This paper has some interesting discussion of some family and youth development programs (starting around page 8).

Linking Affordable Housing and Opportunities for Families: A Background Paper (PDF; 99 KB)
Source: National Residence Services Collaborative

Hot off the press, the Promoting Healthy Families in Your Community: 2007 Resource Packet

This PDF provides some fabulous questions, ideas and resources for programs aimed at strengthening families. Take a look.

Description: This tool is intended as a resource guide for service providers who work with parents and their children. The resource packet supports child abuse prevention efforts by describing strategies and activities that not only reduce risk, but also promote protective factors associated with the prevention of child abuse. These protective factors increase the capacity of parents, caregivers, and communities to protect, nurture, and promote the healthy development of children.

The goals of the packet are to:

• Promote five protective factors that research has shown to reduce the risk of child abuse and neglect
• Encourage service providers to engage and partner with parents
• Provide suggestions for community-wide efforts to raise awareness of the importance of strengthening families

See other materials and the Child Abuse Prevention Month Poster at: http://www.preventchildabuse.org/publications/cap/index.shtml

April is Child Abuse Prevention Month, Month of the Young Child, and Month of the Military Child. These would make great newsletter topics or topics for our news feed. Let me know if you have something.

Schools Grow Increasingly Dependent on Fundraising
Source: National Association of Elementary School Principals

Principals were asked how and why they hold fundraisers, and almost all (94%) said they rely on fundraisers to supplement monies received from district, state, and federal sources. The fundraising revenue is used to pay for classroom equipment and supplies, field trips, and playground equipment, among other items.

“For many principals, school fundraising provides a means to an end,” says NAESP’s executive director, Vincent L. Ferrandino. “The revenue that’s generated from fundraisers provides them with sorely needed resources for their students and teachers.”

The most common yearlong fundraising methods are: collecting food box tops and labels (63%), retail store affiliations (42%), supermarket receipts (25%), and sales from the school store (21%).

Eighty-five percent of the principals responded that they have seen an increased need for schoolwide fundraisers within the last decade; 56 percent have concerns about this increase; and 64 percent would stop fundraising if they could. Many believe fundraisers have become too much of a distraction to the school’s instructional day. A common theme in many of the principals’ comments is that fundraisers place too much pressure on young children to sell products and can also be burdensome to teachers, parents, and community members.

The American Family and Family Economics
Source: Institute for the Study of Labor (forthcoming in Journal of Economic Perspectives)

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gary Becker’s path-breaking Treatise on the Family provides an occasion to reexamine both the American family and family economics. We begin by discussing how families have changed in recent decades: the separation of sex, marriage, and childbearing; fewer children and smaller households; converging work and education patterns for men and women; class divergence in partnering and parenting strategies; and the replacement of what had been family functions and home production by government programs and market transactions. After discussing recent work in family economics that attempts to explain these changes, we point out some challenging areas for further analysis, and highlight issues of commitment in two primary family relationships: those between men and women, and those between parents and children. We conclude by discussing the effectiveness of policies to target benefits to certain family members (e.g., children) or to promote marriage and fertility.

+ Full Papers (PDF; 150 KB)

International Differences in the Family Gap in Pay: The Role of Labor Market Institutions
Source: Institute for the Study of Labor

Using microdata for 35 countries over the period 1985-1994-2002 we find that labor market institutions traditionally associated to more compressed wage structures are associated to a higher family gap. Our results indicate that these policies reduce the price effect of having children but aggravate the human capital loss due to motherhood. We also find evidence that policies that help women continue in the same job after childbirth decrease the family gap. Of all the countries we study, mothers in Southern Europe suffer the biggest family gap and our analysis indicates that this is due to the bad combination of labor market policies in these countries. Our results are robust to specification changes and indicate that the main reason mothers lag behind other women in terms of earnings is the loss of accumulated job market experience caused by career breaks around childbirth.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 638 KB)

Social Security Spouse and Survivor Benefits for the Modern Family
Source: Urban Institute

Social Security spouse and survivor benefits advantage single-earner families relative to dual-earner families paying the same total taxes. Our paper considers earnings sharing—through which husbands’ and wives’ earnings records are combined and averaged throughout their marriage when computing benefits—as well as other changes to spouse/survivor benefits, including caregiver credits and minimum benefits. All the roughly cost-equivalent packages examined improve adequacy and horizontal equity compared to current law. The earnings-sharing proposal, however, only reduced poverty with significant adjustments to the treatment of surviving spouses. The packages reveal tradeoffs among beneficiary groups, with particular tensions around work and marital status.

+ Full Report (PDF; 689 KB)

Thank you to everyone who participated in this issue of Research News You Can Use:

1. Amy Simonne
2. Eboni Baugh
3. Elizabeth Bolton
4. Glenda Warren
5. Heidi Radunovich
6. Jeong Lee
7. Joy Jordan
8. Mickie Swisher
9. Mark Brennan

Be sure to read this truly informative issue of our newsletter at : http://fycs.ifas.ufl.edu/newsletters/research.htm . It is available in a variety of formats for your reading pleasure.

For the upcoming Summer Issue the following faculty members are signed up to contribute. The deadline is June 8, but you can send your submission any time.

Summer Issue

Deadline for submissions: June 8

1. Amy Simonne
2. Eboni Baugh
3. Elizabeth Bolton
4. Mark Brennan
   
5. Glenda Warren
6. Heidi Radunovich
7. Jerry Culen
8. Joy Jordan
9. Kate Fogarty
10. Linda Bobroff
11. Mickie Swisher
12. Rose Barnett
13. Suzanna Smith
14. Carolyn Wilken
    

Submission guidelines can be found here (pdf) and a blank template can be found here (Word .doc).

All of you give plenty of presentations and PowerPoint has changed your life, I am quite sure of it. Presentations work as a key educational method...when they work. Check out these two clickpicks from Techsoup on How to Design and Deliver bad presentations. Nice coverage of the basics of good (and bad) steps to take when designing and delivering your next PowerPoint presentation.

How to Design a Bad Presentation
How to Deliver a Bad Presentation

Food Spending in American Households, 2003-04
Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service

Average yearly expenditures on food in U.S. urban households increased between 2003 and 2004. Over the period, annual per capita spending on food rose from $2,035 to $2,207. The 2004 average comprises $1,347 spent on food consumed at home and $860 spent on food consumed away from home. These amounts reflect a year-to-year increase of 7.9 percent in food-at-home expenditures and 9.3 percent in food-away-from-home expenditures. Wealthier urban households tended to spend more than other urban households for both food at home and food away from home, and they spent a larger share of their food budget than other households on food consumed away from home. The share of the food budget spent on food consumed away from home varied from 30 percent for the poorest group to 44 percent for the wealthiest.

Download in sections (PDFs) or as full report (PDF; 775 KB)

From the Child Welfare League of America comes this announcement about a new SAMHSA resource:
A new searchable database with reliable, up-to-date information on interventions for the prevention and treatment of mental health and substance use disorders is now available online.

Developed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA), the National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP) allows users to perform custom searches to identify specific interventions based on desired outcomes, target populations, and service settings. NREPP was originally created in the 1990s, but was redesigned based on input from the scientific community, service providers, and the public.

Custom features of the new NREPP include:

• custom searches based on desired outcomes, target populations, and service settings;
• details on each intervention, including a descriptive summary, types of outcomes achieved, costs of implementation, and contact information for the intervention developer; and
• two independent expert ratings for each intervention.