Grants Management: Despite Efforts to Improve Weed and Seed Program Management, Challenges Remain

This book provides a fresh look at the process by which governments hold themselves accountable to their citizens for performance. Unlike the plethora of other books in the field, it examines all aspects of the Performance Management and Budgeting issue, not only from the federal, state, and local perspectives, but also internationally in both developing and developed countries.Covering both conceptual and theoretical frameworks in performance management and budget, the book analyzes the effectiveness of different approaches. Featuring insights from a group of distinguished contributors, it ties current performance management approaches into the century-old literature on public sector reform and management, and presents arguments for and against performance management as well as recommendations on how to improve the enterprise.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) appropriated $8 billion for high and conventional speed passenger rail. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) was responsible for soliciting applications, evaluating them to determine program eligibility and technical merits, and selecting awards, which were announced in January 2010. This report examines the extent to which FRA: (1) applied its established criteria to select projects; (2) followed recommended practices for awarding discretionary grants; and (3) communicated outcomes to the public, compared with selected other Recovery Act competitive grant programs. Includes recommendations. Charts and tables. This is a print on demand report.

Anti-Muslim racism with its attendant xenophobia and (the fear of) Salafist hostility are two of the most essential problems facing Europe today. Both result from the enormous failure of the continent’s integration policies, which have either insisted on immigrants’ rigid assimilation or left immigrants to fend for themselves. This book radically breaks with contemporary approaches to immigrant assimilation and integration. Instead it examines non-institutional approaches that facilitate immigrant inclusion through the examples of three alternative small-scale projects that have impacted the lives of urban working-class youth, specifically with second-generation immigrant roots, in Vienna, Austria. These projects involve online gaming, hip hop as an art form, and social work as emancipatory pedagogic practice (commonly referred to as street work). After exploring historic and structural conditions of marginalization in Austria, the book investigates working-class teenagers’ social networks and describes an online game designed to provide a platform for interaction between non-immigrant and immigrant youth who usually either do not interact or display prejudice when they engage each other. Hip hop can provide both a necessary outlet for alienated youth to articulate their frustrations and a highly effective tool for transforming inclusion conflicts. This is achieved through offering individual teens the necessary means to gain the resilience and social grounding necessary to help overcome exclusion and marginalization. In addition to the individual young person’s agency, the inclusion process, of course, also requires corresponding efforts by the majority society. Social work with marginalized youth is crucial for successful inclusion. Specifically individual support in small-scale settings provides a unique opportunity to open up spaces for discouraged and disaffected teenagers to gain self-worth and dignity. While the book focuses on identity formation and the teenagers’ agency, it argues that only projects that include both “newcomer” and “native” can aid in overcoming exclusionary attitudes and policies, eventually allowing some form of social bonding to take place.

GAO-04-245 Grants Management: Despite Efforts to Improve Weed and Seed Program Management, Challenges Remain

Report on the Weed & Seed (W&S) Program, an important component of the Dept. of Justice crime prevention program as well as a major part of the Admin's. community revitalization strategy. W&S is a community-based, multiagency program that proposes to weed outÓ crime from targeted neighborhoods, then seedÓ the site with a variety of programs & resources to prevent crime from recurring. Local W&S sites develop partnerships with other federal, state, & local governments & private sector agencies to leverage federal W&S grant funds with additional resources from these partners to promote weeding & seeding activities. Charts & tables.