Daily Archives: 08/14/2011

(Community Matters) in the NYTimes

(Community Matters)  in The Atlantic: Can the Middle Class Be Saved?   A compelling argument why parents should up their children’s expectation from going to college to going to an elite college and then to graduate school. It might not be long before most of those families with only a bachelors degree will struggle much like we previously saw many families without college educations. Engaging children in civic & religious organizations is also highly recommended by the data – and might be a counter influence making up for the lack of an elite school education.

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(Community Matters) in the New York Review of Books: The Next Election: The Surprising Reality

Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia has been the person to go to for often ignored voting statistics and insight into their meaning. His edited volume on the 2010 elections, Pendulum Swing.

(Community Matters) I was struck by Paul Farmer’s humility, personification of servant leadership, and that he travels all over the world with a theologian, his advisor.

This Foreign Affairs article: Partners in Help: Assisting the Poor Over the Long Term on “accompaniment” should inform all social initiatives, perhaps political as well. Perhaps it’s not coincidental that the Latin origin of the word means breaking bread together.

Accompaniment is both an objective that is set at the beginning of a task and a mode of follow-through. My lesson, in a nutshell, is that the great failures of policy and governance usually result from failures of implementation, and accompaniment is good insurance against such failures.  

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