Infusing Financial Capability and Asset Building Content Into a Community Organizing Class

As social work’s fight for social and economic justice returns to its historical attention to finances, faculty are called to infuse financial capability and asset building (FCAB) content into their classes. Given few published models, this study contributes a redesign that infuses FCAB in a community organization course, with additional attention to Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning experiences. Results of a pre- and posttest survey suggest an overall pattern of students’ increased interest in further learning about FCAB, understanding its importance to social work, confidence about helping clients with FCAB, likelihood of offering to help a client to manage her or his household finances, and changes to students’ own financial practices.     

Body Weight,Eating Patterns,and Physical Activity: The Role of Education

In this article, we empirically study the role of education attainment on individual body mass index (BMI), eating patterns, and physical activity. We allow for endogeneity of schooling choices for females and males in a mean and quantile instrumental variables framework. We find that completion of lower secondary education has a significant positive impact on reduction of individual BMI, containment of calorie consumption, and promotion of physical activity. Interestingly, these effects are heterogeneous across genders and distributions. In particular, for BMI and calorie expenditure, the effect of education is significant for females and is more pronounced for women with high body mass and low physical activity. On the other hand, the effect of education on eating patterns is significant mainly for males, being more beneficial for men with elevated calorie consumption. We also show that education attainment is likely to foster productive and allocative efficiency of individuals in the context of BMI formation. Given that the literature suggests that education fosters development of cognition, self-control, and a variety of skills and abilities, in our context it is thus likely to promote lifetime preferences and means of individuals, which in turn enable them to achieve better health outcomes. Education also provides exposure to physical education and to school subjects enhancing individual deliberative skills, which are important factors shaping calorie expenditure and intake. Finally, we show that in the presence of strong socioeconomic inequalities in BMI, education is likely to have a pronounced impact on healthy BMI for the disadvantaged groups, represented in our framework by females.     

Cross-border partnership – the impact of institutions on creating the borderland communities (the case of Spree-Neisse-Bober Euroregion)

The aim of the paper is to present the cooperation nets generated as a result of the operation of an organization of a cross-border scope and impact, and such is the Spree-Neisse-Bober Euroregion, and to evaluate and assess their role in creating the bonds among the inhabitants. The main research area is the role that the SNBE plays in creating social connections. The authoresses will pay close attention to: the characteristics of Polish-German relations in the borderland; existing social networks within the frames of created partnerships, and the role of the Euroregion as an institution fostering the development of transborder community. The analysis presented here is the result of the research project “Trust beyond Borders. Sprewa-Nysa-Bóbr Euroregion in Perspective of Integrating Processes in Polish-German Borderland”. Conducted in 2013, it used content analysis, survey (800 respondents) and unstructured interviews (70 experts from Poland and Germany) methods.     

The 1990s Shift in the Media Portrayal of Working Mothers

A cultural theme of distressed working mothers depicts working mothers as caught between the demands of work and family in an unforgiving institutional context. Susan Faludi first identified this theme as a conservative backlash against feminists' attempts “to have it all.” But a similar narrative helps support demands for more flexible work–family policies and more significant housework contributions from fathers. We explore the actual trends and prevalence of this distressed working mothers theme by coding 859 newspaper articles sampled from the 1981–2009 New York Times. Articles discussing problems for working mothers increased in the mid‐1990s and have continued increasing into the twenty‐first century. Other themes about problems and benefits for working mothers show quite different trends. There is also an unexpected mid‐1990s shift in attention from problems working mothers are having at home to problems at work. The increase in the distressed working mother theme coincides with the mid‐1990s stall in the gender revolution. The simultaneity of the cultural, economic, political, and attitude trends suggests that the rise of the distressed working mother theme and the stall in the gender revolution may have mutually reinforced each other over the last two decades.     

Is Bigger Really Better?

This study investigates the effect of a capital facilities project on nonprofit financial vulnerability metrics. The author employs a difference‐in‐differences technique to model the relationship between facilities investments and financial vulnerability indicators using data for a matched‐pair sample of nonprofit organizations that invested and did not invest in a facilities project. Overall the findings suggest that investments in facilities are associated with temporary increases in an organization's net assets ratio and decreases in its surplus ratio after a project is completed, and that the costs associated with facilities projects (for example, debt) place strain on nonprofit finances. The study's findings have implications for the financial management of nonprofit organizations, particularly in regard to the associated costs of capital expansion.     

Female-partnered women conceiving kinship: Does sharing a sperm donor mean we are family?

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study explored how 36 initially female-partnered mothers defined their own, and their children's, relationships with families who share their unknown sperm donor (i.e., “linked” families). Shared genetics among children were sometimes sufficient to describe relationships among linked families as familial, especially from the children's perspectives. Most women described their own relationships with linked families as significant but not necessarily in traditional family terms. Family terms were sometimes seen as undermining ties to siblings and genetically unrelated mothers. As shared experiences have come to define “chosen family,” definitions of significant relationships must expand to include those defined by shared genetics alone.     

Wage Inequality and Structural Change

Social Indicators Research - Income inequality in the context of large structural change has received a lot of attention in the literature, but most studies relied on household post-transfer...