Finding the resources for summer learning programs

Research on summer learning losses has unambiguous implications for America: all children need learning opportunities in the summer. But how and when policymakers, educators, and youth service providers will fashion appropriate programming are far less clear. At the root of this problem is the need to vastly increase, stabilize, and coordinate resources for summer programming. Jane Sundius first outlines the current landscape of summer programs. She then goes on to make the case that two key strategies are necessary to securing sustainable increases in funding that will allow all children access to summer programming. The first is a national advocacy and public will-building campaign. The second is extensive, local, public-private planning to map existing summer resources and needs and to create blueprints for programming that serve all children in communities. Drawing on her experiences as a foundation program director, Sundius urges programs, foundation officials, and other stakeholders to expand their summer funding efforts beyond individual summer programs and to support, in addition, strategic communications and community planning efforts that are aimed at providing summer learning opportunities for all children.     

Opportunity, Community, and Reckless Lives: Social Distress Among Adolescents in West Virginia

Social distress among West Virginia adolescents has many manifestations. Among the most conspicuous of these are dropping out of high school, teen pregnancy, and violent death. For more than 30 years, state policy makers have explained these behaviors by invoking the notion of a pervasive culture of poverty and morbidity which is transmitted from generation to generation. Participants in this primitive and fatalistic culture, it is commonly claimed, lack the prudence and foresight needed to make best use of the opportunities offered by our modern world. Education-intensive strategies aimed at enabling West Virginia adolescents and their families to overcome this disabling world view seem the best responses. By contrast, however, based on 8 years of empirical research in West Virginia, we contend that an “Oh, what the Hell!” sort of recklessness is interpretable as a rational response to deteriorating social and economic circumstances. West Virginia communities have become increasingly anomic and devoid of economic opportunity. In this economically uncertain, culturally insubstantial world, adolescents rightly judge their prospects to be poor. In this social context, seemingly irrational acts make more sense. Why be prudent in the absence of opportunity and community? Why be prudent in the absence of a future?     

Spatial Redistribution of Poverty through Migration of Poor People to Depressed Rural Communities1

Recent demographic studies document movement of poor people from both urban and rural places to depressed rural communities. Such migration redistributes poverty to rural areas and further concentrates it within them. This article presents a case study of one depressed community in New York that became a migration destination for urban poor people, causing dramatic increases in poverty rate, welfare rolls, and service needs. On-site research showed that the community's attraction was inexpensive rental housing that had become available after loss of manufacturing jobs prompted a middle-class exodus. The lack of jobs was not a deterrent for low-income inmigrants, though, because many of them had limited job skills and other employment barriers and would have had difficulty getting or holding a job anyway. Similar processes of economic decline, population loss, and poverty inmigration appear to be occurring elsewhere also. The article identifies community-level impacts and policy implications; it concludes with suggestions for further research needs.     

Poverty Catchments: Migration,Residential Mobility,and Population Turnover in Impoverished Rural Illinois Communities

Abstract Research has thoroughly documented how out‐migration of the educated and skilled from rural areas leaves behind a poorer population and creates pockets of rural poverty. Recently, studies have recognized that the poor are also geographically mobile and that poverty migration patterns can reinforce rural poverty concentrations. In this process, certain impoverished rural communities in economically depressed regions receive a disproportionate share of poverty migrants, concentrating poverty in certain locations. This paper examines the conditions and processes through which poor rural communities become likely destinations for a highly mobile segment of the rural poor and near‐poor. Utilizing case studies of depressed rural Illinois communities, it investigates how the interplay of community factors and the behavior of migrants transforms rural communities from residentially stable to highly mobile, impoverished places.     

