“So What?” – Your Weekly Guide to Advocacy With Impact
Lovingly selected and lightly snarked by Team APEP: David Devlin-Foltz, Susanna Dilliplane, and Christine Ferris
Trans-partisan. No trans-fat.
The new year really begins on January 12, 2016 at 8:15 AM, when the intellectually and physically nourishing Aspen Evaluation Breakfast series returns. Daniel Stid, director of the Madison Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, will discuss the Initiative’s efforts to understand how current trends in political strategy complicate traditional models for how policy change occurs. Efforts to foster “transpartisan” coalitions working from the outside in, for example, face new obstacles. With our co-sponsors from the Center for Evaluation Innovation, we’ll consider the implications for evaluating policy change. Reserve your shot at great ideas, coffee and pastries here.
Persuasive Quakers
APEP-pers current and recent are proud University of Pennsylvania fightin’ Quakers. Our Dr. Dilliplane spotted two excellent pieces from former colleagues at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication : new research exploring the surprising contribution of “slacktivists” to social movements. And these student-generated 30-second spots on gun violence; which do you think were most effective? Test your answer against actual opinion research commissioned by the prof. Tough graders.
Happy holidays. See you on the other side.
“So What?” will be shifting to bi-weekly publication with the new year. That’s “bi-“as in every two weeks, not ”semi-” as in twice a week, for those of you still struggling with that distinction. We’ll be back January 8th and with impressive regularity a fortnight later and every fortnight thereafter until no fortnights (or APEP-pers) remain. Because why? Because we like to say “fortnight.”
The Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program helps leading foundations and nonprofit organizations plan, assess and learn from their efforts to promote changes in knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and policies in the US and internationally. To learn more about our tools and services, visit http://www.aspeninstitute.org/apep
