Going Local

National drug chains squeeze local pharmacies out of business, while corporate downsizing ships jobs overseas. All across America, communities large and small are losing control of their economies to outside interests. Going Local shows how some cities and towns are fighting back. Refusing to be overcome by Wal-Marts and layoffs, they are taking over abandoned factories, switching to local produce and manufactured goods, and pushing banks to loan money to local citizens. Shuman details how dozens of communities are recapturing their own economies with these new strategies, investing not in outsiders but in locally owned businesses.

Many developing countries have a history of highly centralized governments. Since the late 1980s, a large number of these governments have introduced decentralization to increase democracy and improve services, especially in small communities far from capital cities. In Going Local, an unprecedented study of the effects of decentralization on thirty Mexican municipalities, Merilee Grindle describes how local governments respond when they are assigned new responsibilities and resources under decentralization policies. She explains why decentralization leads to better local governments in some cases--and why it fails to in others. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, Grindle examines data based on a random sample of Mexican municipalities--and ventures into town halls to follow public officials as they seek to manage a variety of tasks amid conflicting pressures and new expectations. Decentralization, she discovers, is a double-edged sword. While it allows public leaders to make significant reforms quickly, institutional weaknesses undermine the durability of change, and legacies of the past continue to affect how public problems are addressed. Citizens participate, but they are more successful at extracting resources from government than in holding local officials and agencies accountable for their actions. The benefits of decentralization regularly predicted by economists, political scientists, and management specialists are not inevitable, she argues. Rather, they are strongly influenced by the quality of local leadership and politics.

Going public to gain support, especially through reliance on national addresses and the national news media, has been a central tactic for modern presidential public leadership. In Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age, Jeffrey E. Cohen argues that presidents have adapted their going-public activities to reflect the current realities of polarized parties and fragmented media. Going public now entails presidential targeting of their party base, interest groups, and localities. Cohen focuses on localities and offers a theory of presidential news management that is tested using several new data sets, including the first large-scale content analysis of local newspaper coverage of the president. The analysis finds that presidents can affect their local news coverage, which, in turn, affects public opinion toward the president. Although the post-broadcast age presents hurdles to presidential leadership, Going Local demonstrates the effectiveness of targeted presidential appeals and provides us with a refined understanding of the nature of presidential leadership.

Going Local explains how social work students and practitioners can develop approaches to neighbourhood work, to engage communities and neighbourhoods more purposefully and to work with citizens and other mainstream and community service providers to build the capacity of neighbourhoods to tackle social problems on their own. Each chapter includes objectives and key points, as well as case studies and activities where appropriate, and the topics discussed include: what we can learn from past social work practice principles, skills and tools to enhance local working joined up practice care and services for children, families, young people, older people and other vulnerable adults social cohesion and the role of practitioners in overcoming local religious and ethnic division. Going Local will appeal to practitioners working in neighbourhood based services, and is essential reading for students of social work, youth and community work, and probation work.

Going Local is an authoritative guide for parents who wish to gain better understanding of the Swiss school system. It maps out all the stages of schooling from Kindergarten to university in all 26 cantons, providing key facts and useful terminology in German, French and Italian.

Modern presidents engage in public leadership through national television addresses, routine speechmaking, and by speaking to local audiences. With these strategies, presidents tend to influence the media's agenda. In fact, presidential leadership of the news media provides an important avenue for indirect presidential leadership of the public, the president's ultimate target audience. Although frequently left out of sophisticated treatments of the public presidency, the media are directly incorporated into this book's theoretical approach and analysis. The authors find that when the public expresses real concern about an issue, such as high unemployment, the president tends to be responsive. But when the president gives attention to an issue in which the public does not have a preexisting interest, he can expect, through the news media, to directly influence public opinion. Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake offer key insights on when presidents are likely to have their greatest leadership successes and demonstrate that presidents can indeed "break through the noise" of news coverage to lead the public agenda.

CSAs or farmers' markets? Upcycling or freecycling? Carpools or staycations? All of the above? They're all great choices - but how do you decide where your family's time and energy is best spent? In Happy-Go-Local, Linsly Donnelly shares countless ideas from her own experience in living locally to help you raise a happy and sustainable family. From community swaps to cooking co-ops, her approachable, step-by-step style will inspire you to make changes that bring your family, neighborhood, and town together - one compost pile at a time. Featuring interviews and tips from professionals in the sustainable movement, this all-in-one guide takes the guesswork out of living locally - and is one item you won't want to recycle!

Deeply traditional in their thinking but inherently pragmatic by nature, Japanese immigrants in Hawaii were driven by conviction to unite under the mantra, "For the Sake of the Children!" to commit to raising their island-born children as full-fledged Americans irrevocably committed to America's highest ideals.