“There Ain’t No Bond in Town Like There Used to Be”: The Destruction of Social Capital in the West Virginia Coalfields1

There is a paucity of research focusing on the circumstances that cause or contribute to a decline in social capital within communities. Furthermore, relatively few researchers employ qualitative methods in their studies of social capital, despite the multidimensional and many‐layered nature of this concept, characteristics that make social capital well suited for qualitative analysis. To address these two gaps in social capital research, I explore the mechanisms that have led to a depletion of social capital in the southern coal‐producing region of West Virginia. I examine whether the coal industry, which has caused bitter conflicts among residents over environmental degradation and union loyalties, has also undermined social capital in the region. My principal data include 40 semi‐structured, face‐to‐face interviews with randomly selected individuals in a coal‐mining town and a demographically similar non‐coal‐mining town in West Virginia. I analyze the experiences of residents in each town, assessing the qualitative differences in community and personal life associated with social capital. I find that the loss of social capital in the coal‐mining community has arisen through a combination of depopulation and the community‐wide conflict that arose when an anti‐union coal company bought out the union coal mine at which many in the community worked, challenging the union identity so engrained in this region.     

On the moral economy of country life

The role that elite rural women play in the fields of community service and social networking ensures the creation and reproduction of cultural and symbolic capital. Their work, which contributes a necessary ‘service’ for the functioning of village life, also serves to enact women's positions in these fields. Through these strategies and distributions of capital one can see that the social world is mirrored in a homologous symbolic system which is organised according to a specific logic of differences specific to New Zealand rural communities. This paper focuses on how this moral economy of service structures a North Island hill country farming community.     

Family Capital: Implications for Interventions with Families

Social capital has been extensively discussed in the literature as building blocks that individuals and communities utilize to leverage system resources. Similarly, some families also create capital, which can enable members of the family, such as children, to successfully negotiate the outside world. Families in poverty confront serious challenges in developing positive family capital, because of lack of resources. For those families that are successful in developing positive family capital, family capital can help to create positive outcomes for family interactions. Thus, family capital can provide information about opportunities, exert influence on agents who make decisions involving the actor, provide social credentials that indicate a connection to a social network, and reinforce the actor's identity and recognition, which maintains access and entitlement to these social resources.     

Social Landscapes of the Inter‐Mountain West: A Comparison of ‘Old West’ and ‘New West’ Communities*

Abstract Rural communities have experienced dramatic demographic, social, and economic transformations over the past 30 years. Historically characterized by close links between natural resources and social, cultural, and economic structures, few of today's rural communities remain heavily dependent upon traditional extractive industries like ranching, forestry, and mining. New forms of development linked to natural and cultural amenities, including tourism and recreation, have evolved to sustain the link between community and resources. The Inter‐Mountain West region offers an excellent example of this distinction. Many of the region's rural communities have experienced substantial population growth resulting from the in‐migration of a new kind of rural resident. Their arrival, in a process some have associated with the emergence of a “New West,” has transformed rural places. However, amenity‐related social and economic structures have not occurred uniformly across space. This paper uses factor analysis and exploratory spatial data analysis to analyze demographic characteristics related to the “New West” phenomena in Inter‐Mountain West communities and the spatial patterns found in the degree of “New West‐ness” that each community exhibits.     

RURAL POVERTY, URBAN POVERTY, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING

Data from the National Survey of Families and Households are used to compare the psychological well-being of the rural and urban poor. Overall, the urban poor are higher in perceived health than the rural poor, although no differences are apparent in happiness or depression. Significant interactions are present between rural/urban poverty and sex, race, and family status. The psychological well-being of poor African Americans is higher in rural than urban areas, whereas the well-being of poor whites is higher in urban than rural areas. This trend is especially pronounced for depression among males. In addition, single men without children have especially high depression scores in rural areas, whereas married women without children have especially low depression scores in urban areas. The results are interpreted in terms of the environmental quality of inner-city neighborhoods and attitudes toward poverty in urban and rural communities.     

