Action Circle Products
Climate Change
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Identify policymakers to be influenced. Advocate for more funding for behavioral science research to reduce emissions.
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Over the past few years, The Climate Change Task Force of the Coalition of Behavioral Science Organizations has thoroughly reviewed existing research on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It documented an appalling lack of research experimentally evaluating large-scale strategies for influencing people and organizations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
What we’re up to:
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Building a repository of funding mechanisms
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Identifying optimal policies, programs, and practices that communities can adopt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
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Enlist multiple communities to participate in evaluating how to effectively implement high priorities or practices
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Publications:
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Paper
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Paper
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Paper
Healthcare Guide
Supporting Individuals with Developmental Disabilities: This Action Circle reviewed the challenges of individuals with disabilities accessing medical care due to healthcare providers’ lack of experience and training in working with neurodiverse populations and individuals with disabilities.
The outcome of this Action Circle was the creation of A Guide to Improving Healthcare for Persons with Special Healthcare Needs.
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Juvenile Justice Guide
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Identifying and disseminating evidence-based practices to produce meaningful change in the juvenile justice system
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Communities all over the world have placed a significant emphasis on punitive measures for individuals deemed to have engaged in criminal or antisocial behaviors. Indeed, the criminal justice system as whole relies almost exclusively on punishment. Once it is determined that an individual has engaged in some form of unlawful behavior, the criminal justice system may implement a wide variety of consequences intended to reduce the future likelihood that the behavior will occur again. However, while intended to improve the behavior patterns that led to the punishment, these consequences rarely produce the desired effect, often lead to further harm for the individual, and can have detrimental impacts on the wider community. Moreover, non-white people are disproportionately the subjects of punitive criminal justice programs.
What we’re up to:
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Compiling a list of currently used intervention practices within the juvenile justice system.
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Compiling a list of evidence-based prevention and intervention practices for criminal and antisocial behaviors.
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Interviewing experts on juvenile justice practices and/or prevention and intervention practices
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Identify communities and/or organizations currently implementing (or not implementing) evidence-based practices thereby laying the foundation for subsequent Action Circles to work in those communities.
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Every Child Reads (ECR) provides excellent evidence-based high impact tutoring in reading to children who are just learning to read or in need of extra instruction.
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Child Abuse and Neglect
Values to Action received funding from The National Foundation to End Child Abuse and Neglect (EndCAN) to create two Action Circles to investigate how to prevent child abuse and neglect. One Action Circle explored policies that have been shown to have the biggest impact on prevention efforts and how to encourage the wide-spread adoption of effective policies. The second Action Circle investigated methods to improve collaboration among child serving organizations with the common goal of preventing child abuse and neglect. The work of the Action Circles was memorialized in the monograph Mobilizing America to End Child Abuse and Neglect.
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Nurturing Communities
We help communities overcome conflict by bringing people together around a shared vision of the qualities they want in their community. We help them create an Action Circle to promote these qualities throughout the community and to identify and address the most important concerns and problems in the community.
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