assessment. This caused long and severe disputes for more than three years. Based on the lessons learned from the Kobe earthquake, Mr. Horie’s paper presents (1) a standardized procedure for building damage assessment and (2) an inspector training system. This system has been adopted as the official building damage assessment system for issuing damage certificates to victims of the 2004 Niigata-ken Chuetsu earthquake, the 2007 Noto-Peninsula earthquake, and the 2007 Niigata-ken Chuetsu Oki earthquake. Personal and family recovery, which we term life recovery, was one of the explicit goals of the recovery plan from the Kobe earthquake, but it was unclear in both recovery theory and practice as to how this would be measured and accomplished. Now, after studying the recovery in Kobe and other regions, Ms. Tamura’s paper proposes that there are seven elements that define the meaning of life recovery for disaster victims. She recently tested this model in a workshop with Kobe disaster victims. The seven elements and victims’ rankings are shown in Fig. 4. Regaining housing and restoring social networks were, by far, the top recovery indicators for victims. Restoration of neighborhood character ranked third. Demographic shifts and redevelopment plans implemented following the Kobe earthquake forced significant neighborhood changes upon many victims. Next in line were: having a sense of being better prepared and reducing their vulnerability to future disasters; regaining their physical and mental health; and restoration of their income, job, and the economy. The provision of government assistance also provided victims with a sense of life recovery. Mr. Tatsuki’s paper summarizes the results of four random-sample surveys of residents within the most severely impacted areas of Hyogo Prefecture. These surveys were conducted biannually since 1999,. Based on the results of survey data from 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005, it is our conclusion that life recovery took ten years for victims in the area impacted significantly by the Kobe earthquake. Fig. 5 shows that by comparing the two structural equation models of disaster recovery (from 2003 and 2005), damage caused by the Kobe earthquake was no longer a determinant of life recovery in the 2005 model. It was still one of the major determinants in the 2003 model as it was in 1999 and 2001. This is the first time in the history of disaster research that the entire recovery process has been scientifically described. It can be utilized as a resource and provide benchmarks for monitoring the recovery from future disasters. <strong>Fig. 4.</strong> Ethnographical meaning of “life recovery” obtained from the 5th year review of the Kobe earthquake by the City of Kobe. <strong>Fig. 5.</strong> Life recovery models of 2003 and 2005. 6. The Need for an Integrated Recovery Plan The recovery lessons from Kobe and other regions suggest that we need more integrated recovery plans that use physical recovery as a tool for economic recovery, which in turn helps disaster victims. Furthermore, we believe that economic recovery should be the top priority for recovery, and physical recovery should be regarded as a tool for stimulating economic recovery and upgrading social infrastructure (as shown in Fig. 6). With this approach, disaster recovery can help build the foundation for a long-lasting and sustainable community. Figure 6 proposes a more detailed model for a more holistic recovery process. The ultimate goal of any recovery process should be achieving life recovery for all disaster victims. We believe that to get there, both direct and indirect approaches must be taken. Direct approaches include: the provision of funds and goods for victims, for physical and mental health care, and for housing reconstruction. Indirect approaches for life recovery are those which facilitate economic recovery, which also has both direct and indirect approaches. Direct approaches to economic recovery include: subsidies, loans, and tax exemptions. Indirect approaches to economic recovery include, most significantly, the direct projects to restore infrastructure and public buildings. More subtle approaches include: setting new regulations or deregulations, providing technical support, and creating new businesses. A holistic recovery process needs to strategically combine all of these approaches, and there must be collaborative implementation by all the key stakeholders, including local governments, non-profit and non-governmental organizations (NPOs and NGOs), community-based organizations (CBOs), and the private sector. Therefore, community and stakeholder participation in the planning process is essential to achieve buy-in for the vision and desired outcomes of the recovery plan. Securing the required financial resources is also critical to successful implementation. In thinking of stakeholders, it is important to differentiate between supporting entities and operating agencies. Supporting entities are those organizations that supply the necessary funding for recovery. Both Japan’s national government and the federal government in the U.S. are the prime supporting entities in the recovery from the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2001 World Trade Center recovery. In Taiwan, the Buddhist organization and the national government of Taiwan were major supporting entities in the recovery from the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake. Operating agencies are those organizations that implement various recovery measures. In Japan, local governments in the impacted area are operating agencies, while the national government is a supporting entity. In the United States, community development block grants provide an opportunity for many operating agencies to implement various recovery measures. As Mr. Mammen’ paper describes, many NPOs, NGOs, and/or CBOs in addition to local governments have had major roles in implementing various kinds programs funded by block grants as part of the World Trade Center recovery. No one, single organization can provide effective help for all kinds of disaster victims individually or collectively. The needs of disaster victims may be conflicting with each other because of their diversity. Their divergent needs can be successfully met by the diversity of operating agencies that have responsibility for implementing recovery measures. In a similar context, block grants made to individual households, such as microfinance, has been a vital recovery mechanism for victims in Thailand who suffered from the 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami disaster. Both disaster victims and government officers at all levels strongly supported the microfinance so that disaster victims themselves would become operating agencies for recovery. Empowering individuals in sustainable life recovery is indeed the ultimate goal of recovery. <strong>Fig. 6.</strong> A holistic recovery policy model.