Civic life in Gray Mountain: sizing up the legacy of New England’s blue-collar middle class

When President Clinton took Congressional and business leaders on a tour early this summer to places where chronic poverty has persisted despite the nation’s booming economy, they visited Appalachia’s coalfields, the Mississippi Delta, the Pine Ridge Indian reservation and inner-city neighborhoods in East St. Louis and Los Angeles. They did not visit New England. Not that New England’s inner cities aren’t plagued with poverty and social problems; they are. And many poor families are struggling to get by in rural Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Yet the notoriously bad conditions that took the president to the nation’s “poverty pockets” are exceedingly rare in the six-state region. Why? Why have poverty rates stayed so high in the South compared with New England? And what can the region expect in the future?The answers lie in the kind of civic culture generated by each community’s economy and social structure. Chronically poor places are divided by race and class and saddled with corrupt politics, ineffective schools, and self-interested elites. Distrustful of one another, people in these places look out only for their own families. Escaping poverty is possible only for the lucky few who have a kind relative, caring teacher, or coach who pushes and inspires them to finish school and aim high. But most stay trapped in the same poor conditions their parents and perhaps grandparents knew.In contrast, when communities have a large middle class, the poor are less likely to be cut off from the mainstream. And they are more likely to have the set of contacts, habits and skills—the cultural tool kit—they need to leave poverty behind. More importantly, the community institutions that poor families rely upon are more likely to be effective because the middle class is committed to them. The poor can get ahead without relying solely on personal intervention from a mentor or other benefactor.During the 1990s, I studied poverty and community change in three remote, rural communities: a poor Appalachian coal county I call “Blackwell,” a poor Mississippi Delta plantation community I call “Dahlia” and a more stable and economically diverse northern New England mill community, “Gray Mountain.” The idea was to learn why poverty persisted generation after generation in Appalachia and the Delta, what made the difference when people did achieve upward mobility, and why it was so hard to bring about change. I examined 100 years of Census data detailing changes in population, patterns of work, income distribution and education. I read histories of each region, as well as the local weekly newspapers. But the heart of the study is the 350 in-depth interviews colleagues and I conducted with people living in these communities—not only the poor, but also the rich and those in between. These open-ended conversations revealed how each community’s civic culture—its level of trust, participation and investment—shapes opportunities for both individual mobility and social change.     

Early Achievement Gains and Poverty-Linked Social Distress: The Case of Post-Head Start Transition

Public policymakers in West Virginia have an intense interest in early and continuing educational intervention for the poor. In this view, interventions such as Head Start are a good idea, but they start too late and end too soon. Properly executed, early and continuing intervention is expected to provide a basis for later achievement-driven improvements in occupational and income attainments. Rural poverty and its correlates, which manifest and cause social distress in a variety of forms, is then diminished. We report on an evaluation of the West Virginia site of a federally-funded program intended to maintain early achievement gains viewed as crucial in alleviating poverty-linked social distress. Results of the evaluation of Post-Head Start Transition show no achievement gains. This undercuts the rationale for the program. Furthermore, it provides no support for a general policy of early and continuing educational intervention to foster achievement-driven diminution of poverty. It seems reasonable to consider the possibility that achievement rises and falls in response to the prevalence and intensity of social distress. Context determines educational outcomes, not the other way around. Reasons are suggested for this.     

Early Achievement Gains and Poverty-Linked Social Distress: The Case of Post-Head Start Transition

Public policymakers in West Virginia have an intense interest in early and continuing educational intervention for the poor. In this view, interventions such as Head Start are a good idea, but they start too late and end too soon. Properly executed, early and continuing intervention is expected to provide a basis for later achievement-driven improvements in occupational and income attainments. Rural poverty and its correlates, which manifest and cause social distress in a variety of forms, is then diminished. We report on an evaluation of the West Virginia site of a federally-funded program intended to maintain early achievement gains viewed as crucial in alleviating poverty-linked social distress. Results of the evaluation of Post-Head Start Transition show no achievement gains. This undercuts the rationale for the program. Furthermore, it provides no support for a general policy of early and continuing educational intervention to foster achievement-driven diminution of poverty. It seems reasonable to consider the possibility that achievement rises and falls in response to the prevalence and intensity of social distress. Context determines educational outcomes, not the other way around. Reasons are suggested for this.     

