How do you know it’s time for a career break? How can you revitalize yourself during a career break? How can you prepare and acquire a PhD around your mid-life? What can you expect while changing careers from corporate to academia? How do you re-enter the corporate world post a Ph. D? Working women face career dilemmas, especially in their mid-life. Issues of work-life balance are encountered at this stage, and they begin to introspect and question what they really want from their careers. The New Plan A is a book aimed at encouraging working women to change careers at any life stage. Careers in the corporate world and the academic world and the aspects of dealing with a career break have been covered in detail. Honest, vulnerable, witty, The New Plan A is a book that seeks to inspire people to believe in their dreams and dare to pursue them, age not being a barrier.

A New Plan renews the promise of person-centered planning with powerful, research-based positive psychology skills and tools. Authors Dykstra and Dykstra build on the foundation of historical contributions to advance their "10 Principles of Person-Centered Planning." They reflect on the reasons people don't plan and stress the importance of addressing personal outcomes. A New Plan introduces the role of the Champion in the life of a person who has disabilities and includes a new implementation framework, along with the specific action steps needed to enable a person to flourish and live their best life possible. The authors also stress the importance of cultivating a positive organizational culture. They include the Organizational Inventory of Person-Centeredness that allows readers and providers to assess their person-centered efforts and find areas to address for continuous improvement.

From a Harvard scholar and former Obama official, a powerful proposal for curtailing violent crime in America Urban violence is one of the most divisive and allegedly intractable issues of our time. But as Harvard scholar Thomas Abt shows in Bleeding Out, we actually possess all the tools necessary to stem violence in our cities. Coupling the latest social science with firsthand experience as a crime-fighter, Abt proposes a relentless focus on violence itself -- not drugs, gangs, or guns. Because violence is "sticky," clustering among small groups of people and places, it can be predicted and prevented using a series of smart-on-crime strategies that do not require new laws or big budgets. Bringing these strategies together, Abt offers a concrete, cost-effective plan to reduce homicides by over 50 percent in eight years, saving more than 12,000 lives nationally. Violence acts as a linchpin for urban poverty, so curbing such crime can unlock the untapped potential of our cities' most disadvantaged communities and help us to bridge the nation's larger economic and social divides. Urgent yet hopeful, Bleeding Out offers practical solutions to the national emergency of urban violence -- and challenges readers to demand action.

Early care and education for many children in the United States is in crisis. The period between birth and kindergarten is a critical time for child development, and socioeconomic disparities that begin early in children’s lives contribute to starkly different long-term outcomes for adults. Yet, compared to other advanced economies, high-quality child care and preschool in the United States are scarce and prohibitively expensive for many middle-class and most disadvantaged families. To what extent can early-life interventions provide these children with the opportunities that their affluent peers enjoy and contribute to reduced social inequality in the long term? Cradle to Kindergarten offers a comprehensive, evidence-based strategy that diagnoses the obstacles to accessible early education and charts a path to opportunity for all children. The U.S. government invests less in children under the age of five than do most other developed nations. Most working families must seek private childcare, which means that children from low-income households, who would benefit most from high-quality early education, are the least likely to attend them. Existing policies, such as pre-kindergarten in some states are only partial solutions. To address these deficiencies, the authors propose to overhaul the early care system, beginning with a federal paid parental leave policy that provides both mothers and fathers with time and financial support after the birth of a child. They also advocate increased public benefits, including an expansion of the child care tax credit, and a new child care assurance program that subsidizes the cost of early care for low- and moderate-income families. They also propose that universal, high-quality early education in the states should start by age three, and a reform of the Head Start program that would include more intensive services for families living in areas of concentrated poverty and experiencing multiple adversities from the earliest point in these most disadvantaged children’s lives. They conclude with an implementation plan and contend that these reforms are attainable within a ten-year timeline. Reducing educational and economic inequalities requires that all children have robust opportunities to learn, fully develop their capacities, and have a fair shot at success. Cradle to Kindergarten presents a blueprint for fulfilling this promise by expanding access to educational and financial resources at a critical stage of child development.