Connected Communities

New insights into how and why social identities formed and changed in the prehistoric past--Provided by publisher.

As a community, aligning efforts across a community to support the safety and well-being of vulnerable and underserved individuals is extraordinarily difficult. These individuals suffer disproportionally from health issues, job loss, a lack of stable housing, high utility costs, substance abuse, and homelessness. In addition to medical care, these individuals often critically need access to community social sector organizations that provide a distinct and complementary set of services, such as housing, food services, emergency utility assistance, and employment assistance. These services are just as vital as healthcare services to these individuals’ long-term health and well-being, with data suggesting that 80–90% of health outcomes can be attributed to factors beyond direct medical intervention. This book proposes a novel approach to the coordination of medicine and social services through the use of people, process, and technology, with the goal being to streamline coordination between medical and Community-Based Organizations and to promote true cross-sector patient and client advocacy. The book is based on the experience of Dallas, TX, which was one of the first metropolitan regions to develop a comprehensive foundation for partnership between a community’s clinical and social sectors using web-based information exchange. In the 5 years since the initial launch, the authors have been able to provide seamless connection, communication, and coordination between healthcare providers and a wide array of community-based social service organizations (a/k/a Community-Based Organizations or CBOs), criminal justice entities, and various other community organizations, including non-collegiate educational systems. This practical how-to guide is the codification of transferrable lessons from successes and challenges faced when working with clinical, community, and government leaders. By reading this playbook, leaders interested in building (or expanding) connected clinical-community services will learn how to: 1) facilitate cross-sector care coordination; 2) enable community care partners to better provide targeted services to community residents; 3) reduce duplication of services across partnering organizations; and 4) help to bridge service gaps in the currently fragmented system. Implementation of services, as recommended in this book, will ultimately streamline assistance efforts, reduce repeat crises and emergency funding requests, help address disparities of care, and improve the health, safety, and well-being of the most vulnerable community residents.

Find out how to uncover the hidden talents, assets, and abilities in your neighborhood and bring them together to create a vibrant and joyful community. It takes a village! We may be living longer, but people are more socially isolated than ever before. As a result, we are hindered both mentally and physically, and many of us are looking for something concrete we can do to address problems like poverty, racism, and climate change. What if solutions could be found on your very doorstep or just two door knocks away? Cormac Russell is a veteran practitioner of asset-based community development (ABCD), which focuses on uncovering and leveraging the hidden resources, skills, and experience in our neighborhoods. He and John McKnight, the cooriginator of ABCD, show how anyone can discover this untapped potential and connect with his or her neighbors to create healthier, safer, greener, more prosperous, and welcoming communities. They offer a wealth of illustrative examples from around the world that will inspire you to explore your own community and discover its hidden treasures. You will learn to take action on what you already deeply know-that neighborliness is not just a nice-to-have personal characteristic but essential to living a fruitful life and a powerful amplifier of community change and renewal.

This book addresses how accelerating advances in information and communication technology, mobile technology, and location-aware technology have fundamentally changed the ways how social, political, economic and transportation systems work in today’s globally connected world. It delivers on many exciting research questions related to human dynamics at both disaggregate and aggregate levels that attract the attention of researchers from a wide range of disciplines. Human Dynamics Research involves theoretical perspectives, space-time analytics, modeling human dynamics, urban analytics, social media and big data, travel dynamics, privacy issues, development of smart cities, and problems and prospects of human dynamics research. This book includes contributions on theoretical, technical, or application aspects of human dynamics research from different disciplines. Appealing to researchers, scholars and students across a wide range of topics and disciplines including: urban studies, space-time, mobility and the internet, social media, big data, behavioral geography and spatio-temporal-network visualization, this book offers a glimpse at the cutting edge of research on human dynamics.

United We Act brings together an investigation into the topic of connected communities by the Creative Media group and the Social Sciences Perspective of the Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy (SiDE) research project based at Culture Lab, Newcastle.This publication gathers together the main aspects of the study consisting of the final report 'Situating Communities through Creative Technologies and Practice' and the expressions of interest of the participants for the September 2011 international interdisciplinary symposium.The report explores the relation between creative uses of digital technologies and the notion of connected communities; and the symposium expanded on this by opening up the dialogue on the topic to international experts from various disciplines, grass-roots community workers, and the general public. In addition we provide an extended bibliography as a research tool on the topic and suggestions for future research.

There are times when we all feel that no one is listening to us, and no one understands us. In sharing the sorrowful joy and the joyful sorrow of our lives as engaged people we begin to see ourselves in the lives of one another. World Voice: Connected Communities is a snap shot of a small space in time and a select few people that now know "We" are listening. Writers from around the globe share their lives, passions, poetry, stories, spiritual pilgrimages, and their own humanity, while becoming part of the historical record of a burgeoning global society. The World Voice book series has the goal of fostering communication and commonality of all people across borders. In supporting the World Voice series you are making a difference in people's lives by taking part in creating a community where neighbors might become friends, and all people can connect meaningfully to improve the quality of one life at a time with the intention to touch the whole world. So take your place, take a chance, and leave your mark.

This book aims to promote greater understanding of social cohesion amidst existing complexities of faith and identity, and what it portends for our future.Social cohesion defies easy definition; yet, every pursuit of social cohesiveness requires nurture, patience and a consensus that it is germane to the success of any community. Indeed, challenges abound, developments such as the COVID-19 pandemic, evolving geopolitical tensions, and a rise in access to technology impact social cohesion. In such times, it is pertinent to maintain on-going conversations revolving around social cohesion to bridge the divides through diversity and technology.This book continues to build on the conversations from the second edition of the International Conference of Cohesive Society (ICCS), held from 6-8 September 2022 in Singapore. Over 25 essays across three ICCS 2022 themes — How Faith Can Bridge Divides, Diversity, and Technology — present international and interdisciplinary perspectives in building confident identities and connected communities.

Find out how to uncover the hidden talents, assets, and abilities in your neighborhood and bring them together to create a vibrant and joyful community. It takes a village! We may be living longer, but people are more socially isolated than ever before. As a result, we are hindered both mentally and physically, and many of us are looking for something concrete we can do to address problems like poverty, racism, and climate change. What if solutions could be found on your very doorstep or just two door knocks away? Cormac Russell is a veteran practitioner of asset-based community development (ABCD), which focuses on uncovering and leveraging the hidden resources, skills, and experience in our neighborhoods. He and John McKnight, the cooriginator of ABCD, show how anyone can discover this untapped potential and connect with his or her neighbors to create healthier, safer, greener, more prosperous, and welcoming communities. They offer a wealth of illustrative examples from around the world that will inspire you to explore your own community and discover its hidden treasures. You will learn to take action on what you already deeply know-that neighborliness is not just a nice-to-have personal characteristic but essential to living a fruitful life and a powerful amplifier of community change and renewal.