Post-school outcomes are poor for youth with disabilities, in general, but even more discouraging for certain subpopulations of individuals with disabilities, particularly those from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds. The authors discuss structural inequalities in public schools which potentially contribute to the poorer transition outcomes of CLD youth with disabilities compared with their White peers with disabilities and identify 11 research-based practices (RBPs) for supporting CLD youth with disabilities and their families during the transition planning process. A study is subsequently described involving the development and implementation of a survey measuring the degree to which these 11 RBPs are being implemented in public school districts. The survey was administered during 2011 to 2016 to interdisciplinary transition teams representing more than 90 school districts in the United States who were attending state capacity-building transition services training institutes. Group consensus was sought on the 11 items appearing on the survey. Results from the study found that most school districts were not implementing any of the RBPs to any significant degree, school staff were in need of cultural competence professional development training, CLD families of transition-aged youth with disabilities lacked access to quality resources and supports, and CLD youth with disabilities lacked opportunities to strengthen their self-determination skills. Implications for practice and future research on this topic is presented and discussed.

AbstractThe watershed events of September 11, 2001; the anthrax attacks; Hurricane Katrina; and H1N1 necessitated that the United States define alternative mechanisms for disaster response. Specifically, there was a need to shift from a capacity building approach to a capabilities based approach that would place more emphasis on the health care community rather than just first responders. Georgia responded to this initiative by creating a Regional Coordinating Hospital (RCH) infrastructure that was responsible for coordinating regional responses within their individual geographic footprint. However, it was quickly realized that hospitals could not accomplish community-wide preparedness as a single entity and that siloed planning must come to an end. To reconcile this issue, Georgia responded to the 2012 US Department of Health and Human Services concept of coalitions. Georgia utilized the existing RCH boundaries to define its coalition regions and began inviting all medical and nonmedical response partners to the planning table (nursing homes, community health centers, volunteer groups, law enforcement, etc). This new collaboration effectively enhanced emergency response practices in Georgia, but also identified additional preparedness-related gaps that will require attention as our coalitions continue to grow and mature.(Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2016;10:174–179)

Abstract 97 Purpose Despite great barriers, implementing pathology services in resource-limited rural settings is achievable. Challenges include the lack of infrastructure, trained personnel, supply chain, and decentralized services, and have hindered the appropriate provision of cancer care to those who live in resource-limited settings. In Haiti, we began treating cancer at University Hospital Mirebalais (HUM) before pathology services existed, sending samples to the United States for diagnoses. This model allowed patients to receive treatment, but turnaround time was often delayed. Our goal is to implement pathology services at HUM that can provide high-quality diagnostics to patients who are enrolled in the cancer program. We demonstrate that, by rolling out a phased implementation of local pathology services with appropriate commitment from local and international partners, accurate pathologic diagnoses can exist in low- and middle-income countries. Methods Phase I—infrastructure and personnel—occurred fall 2016 with the construction of the laboratory and the hiring of a pathologist and laboratory technicians, which allowed samples to be grossed into paraffin blocks before being sent to Boston. Phase II—technology transfer and training—occurred fall 2017 with the procurement of additional equipment and hands-on histology training, which allowed samples to be cut, stained, and diagnosed on-site. In this phase, only complex samples that needed additional immunohistochemistry or a second opinion were sent to Boston. Phase III—testing capacity expansion—will occur summer 2018 and involves procuring immunohistochemistry and training, which will further limit the need to send cases to the United States. Phase IV—routine testing and quality assurance—will occur in tandem with phase III and involves implementing a telepathology system on-site in the HUM laboratory. Results Outcomes of this phased implementation will result in decentralized pathology services in the public sector and ultimately decreased turnaround times, producing better clinical outcomes. Our model demonstrates that it is possible to build local pathology capacity in rural areas. Since the opening of our laboratory, more than 1,000 cases have been processed into paraffin blocks before being sent to Boston. In September 2017, the first cases were diagnosed in country, and more than 100 cases have been processed and reported in Haiti. Conclusion Building on the foundational phases, the next phases of implementation involve long-term diagnostic support that will correlate directly with a substantial decrease in turnaround time. AUTHORS' DISCLOSURES OF POTENTIAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST No COIs from the authors.