Rural Students’ Social Capital in the College Search and Application Process

Although the growing mandate for higher education creates challenges for students in rural areas, rural high school graduates currently attend college at a rate similar to their peers in other locale types. Prior research has attributed this accomplishment to family, school, and community social capital, yet the processes through which students translate social capital into educational attainment remain unspecified. This study examines how successful rural students access and engage various forms of social capital during the college search and application process. Analysis of semistructured interviews with 30 college graduates from communities throughout one predominantly rural state showed that family social capital provided most students with generalized support, but college‐specific guidance tended to correlate with parental education and income. Most students benefited from school social capital, primarily through pro‐college climate, peer networks, teachers, guidance counselors, and academic tracking. Students accessed community social capital through supportive youth and adult interactions, extended family ties, and a caring community, but these forms of social capital did not explicitly support the college search process. Although quantitative studies have operationalized family, school, and community social capital as distinct concepts, this study argues that these constructs cannot be disentangled given the interconnectedness of rural families, schools, and communities.     

University-assisted community school program of West Philadelphia: democratic partnerships that make a difference

The university-assisted community school model is showing results for children and youth in West Philadelphia. The University of Pennsylvania's (Penn's) Center for Community Partnerships has coordinated universitywide efforts, in partnership with the community, in order to create and develop community school programs. The Sayre program aims to become a university-assisted community school, with a comprehensive community problem-solving curriculum and communitywide program that is fully integrated across both the Sayre curriculum and the curriculum of a number of Penn's schools. The Penn-Sayre project demonstrates that higher education can be a permanent anchor for revitalizing schools and communities if the vast resources it possesses, particularly its faculty, students, and staff, are brought to bear in a coordinated fashion.     

Teachers and health workers: partners in primary health care. Experiences from Papua New Guinea

Primary health care (PHC) involves community health education. When health priorities in rural communities are focused on the vulnerable under-5-years-of-age group then one has to examine who actually cares for this age group and what are the most appropriate means of reaching them through health education programs. In the context of rural communities in Papua New Guinea the linking of school and community health programs has been taking place. Examples and insights from programs where teachers and health workers attempted to find appropriate channels for integrating child and adult education in order to improve the health status of the very young child are described. The school programs used a child to child approach to develop in children a sense of shared responsibility with adults towards better health for themselves, younger children in their care and the environment of the community. The goal was a health program that applied to the whole community, where division between child and adult learning activities was not so sharply drawn, and where formal school programs and nonformal community education programs were to complement and contribute to each other. A campaign against infant diarrhea and death through dehydration was implemented. As a result of a 3-day planning workshop a program was drawn up for schools and communities. The workshop covered causes of diarrhea, fluid loss and dehydration, simple preventive and curative measures, essential hygiene habits and current community practices. Teachers, health workers and community leaders fashioned a program of activities for school children and adults. It was discovered that adults often feel a barrier between themselves and the child's school learning. Also, a gap often exists between what is taught in school and what is needed and can be applied to community health priorities. Thus, an effective community health education program that includes both children and adults in an integrated program will need to cover the varying ages and groups of community members who, with different degrees of responsibility, take care of themselves and others.     

Migration,Small Farming and Food Security in the Caribbean: Jamaica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Long‐term and short‐term (seasonal) migrations from Caribbean countries have been strategies for enhancing the livelihoods and assets of individuals and families for many decades. The greatest challenges to food security are felt by the populations below the poverty level, most of whom are rural dwellers. Taking two Caribbean countries – Jamaica, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, this article assesses whether in rural, characteristically small‐farming areas, the financial and social remittances resulting from migration are used to improve food security, through either supporting agricultural production or providing money to purchase food. The findings show the contrast between Jamaica and St. Vincent. Whereas migration generally benefits small‐scale farming and domestic food production, increasing food accessibility in Jamaica, migration has been variously used by the rural poor in St. Vincent to replace farming. Food security in St. Vincent is heavily dependent on purchasing food and, in this regard, migrant remittances play an important role.     

