Click Here for Change:Your Guide to the E-Advocacy Revolution (2007), PolicyLink
Arnold Chandler
Click Here for Change: Your Guide to the E-Advocacy Revolution cites examples of organizations that have used e-advocacy to reach “hard to reach” communities; organize for mass mobilization; strengthen their offline tactics (such as tabling, rallying, and protest marches); reach out to media; connect to more supporters for online donations; and target decision-makers, rapidly and forcefully, to pass or defeat proposed legislation.
In addition to case studies, this report is loaded with technology tips to create an advocacy website, format emails and newsletters for maximum effectiveness, and connect to audiences and enable supporter action. It also examines barriers and opportunities for organizations that want to integrate technology into their communications strategies, and a detailed list of technology vendors. Download Click Here for Change
Twelfth Status Report of the Independent Monitor: Delphine Allen, et al., v. City of Oakland, et al. (A report to the United States District Court Northern District of California) (2008)
In 2003 the City of Oakland and the Oakland Police Department entered into a Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA) with private plaintiffs in a lawsuit known as Delphine Allen, et al., v. City of Oakland et al. that alleged several allegations of police misconduct. Judge Thelton Henderson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California approved the appointment of an Independent Monitoring Team comprised of two retired police chiefs, two attorneys and two researchers. The IMT was responsible for monitoring the compliance of the OPD and City of Oakland with the Negotiated Settlement Agreement.
As part of the IMT, Arnold Chandler conducted compliance audits of OPD policies and practices per the Negotiated Settlement Agreement. This included such varied compliance areas as Internal Affairs, Use of Force, the OPD's Personnel Assessment System, and Community Policing. Arnold was a co-author of sections of the Twelfth Status Report of the Independent Monitor: Delphine Allen, et al., v. City of Oakland, et al. Download IMT Twelfth Report
Unincorporated Communities in the
V. Rubin, A. Chandler, E. Bernabei, R. Lizardo
The low-income unincorporated communities of the San Joaquin
Valley face uphill struggles to attain basic features of a safe and healthy
environment that residents of most other places have long taken for granted.
These communities range from remote settlements in farm country to
neighborhoods that have been surrounded by, but are not part of, the
Download Unincorporated Communities Framing Paper
Bridging the Innovation Divide: An Agenda for Disseminating Technology Innovations within the Nonprofit Sector (2007), PolicyLink
S.
Treuhaft, A. Chandler, J. Kirschenbaum, M. Magallanes and R. Pinkett
PolicyLink, BCT Partners, and the Hewlett-Packard Company
have long partnered in the search for solutions to bridge the gap between the
power of new information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the ability
of marginalized communities and their advocates to access and use them. Bridging
the Innovation Divide: AnAgenda for Disseminating Technology Innovations within
the Nonprofit Sector,presents a new framework for understanding today’s digital
divide— the innovation divide—and the policy options for transcending it.
Nonprofit community building organizations are crucial innovators when it comes to responding to social needs. They are entrepreneurial in designing new programs and policies. Nonprofits also innovate with technology. The growth of technology-infused programs and organizations—largely created from the past decade of digital divide policy—attests that the sector can be a rich venue for incubating emerging information and communications technologies. In contrast to the private sector, which has poured billions of dollars into technology research and development, nonprofits adopt and further develop— or adapt—new technologies on shoestring budgets, creatively leveraging philanthropic and corporate resources to create innovations that are relevant to their particular needs.
Although nonprofits are increasingly innovating with technology, they have yet to fully realize the potential of new technologies. The sector faces what this report articulates as the Innovation Divide: the lack of infrastructure and support for adopting and effectively using ICT innovations as well as the paucity of mechanisms for sharing knowledge about innovations among practitioners.
Download Bridging the Innovation Divide
Foundation Giving in California: A Snapshot of Overall Giving, Asset Distributions and Regional Disparities Among Private and Community Foundations (2006), Irvine Foundation and Putnam Community Investment Consulting
Arnold Chandler (Data Analyst, Co-Writer): A.L. Chandler Consulting worked with Putnam CIC as the lead research data analyst and co-writer for this report.
As the largest multipurpose private foundation focused exclusively on California, The James Irvine Foundation maintains a keen interest in understanding the nature and patterns of philanthropic giving across the state. To this end, our Foundation retained Putnam Community Investment Consulting to create a statistical snapshot of foundation giving in California. Based on 2003 federal tax data gathered by Guidestar, a leading source of information on nonprofits, this report provides what we believe to be the most comprehensive picture to date of private and community foundation giving in the state.
The report indicates that California is home to some of the largest concentrations of foundation assets in the country and therefore some of the highest levels of foundation giving in the country. However, there are also enormous disparities between different regions. For example, the San Francisco Bay Area leads the state in philanthropic activity, with San Francisco itself receiving $678 per capita in annual foundation giving. By comparison, many counties in the inland and northern regions of the state receive less than $10 per capita.
