Financial Capability and Asset Building in Vulnerable Households

Financial Capability and Asset Building in Vulnerable Households
Author: Margaret Sherraden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2018-03-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0190238577

Financial struggles of American families are headline news. In communities across the nation, families feel the pinch of stagnant and sometimes declining incomes. Many have not recovered from the Great Recession, when millions lost their homes and retirement savings. They are bombarded daily with vexing financial decisions: Which bills to pay? Where to cash checks? How to cover an emergency? How to improve a credit report? How to bank online? How to save for the future? Low- and moderate-income families have few places to turn for guidance on financial matters. Not many can afford to pay a financial advisor to help navigate an increasingly complex financial world. They do their best with advice from family and trusted individuals. Social workers, financial counselors, and human services professionals can help. As "first responders," they assist families and help in finding financial support from public and private sources. But these professionals are too often unprepared to address the full range of financial troubles of ordinary working families. Financial Capability and Asset Building in Vulnerable Households prepares social workers, financial counselors, and other human service professionals for financial practice with vulnerable families. Building on more than 20 years of research, the book sets the stage with key concepts, historical antecedents, and current financial challenges of families in America. It provides knowledge and tools to assist families in pressing financial circumstances, and offers a lifespan perspective of financial capability and environmental influences on financial behaviors and actions. Furthermore, the text details practice principles and skills for direct interventions, as well as for designing financial services and policy innovations. It is an essential resource for preparing the next generation of practitioners who can enable families to achieve economic security and development.

Child Behavioral Health in Sub-Saharan Africa

Child Behavioral Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
Author: Fred M. Ssewamala
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2021-11-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030837076

This book highlights the emerging research and policy development efforts to address child and adolescent behavioral health in Sub-Saharan Africa, where mental health policy is at an early stage and in need of context-specific attention to its successes and shortcomings. A diverse range of researchers, with expertise on relevant policy in both the region as a whole and country-specific contexts, including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, and Uganda, outline theoretically informed, culturally appropriate, evidence-based, and youth- and family-focused service models. The first work of its kind with an exclusive focus on the understudied region of Sub-Saharan Africa, this text: Provides an overview of the current state of child and adolescent behavioral health in the region Evaluates empirical work on risk and protective factors influencing behavioral outcomes Highlights emerging intervention research and dialogue on what works to improve child and adolescent behavioral health Offers insight and strategies on how to advance child and adolescent behavioral health in policy, research, and practice Child Behavioral Health in Sub-Saharan Africa: Towards Evidence Generation and Policy Development is a unique reference that offers guidance for current and future policy-makers, researchers, practitioners, and students as they seek to invest and engage in the healthy development of a future generation.

Confronting Poverty

Confronting Poverty
Author: Mark Robert Rank
Publisher: Sage Publications, Incorporated
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre:
ISBN: 9781544344362

Confronting Poverty is a text that addresses four fundamental questions about economic hardship in the U.S: (1) What is the nature, prevalence, and characteristics of poverty; (2) Why does poverty exist; (3) What are the effects and consequences of poverty upon individuals and the wider society; and (4) How can poverty be reduced and alleviated?

Toward a Livable Life

Toward a Livable Life
Author: Mark R. Rank
Publisher:
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2020
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190691050

Toward a Livable Life explores many of today's most critical issues facing both the United States and the profession of social work (i.e., poverty, inequality, disparities in health, discrimination, and several other areas). The volume enlists the insights of leading social work scholars in order to assess the causes behind these problems and identify innovative solutions.

Redesigning the Medicare Contract

Redesigning the Medicare Contract
Author: Edward F. Lawlor
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2003-12-06
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780226470344

