Volunteering in a School Kitchen Garden Program: Cooking Up Confidence,Capabilities, and Connections!

This paper reports on the evaluation of a kitchen garden program in primary schools in Victoria, Australia. It focuses on the motivations, impacts, and issues associated with volunteering in the program. The study revealed that volunteers are drawn from a range of sources, including: families of current and former students, former teachers, local residents, clients of aged care and/or disability services, other schools and communities, local universities, community organizations, the community services sector, and the corporate sector. Benefits to volunteers included: opportunities to use time productively, an increased sense of belonging, learning opportunities, and an increased sense of self-worth and enjoyment. For schools, volunteers enhanced engagement between the school and the local community, enabled them to engage more effectively with hard to reach groups, and increased student engagement. In addition, the involvement of volunteers improved the sustainability of the program, improved communication between teachers and families of students from minority ethnic groups, and gave students the chance to relate to new people, to learn from their experience and to have fun in working with the volunteers. Perhaps the most telling benefits to flow both to students and to volunteers were not the “three Rs—reading, w’riting and a’rithmetic” but the three Cs—confidence, capabilities, and connections. However, a clearly identified issue was the importance of matching volunteers’ motivations and needs with the roles they play to sustain current levels of volunteering and, therefore, the program itself.     

New productive forces and the contradictions of contemporary capitalism

Conclusion The analysis that we have put forward is necessarily incomplete without developing its implications for political practice. However, considerations of space prevent us from elaborating on this aspect of our argument here. It is also the case that our ideas on politics are less coherent and developed than the theoretical perspective that we have outlined. This seems inevitable, since political thinking must be a collective project; political programs written by isolated individuals always sound hollow and abstract.Yet there are a few broad political implications of our analysis that are important to state here. The first is that any emancipatory politics in the present must begin with the realities of contemporary society, rather than from Marxist categories that have been rendered obsolete by the passing of accumulationist capitalism. While this point might seem obvious, it bears restating since so much current Marxist writing fails to grasp this idea. Second, while some might read our argument as an optimistic alternative to those theorists (Piccone, Lasch, Jacoby) who despair of the existence of emancipatory possibilities in the present, that is not our intention. For us, optimism and pessimism are not the important categories. In fact, our analysis incorporates the most pessimistic possible scenarios, since continued social stalemate in the face of post-industrial transition can unleash awesomely powerful pressures for individual and social regression. The point is rather that we have sought to develop an analysis that is genuinely dialectical — recognizing in this historical moment the interlocking processes of decay and development.This essay is a further elaboration of themes developed by L. Hirschhorn in a number of articles, see particularly Toward a Political Economy of the Service Society, Working Paper No. 229, Institute for Urban and Regional Development, University of California, Berkeley (IURD): The Social Crisis, Parts I and II, Working Papers No. 251, 252, IURD; Social Services and Disaccumulationist Capitalism, International Journal of Health Services, May, 1979; The Political Economy of Social Service Rationalization, Contemporary Crisis (Winter, 1978).     

Using social theory to leap over historical contingencies: A comment on Robinson

Conclusion To be fair to Robinson, it is worth mentioning that he does offer a number of qualifications to his thesis. He tries to avoid excessive determinism and at one point suggests: A satisfactory account should not imply an evolutionary notion and should leave open the possibility of historic discontinuities and of contingencies that generate alternative pathways of development, including alternative futures. In other words, maybe this embryonic TNS will never progress beyond its current stage or perhaps it will continue to grow but it will never become a real state. But the main thrust of Robinson’s account is strongly deterministic. In fact, he does not consider a single factor that might impede the unity of the global bourgoisie or derail transnational state formation. In a sense, Robinson’s mistake is that he has tried to derive a theoretical solution to a concrete problem that global capitalism has not yet solved in practice. While it might well be a logical step for capitalist elites to create a Transnational State, it is always risky to attribute too much rationality to an order that is notorious for its contradictions.     

Iowa Case Management for Rural Drug Abuse

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness of a comprehensive, strengths-based model of case management for clients in drug abuse treatment. METHOD: 503 volunteers from residential or intensive outpatient treatment were randomly assigned to one of three conditions of Iowa Case Management (ICM) plus treatment as usual (TAU), or to a fourth condition of TAU only. All were assessed at intake and followed at 3, 6, and 12 months. RESULTS: Clients in all four conditions significantly decreased substance use by 3 months after intake and maintained most gains over time. However, the addition of ICM to TAU did not improve substance use outcomes. CONCLUSION: Overall, the addition of case management did not significantly improve drug treatment as hypothesized by both researchers and clinicians. Some results were mixed, possibly due to the heterogeneous sample, wide range of case management activities, or difficulty retaining participants over time.     

Negative dependence and the Simes inequality

It is shown that the Simes inequality is reversed for a broad class of negatively dependent distributions.     

Tail Behavior of the Failure Rate Functions of Mixtures

The tail behavior of the failure rate of mixtures of lifetime distributions is studied. A typical result is that if the failure rate of the strongest component of the mixture decreases to a limit, then the failure rate of the mixture decreases to the same limit. For a class of distributions containing the gamma distributions this result can be improved in the sense that the behavior of the failure rate of the mixture asymptotically mirrors that of the strongest component in whether it decreases or increases to a limit. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.