New Voices: 2006 Grantees: Trenton Policy Options

2006 Grantees

Trenton Policy Options

Robert Hackett, Vice President, Bonner Foundation
Trenton Center for Campus-Community Partnerships
Princeton, N.J.

CONTACT INFO

Trenton Policy Options
Bonner Foundation
10 Mercer Street
Princeton, NJ 08540
(609) 924-6663
E-mail

Web site

This project will create a Web site and weekly e-mail newsletter that will have up-to-date information on Trenton area and New Jersey policy news, research, and non-profit organization resources. The focus is to provide local policy and program information for residents and community leaders, including directors of non-profit and community-based organizations, elected officials, and faculty and students from area campuses.

Check back for future news and updates.

• End of Year One: November 2007
• Spring 2007
• November 2006

Slow and Steady Build-Out

End of Year One: November 2007

Trenton Policy Options (TPO) is still in the pilot phase of the project to create a single hub for local data, research and policy analysis. Over the summer, three college students participated in an intensive Trenton community research internship which kick-started the information gathering for the Web site. So far, the site has 10 different issues areas with more than 100 entries. The product of their summer research can be found on the PolicyOptions wiki and they documented the process on an organizer’s blog.

The project has been beta testing a custom content management system to host the site, fine-tuning and adjusting the platform to make it more powerful, user-friendly and easier to navigate. They’ve tested version 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2, aim to improve to 1.4 by March 2008 and 1.5 by June 2009 for the public launch of the Trenton.policyoptions.org Web site.

As of November 2007, four students at the College of New Jersey were being trained to serve as reporters and researchers who will add local content to the site. “In this process we are figuring out the practical questions such as how we assign articles and manage the editorial process for approving them for publication,” says Robert Hackett of the Bonner Foundation, who’s leading up the project. As they work out the kinks of their Web-based data entry system, they have posted a video training guide to teach people how to contribute to the site.

The mission of PolicyOptions.org is…

To improve planning and decision-making for all individuals, organizations, and communities by establishing a global network of affiliated local, state & national community information bureaus.

--from TPO Web site

Another key accomplishment this year was the establishment of the Trenton PolicyOptions Bureau as an ongoing programmatic activity of the Bonner Center for Civic and Community Engagement. As a result, faculty and community partners on the center’s advisory committee are more engaged in development of the TPO project, as issue-expert advisors. “They will guide our student and faculty research teams to ensure that we cover the topics accurately and thoroughly, and provide leads for new sources of information. We need this help because college students like to do online research and it is more difficult for them to identify reliable contacts in the local community but especially in local government,” says Bonner.

Aside from the delay in completing the content management system, Bonner says recruiting faculty who will integrate Trenton-focused PolicyOptions Issue Briefs into their courses has been a challenge. “While I am confident these key components of our strategy will be in place by the end of the 2007-08 school year, without these two pieces fully in place we’ve been unable to launch the Web site publicly as early as we wanted,” Bonner added.

Bonner is also busy identifying other campuses around the country that might want to replicate this effort in their own communities. “The colleges I’m talking to think this is a great teaching tool,” says Bonner.

“Everybody recognizes that students aren’t getting the bigger political context. They are serving soup in the soup kitchen, but don’t understand why there is homelessness. It’s not easy to find out the latest thinking about it.” Bonner says the policy options Web sites will bring together local, state, national data and show models that are working to address community problems.

Plus, Bonner says policy analysis is happening across various disciplines, but even in this information age, there isn’t a central place or portal where people can access that analysis, whether it comes from the world of social work, law, medicine, education or government.

Colleges Help with Issues Briefs for Policy Options Wiki

Spring 2007

Trenton Policy Options, a pilot project to have students and faculty create issues briefs about state, local and national issues and invite collaboration via a wiki, has created a main wiki page with framework to help guide future collaborations on such issues as education, health and criminal justice.

The project has also been working with affiliated Bonner Center colleges and universities to recruit faculty and students to participate in researching and writing issues briefs. So far, at least 10 have signed up, including Princeton University and Notre Dame.

During the spring 2007 semester, more than 200 students working in teams in college and graduate level courses were using the Policy Options Wiki, said project leader Robert Hackett.

For the Trenton site, Hackett and others at the Bonner Center have worked with The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) to identify four courses for the fall 2007 semester that will be dedicated to researching Trenton-focused issue briefs and supplying content for the wiki. The issues to be researched will be identified through outreach to local community partners, including both non-profit directors and government officials, Hackett said. TCNJ has also created a Faculty and Community Engagement Coordinator position to oversee work on the project.

For the summer, the project plans to work with summer interns, who will examine community and environmental issues.

The project is also making good progress on a custom content management system being created for the Policy Options Web sites. It is expected to be ready for use this summer. Hackett said he hopes “people will use this Web site as a reference tool, like a library.”

Since the fall of 2006, PolicyOptions.org and four Princeton undergraduate students have compiled the first local Policy Options brief on the issue of supporting mentally ill homeless mothers. The report was generated at the request of a non-profit that provides transitional housing for the homeless, Hackett said.

