Community-Based Collaborative Action Research: A Nursing Approach provides a clear framework for an action research process to improve health outcomes and enact needed systems improvement. The authors bring years of experience in community-based collaborative action research (CBCAR) to demonstrate how nursing and other health care practitioners, leaders, and scholars can transform communities by identifying and addressing systemic and structural barriers to health and well-being. These communities can range from neighborhoods, practice environments, and villages to boardrooms and organizations. Ideal for novice and experienced researchers, including graduate and doctoral students involved in research initiatives and capstone projects, this rigorous text is a non-prescriptive, step-by-step guide to enacting meaningful change that emerges primarily from within the community. Rooted in social justice and advocacy and driven by theory and evidence-based practice, Community-Based Collaborative Action Research: A Nursing Approach is a unique and innovative resource.

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.

This volume constitutes a first approximation for the use of systems approaches and dynamic performance management as tools for collaborative governance. The chapters examine models and simulations used in some specific systems approaches, which contribute to facilitating problem focus and collective understanding of collaborative governance, especially in the area of performance management. The explicit connection between resources and outcomes promoted by this view helps managers to understand better how to improve policy and to create positive outcomes that create public value.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.