Recent debates on Medicare reform focus on prescription drug coverage, expanding managed-care choices, or technical issues of payment policy. Despite all the heat generated by these issues, Edward F. Lawlor's new book, Redesigning the Medicare Contract, demonstrates that fundamental questions of purpose and policy design for Medicare have been largely ignored. Challenging conventional ideas, Lawlor suggests that we look at Medicare as a contract between the federal government, the program's beneficiaries, and health care providers. Medicare reform, then, would involve rewriting this contract so that it more successfully serves the interests of both beneficiaries and taxpayers. To do this, Lawlor argues that we must improve the agency of the program—the informational, organizational, and incentive elements that assure Medicare program carries out beneficiary and taxpayer interests in providing the most appropriate, high-quality care possible. The book includes a chapter devoted solely to concepts and applications that give definition to this brand of agency theory. Lawlor's innovative agency approach is matched with lucid explanation of the more comprehensive groundwork in the history and politics of the Medicare program. Lawlor's important and timely book reframes the Medicare debate in a productive manner and effectively analyzes alternatives for reform. Lawlor argues that effective policy design for Medicare requires greater appreciation of the vulnerability of beneficiaries, the complexity of the program itself, its wide geographical variations in services and financing, and the realistic possibilities for government and private sector roles. Tackling difficult problems like end-of-life and high-tech care—and offering sensible solutions—Redesigning the Medicare Contract will interest political scientists, economists, policy analysts, and health care professionals alike.

Porn Work

Porn Work
Author: Heather Berg
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2021-02-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469661934

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.

Connecting Civic Engagement and Social Innovation

Connecting Civic Engagement and Social Innovation
Author: Amanda Moore McBride
Publisher: Campus Compact
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2020-04-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1945459239

This book offers a much-needed appraisal of two key social change movements within higher education: civic engagement and social innovation. The authors critically explore the historical and contemporary contexts as well as democratic foundations (or absence thereof) of both approaches, concluding with a discussion of possible future directions that may make the approaches more effective in fulfilling the broader democratic mission of U.S. higher education. This is an essential resource for those in higher education who wish to promote and advance social change, as it provides an opportunity to critically examine where we are with our civic engagement and social innovation approaches and what we might do to best realize their promise through changes in our educational processes, pedagogical strategies, evaluation metrics, and outcomes.

Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care

Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2020-01-30
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0309493439

Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health was released in September 2019, before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020. Improving social conditions remains critical to improving health outcomes, and integrating social care into health care delivery is more relevant than ever in the context of the pandemic and increased strains placed on the U.S. health care system. The report and its related products ultimately aim to help improve health and health equity, during COVID-19 and beyond. The consistent and compelling evidence on how social determinants shape health has led to a growing recognition throughout the health care sector that improving health and health equity is likely to depend â€" at least in part â€" on mitigating adverse social determinants. This recognition has been bolstered by a shift in the health care sector towards value-based payment, which incentivizes improved health outcomes for persons and populations rather than service delivery alone. The combined result of these changes has been a growing emphasis on health care systems addressing patients' social risk factors and social needs with the aim of improving health outcomes. This may involve health care systems linking individual patients with government and community social services, but important questions need to be answered about when and how health care systems should integrate social care into their practices and what kinds of infrastructure are required to facilitate such activities. Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health examines the potential for integrating services addressing social needs and the social determinants of health into the delivery of health care to achieve better health outcomes. This report assesses approaches to social care integration currently being taken by health care providers and systems, and new or emerging approaches and opportunities; current roles in such integration by different disciplines and organizations, and new or emerging roles and types of providers; and current and emerging efforts to design health care systems to improve the nation's health and reduce health inequities.

Jesus in Our Wombs

Jesus in Our Wombs
Author: Rebecca J. Lester
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2005
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780520938205

In Jesus in Our Wombs, Rebecca J. Lester takes us behind the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the lives, training, and experiences of a group of postulants--young women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. Lester, who conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in the convent, provides a rich ethnography of these young women's journeys as they wrestle with doubts, fears, ambitions, and setbacks in their struggle to follow what they believe to be the will of God. Gracefully written, finely textured, and theoretically rigorous, this book considers how these aspiring nuns learn to experience God by cultivating an altered experience of their own female bodies, a transformation they view as a political stance against modernity. Lester explains that the Postulants work toward what they see as an "authentic" femininity--one that has been eclipsed by the values of modern society. The outcome of this process has political as well as personal consequences. The Sisters learn to understand their very intimate experiences of "the Call"--and their choices in answering it--as politically relevant declarations of self. Readers become intimately acquainted with the personalities, family backgrounds, friendships, and aspirations of the Postulants as Lester relates the practices and experiences of their daily lives. Combining compassionate, engaged ethnography with an incisive and provocative theoretical analysis of embodied selves, Jesus in Our Wombs delivers a profound analysis of what Lester calls the convent's "technology of embodiment" on multiple levels--from the phenomenological to the political.