The Changing Spatial Concentration of America's Rural Poor Population*

Abstract This paper documents changing patterns of concentrated poverty in nonmetro areas. Data from the Decennial U.S. Census Summary Files show that poverty rates—both overall and for children—declined more rapidly in nonmetro than metro counties in the 1990s. The 1990s also brought large reductions in the number of high‐poverty nonmetro counties and declines in the share of rural people, including rural poor people, who were living in them. This suggests that America's rural pockets of poverty may be “drying up” and that spatial inequality in nonmetro America declined over the 1990s, at least at the county level. On a less optimistic note, concentrated poverty among rural minorities remains exceptionally high. Roughly one‐half of all rural blacks and one‐third of rural Hispanics live in poor counties. Poor minorities are even more highly concentrated in poor areas. Rural children—especially rural minority children—have poverty rates well above national and nonmetro rates, the concentration of rural minority children is often extreme (i.e., over 80% lived in high‐poverty counties), and the number of nonmetro counties with high levels of persistent child poverty remains high (over 600 counties). Rural poor children may be more disadvantaged than ever, especially if measured by their lack of access to opportunities and divergence with children living elsewhere. Patterns of poverty among rural children—who often grow up to be poor adults— suggest that recent declines in concentrated rural poverty may be short‐lived.     

Cross Cultural Programming for AIDS Orphans: What We are Learning from Other Contexts

The problem of AIDS orphans in Zambia has reached alarming proportions because of the extent of poverty and poor social and economic policies. Worldwide, 15 million children have been orphaned due to AIDS, with 11.6 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa alone (UNICEF, The State of the World’s Children 2009: maternal and newborn health, UNICEF, New York, 2008), and 670,000 children under the age of 17 in Zambia (UNAIDS, UNAIDS report on the global AIDS epidemic, UNAIDS, Geneva, 2010). Resulting from this situation are child headed households (CHHs) who face hunger, poor health, sanitation and water problems. Despite the challenges, there seems to be an absence of political will to support CHHs. To assess if Africans living in Richmond Virginia in the United States might offer something programmatically useful for CHHs in Zambia, important elements in the Richmond Independent Living services model were identified. Specific elements were screened using Africans as a cultural screen. Important implications for programming and practice suggest that feasibility, content and quality are key areas for appropriate CHHs programming. In this article, the terms orphans, vulnerable children, and young people are used interchangeably.     

A Participant-Informed Model for Preventing Teen Pregnancy in a Rural Latino Community

Recognizing the need for health prevention efforts that are tailored to the needs of Latinos in rural communities, the researchers utilized focus groups to ascertain the perspectives of Latino children and their parents who participated in a teen pregnancy prevention program. This article presents a Latino-driven conceptual design of an evidence-informed comprehensive, community-based, and culturally sensitive teen-pregnancy prevention program. The new model, called the Family-Festival Prevention Model, (1) used culturally relevant and experiential learning activities, (2) promoted community connections, (3) incorporated strategies that engaged fathers, and (4) engaged important faith-based and community stakeholders to involve the whole community in prevention efforts.     

Poverty and Social Context in Remote Rural Communities1

Abstract Many urban analysts studying poor inner city communities argue that social isolation in poor neighborhoods perpetuates poverty. This paper extends analysis of social context to rural areas, comparing a chronically poor coal-dependent Appalachian community with a more diverse, resource-rich community in northern New England. The Appalachian community has more limited job opportunities and over time the scarcity of jobs in a volatile coal economy generated a divided social context. In contrast, the community in northern New England offers both more opportunities for work and has a stable, working middle class that invests in and uses public goods; the poor are not deliberately segregated. These differences in communities' socioeconomic context are reflected in poor women's experiences and aspirations.