The project has continued to work to recruit other participants from other campuses and communities in the Bonner network.

Trenton PolicyOptions.org Pilots Policy News

November 2006

The Trenton PolicyOptions.org project was a late-comer to this year’s New Voices grantees. Robert Hackett, project director and vice president of the Bonner Foundation, learned in late September that The College of New Jersey, which works in partnership with Bonner, was accepted in place of another initial grantee.

One of the first steps Hackett and TCNJ leaders took was to launch a Web site - www.PolicyOptions.org - to explain the program and recruit college student and faculty support. PolicyOptions.org is a national effort and an initiative of the Bonner Foundation, which promotes community service, and its coalition of participating college campuses. It aims to improve policy and program decision-making for concerned individuals and community organizations by creating a global network of information bureaus. The Trenton project is the pilot site.

The initiative will consist of a Web site, Trenton.PolicyOptions.org, which will provide policy news, research and other resources; a weekly e-mail newsletter; issue forums; and leadership training. The site will focus on issues such as education, youth development, affordable housing, violence and economic development. And it will draw upon support of area colleges, including Rider University, Princeton University and Mercer County Community College.

To get the project off the ground, Hackett and TCNJ officials met with faculty, staff and students from various higher education institutions, including those in the Trenton area. They recruited four Princeton University undergraduates to write the first issue brief for the site, about supporting mentally-ill homeless mothers. HomeFront, a nonprofit that aids homeless families, requested the research, and the students will be earning academic credit for a course on Medical Anthropology. Hackett calls this initiative “an important trial run,” which will test the project’s approach to create credible policy analysis with college students and faculty supervision.

The research will also test the viability of wiki-based collaborative efforts. To meet the high level of interest in the initiative - and in the absence of the Trenton Web site - the project created a wiki to house discussions and writings of public policy issue briefs. Hackett hopes that Trenton.PolicyOptions.org, which will have a custom-designed content management system, will be launched by the summer. A mock-up can be viewed here.

The PolicyOptions Wiki uses MediaWiki software and is hosted by SiteGround.com. Contributors must register with the wiki in order to edit entries. Hackett says it has enabled the project to attract faculty and students and could engage citizens and community experts as well.

In the spring semester, faculty members will recruit student interns to produce local policy news, research and other information for the Web site. Students will work part time during the semester and full time in the summer. One faculty member will serve as a managing editor of the interns’ work, and other faculty will encourage students to write issue briefs.

For now, the wiki has been an important starting point. “We will be developing templates for the locally focused pages of the PolicyOptions Wiki so we can experiment with gathering not just the Trenton-focused issue briefs but also the relevant news, research, and resources,” Hackett writes. “In addition, we will explore using the wiki to produce RSS feeds and e-mail alerts.”

