UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item THE COMMUNITY CAPACITY BUILDING IMPACT OF THE BALTIMORE EMPOWERMENT ZONE(2008-04-28) Clinch, Richard; Nelson, Robert H; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The federal Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community (EZ/EC) Initiative was the major urban initiative of the Clinton administration. It sought to replace the Reagan and the first Bush administrations' reductions in support for urban programs and passive focus on addressing urban issues through people-based policies and market and tax incentives. Baltimore was one of six cities selected for a full Empowerment Zone. One of the core goals of the federal EZ/EC Initiative was to create sustainable community capacity. Baltimore's implementation strategy was recognized as the most community driven of all of the Zones. This dissertation examines the experience of the Empowerment Zone in building sustainable community development capacity in the form of community organizations to implement programs and presents lessons learned to guide future community capacity building efforts. This dissertation used a detailed literature review, interview, focus group, records review and case study approach to answer the question - Can a federal policy create sustainable community capacity? The Baltimore Empowerment Zone was partially successful in creating or enhancing community development capacity in six urban neighborhoods in Baltimore. Five of the six community organizations - in the case of the Baltimore Empowerment Zone these were called village centers -- formed or participating in the Empowerment Zone effort operated throughout the ten year federal funding period and four remained in operation after the end of the program. This dissertation examined the internal (community) and external (economic, social, and political) factors that influenced each village centers' efforts to build sustainable development community capacity.Item An analytic case study of the evaluation reports of a comprehensive community initiative(2004-10-05) Frusciante, Angela Katherine; Mawhinney, Hanne B; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study is a case study of the evaluation reports of the Neighborhood and Family Initiative (NFI). NFI was a ten-year Ford Foundation sponsored comprehensive community initiative (CCI) in four low-income neighborhoods in four United States cities. The NFI evaluation was longitudinal, interdisciplinary, and multi-tiered. Through this study of the eleven publicly released evaluation reports, I found that the evaluators not only wrote about CCIs and evaluation but also evidenced evaluation as part of loosely linked network supporting urban community development. The knowledge community addressed in the study is the Aspen Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives a national coalition supporting the discussion of evaluation appropriate to community initiatives. The study involved the identification of reporting dimensions from descriptive analysis, evaluation lessons from the documented evaluatorsÂ' interpretations, and change constructs from my theoretical concerns. The study resulted in a discussion of issue areas to be addressed in understanding evaluation reporting of complex social and policy initiatives. These issue areas included: community organization building versus coalition formation, comprehensiveness as a lens for change, audience, institutional distancing, and learning, knowledge development and education. With the study, I also provide an innovative methodological approach to analyzing change through the language evaluators put to initiative reporting. The qualitative approach involved devising a process for analyzing description and evaluator written reflection but also analyzing change of evaluator interpretations. Unlike qualitative approaches that emphasize only themes as recurrences over time, the approach to this study centered ideas as clusters that changed in configuration over time.Item Sandtown: Rebuilding a Community(2004-05-20) Tarbert, Colin; Bowden, Gary; ArchitectureInner-city neighborhoods have suffered years of neglect and have fallen into utter disrepair. Scenes of crime, poverty, and substandard housing are a way of life. Education and social services are under-supported and overwhelmed. For such communities, urban revitalization is hard to envision for even the most optimistic visionary. The social and economic issues involved in rebuilding such neighborhoods are complex. For decades government programs have attempted to end poverty and stabilize inner-city communities. While many architects and planners envision a flight back to the cities, few realize the serious challenges that await them. In order to bring urban vitality to fruition, a firm commitment must be made to ameliorate the social and economic ills that characterize many distressed American cities. This is the hardest challenge facing practitioners. This thesis explores the community development efforts taking place in Sandtown, a neighborhood located in West Baltimore. The thesis entails the creation of a neighborhood community plan phased a over series of incremental time periods that addresses the following: existing conditions, specific areas of revitalization, defensible open/public space, new residential construction, economic development, regional connection, and historic preservation. The thesis focuses on economic development through the design of a Center for Entrepreneurship that would provide educational programs, research and analysis programs, and "living classroom" component related to developing community retail.