Our goal in publishing the results of this research is to raise awareness about philanthropic trends in California and to draw attention to the underinvestment by private philanthropy in regions of California that will be increasingly important to the future of our state. We at Irvine have sought to do our part to invest in such regions. Based on research from earlier periods, we have significantly increased our grants to the Central Valley and, more recently, the Inland Empire. In addition, through our Community Foundations Initiative, we are supporting a group of community foundations, mostly in inland regions, by helping them to broaden their donor base and to assume a greater leadership role in their communities.
While this report points to clear disparities by examining the supply side of the grant-making equation, the report does not address the demand side, which is influenced by a variety of factors, including the scope and depth of the nonprofit community across California. Here, too, we believe that philanthropy can play a unique and critical role, by helping to nurture and sustain the development of the nonprofit community in more underserved regions so that they might be better positioned to attract additional investment by private foundations and others.
Download Foundation Giving in California
Regionalism: Growing Together to Expand
Arnold Chandler (author of Chapter 9 of the report titled "Housing Policy Analysis and Recommendations")
Commissioned by the Presidents’ Council of Cleveland with
the guiding purposes of understanding how regionalism could impact the African
American community as well as identifying equity based regional policies that
could improve conditions for the African American community, Regionalism:
Growing Together to Expand Opportunity for All, uses the Cleveland, Ohio
metropolitan region as a focus for studying regional inequity and the need for
regional-based equity policy strategies. An equity oriented model for the Cleveland
region should create and grow communities of opportunity for the entire
Cleveland region, affirmatively connect Cleveland’s African American community
to regional opportunity structures, reduce disparities in resources between
communities in the region, cooperatively manage the region’s sprawling
development patterns, and improve the educational outlook for all of the region’s
children. This vision, however, cannot be achieved without investing in
personal and institutional relationships, and improving collaboration and
communication across
The Potential of Parcel-Based
Arnold Chandler, G. Thomas Kingsley, Josh Kirschenbaum and Kathryn L.S. Pettit
The past decade has seen notable improvements in the
availability of data about land in America’s communities. Local agencies have
been automating their administrative records for some time, but it is only
recently that improvements in technology—particularly in Geographic Information
System (
Download The Potential of Parcel-Based GIS
Buy Newark: Adopting a Comprehensive Buy-Local Strategy for the City of Newark (2007), PolicyLink
Arnold Chandler
Every day in Newark, millions of dollars flow between residents, major governmental and institutional purchasers, and businesses. Steering a portion of this enormous purchasing power toward local, small, and minority- and women-owned businesses could yield substantial local economic impacts that would benefit a broad and deep cross-section of Newark residents. Local governments and major anchor institutions in cities across the country have adopted a variety of local purchasing and procurement initiatives that seek to connect businesses that are more likely to spend, hire, and invest locally with public contracting opportunities. This briefing paper was prepared to inform a November 13th discussion of how leaders in Newark’s local government and major institutions can strengthen the city’s local economy by leveraging their enormous purchasing power to promote the growth and stability of the city’s small, minority-owned, and women-owned businesses. This paper will describe how such policies and programs have been enacted across the country and the promise they offer for Newark. Download Buy Newark
"Working Technology: Issues in the Design of Information Systems to Support Work Practices" (2001), Business, Education and Technology Journal, Golden Gate University
Arnold Chandler
Understanding the implications of computer and telecommunication technologies for work and organizing requires balancing “materialism” and “agency” in theories of social change. Techno-rationalist assumptions often underlie “technological frames” of managers who commission the design of information systems within business organizations to improve “efficiency” and eliminate “redundancy”. These conceptualizations, however, are materially determinist and focus on reifications of “system” and “process” that treat work, the foundation of organizing, as merely a set of discrete and identifiable tasks captured in a job description that can be automated or made supportable by information systems.
A “canonical” notion of work, therefore, is reified in the material assumptions embedded in new information technologies. This representation of work, as it becomes embodied in system design, serves to constrain, obstruct, or otherwise undermine the noncanonical work practices responsible for carrying out the actual business of the organization.
An alternative approach to conceptualizing work and technology, captured largely in the work of ethnomethodologists and especially in the work of Lucy Suchman, treats the interaction of people and information systems within working contexts as distinctly “situated”. Situated action is tied inextricably to the context in which it occurs. Moreover, situated interactions with information systems in the course of work are often made meaningful within an emergent “community of practice” that serves as a locus of learning and understanding that shapes the lived moment-to-moment experience of work life. Information system design, to support work as work is done, must utilize representations of work that capture both its “visible” and “invisible” elements. To do this requires forms of user involvement and “participatory” or “cooperative” design that enable representations of work to be employed as reified “boundary objects” that can help translate between the work practices of intended system users and the work practices of those who design the systems.
Stumbling Ahead: Transforming Ghana’s Telecommunications Industry (2000), Golden Gate University
Arnold Chandler
This paper explores the problem of establishing regulatory authority in the Ghanaian telecommunications industry as a case study for regulation and liberalization in developing countries generally. By highlighting the missteps and shortcomings of the Ghanaian liberalization program for telecommunications, this paper will illustrate the indispensable role that the consolidation of regulatory authority must play in the transition from a state-owned industry to a fully privatized competitive market in telecommunications services.