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• • Mission Contact Info J-Lab site Staff Links • Guidelines How to Apply FAQs Advisory Board • List of Grantees Project Updates • Citizens Media Spotlights Good Ideas Glossary • News Releases News about Citizens Media Speeches • • Blog Ask Questions Share Your Story • Sign up for New Voices e-mail updates!	2006 Grantees Trenton Policy Options Robert Hackett, Vice President, Bonner Foundation Trenton Center for Campus-Community Partnerships Princeton, N.J. CONTACT INFO Trenton Policy Options Bonner Foundation 10 Mercer Street Princeton, NJ 08540 (609) 924-6663 E-mail Web site This project will create a Web site and weekly e-mail newsletter that will have up-to-date information on Trenton area and New Jersey policy news, research, and non-profit organization resources. The focus is to provide local policy and program information for residents and community leaders, including directors of non-profit and community-based organizations, elected officials, and faculty and students from area campuses. Check back for future news and updates. • End of Year One: November 2007 • Spring 2007 • November 2006 Slow and Steady Build-Out End of Year One: November 2007 Trenton Policy Options (TPO) is still in the pilot phase of the project to create a single hub for local data, research and policy analysis. Over the summer, three college students participated in an intensive Trenton community research internship which kick-started the information gathering for the Web site. So far, the site has 10 different issues areas with more than 100 entries. The product of their summer research can be found on the PolicyOptions wiki and they documented the process on an organizer’s blog. The project has been beta testing a custom content management system to host the site, fine-tuning and adjusting the platform to make it more powerful, user-friendly and easier to navigate. They’ve tested version 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2, aim to improve to 1.4 by March 2008 and 1.5 by June 2009 for the public launch of the Trenton.policyoptions.org Web site. As of November 2007, four students at the College of New Jersey were being trained to serve as reporters and researchers who will add local content to the site. “In this process we are figuring out the practical questions such as how we assign articles and manage the editorial process for approving them for publication,” says Robert Hackett of the Bonner Foundation, who’s leading up the project. As they work out the kinks of their Web-based data entry system, they have posted a video training guide to teach people how to contribute to the site. The mission of PolicyOptions.org is… To improve planning and decision-making for all individuals, organizations, and communities by establishing a global network of affiliated local, state & national community information bureaus. --from TPO Web site Another key accomplishment this year was the establishment of the Trenton PolicyOptions Bureau as an ongoing programmatic activity of the Bonner Center for Civic and Community Engagement. As a result, faculty and community partners on the center’s advisory committee are more engaged in development of the TPO project, as issue-expert advisors. “They will guide our student and faculty research teams to ensure that we cover the topics accurately and thoroughly, and provide leads for new sources of information. We need this help because college students like to do online research and it is more difficult for them to identify reliable contacts in the local community but especially in local government,” says Bonner. Aside from the delay in completing the content management system, Bonner says recruiting faculty who will integrate Trenton-focused PolicyOptions Issue Briefs into their courses has been a challenge. “While I am confident these key components of our strategy will be in place by the end of the 2007-08 school year, without these two pieces fully in place we’ve been unable to launch the Web site publicly as early as we wanted,” Bonner added. Bonner is also busy identifying other campuses around the country that might want to replicate this effort in their own communities. “The colleges I’m talking to think this is a great teaching tool,” says Bonner. “Everybody recognizes that students aren’t getting the bigger political context. They are serving soup in the soup kitchen, but don’t understand why there is homelessness. It’s not easy to find out the latest thinking about it.” Bonner says the policy options Web sites will bring together local, state, national data and show models that are working to address community problems. Plus, Bonner says policy analysis is happening across various disciplines, but even in this information age, there isn’t a central place or portal where people can access that analysis, whether it comes from the world of social work, law, medicine, education or government. Colleges Help with Issues Briefs for Policy Options Wiki Spring 2007 Trenton Policy Options, a pilot project to have students and faculty create issues briefs about state, local and national issues and invite collaboration via a wiki, has created a main wiki page with framework to help guide future collaborations on such issues as education, health and criminal justice. The project has also been working with affiliated Bonner Center colleges and universities to recruit faculty and students to participate in researching and writing issues briefs. So far, at least 10 have signed up, including Princeton University and Notre Dame. During the spring 2007 semester, more than 200 students working in teams in college and graduate level courses were using the Policy Options Wiki, said project leader Robert Hackett. For the Trenton site, Hackett and others at the Bonner Center have worked with The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) to identify four courses for the fall 2007 semester that will be dedicated to researching Trenton-focused issue briefs and supplying content for the wiki. The issues to be researched will be identified through outreach to local community partners, including both non-profit directors and government officials, Hackett said. TCNJ has also created a Faculty and Community Engagement Coordinator position to oversee work on the project. For the summer, the project plans to work with summer interns, who will examine community and environmental issues. The project is also making good progress on a custom content management system being created for the Policy Options Web sites. It is expected to be ready for use this summer. Hackett said he hopes “people will use this Web site as a reference tool, like a library.” Since the fall of 2006, PolicyOptions.org and four Princeton undergraduate students have compiled the first local Policy Options brief on the issue of supporting mentally ill homeless mothers. The report was generated at the request of a non-profit that provides transitional housing for the homeless, Hackett said. The project has continued to work to recruit other participants from other campuses and communities in the Bonner network. Trenton PolicyOptions.org Pilots Policy News November 2006 The Trenton PolicyOptions.org project was a late-comer to this year’s New Voices grantees. Robert Hackett, project director and vice president of the Bonner Foundation, learned in late September that The College of New Jersey, which works in partnership with Bonner, was accepted in place of another initial grantee. One of the first steps Hackett and TCNJ leaders took was to launch a Web site - www.PolicyOptions.org - to explain the program and recruit college student and faculty support. PolicyOptions.org is a national effort and an initiative of the Bonner Foundation, which promotes community service, and its coalition of participating college campuses. It aims to improve policy and program decision-making for concerned individuals and community organizations by creating a global network of information bureaus. The Trenton project is the pilot site. The initiative will consist of a Web site, Trenton.PolicyOptions.org, which will provide policy news, research and other resources; a weekly e-mail newsletter; issue forums; and leadership training. The site will focus on issues such as education, youth development, affordable housing, violence and economic development. And it will draw upon support of area colleges, including Rider University, Princeton University and Mercer County Community College. To get the project off the ground, Hackett and TCNJ officials met with faculty, staff and students from various higher education institutions, including those in the Trenton area. They recruited four Princeton University undergraduates to write the first issue brief for the site, about supporting mentally-ill homeless mothers. HomeFront, a nonprofit that aids homeless families, requested the research, and the students will be earning academic credit for a course on Medical Anthropology. Hackett calls this initiative “an important trial run,” which will test the project’s approach to create credible policy analysis with college students and faculty supervision. The research will also test the viability of wiki-based collaborative efforts. To meet the high level of interest in the initiative - and in the absence of the Trenton Web site - the project created a wiki to house discussions and writings of public policy issue briefs. Hackett hopes that Trenton.PolicyOptions.org, which will have a custom-designed content management system, will be launched by the summer. A mock-up can be viewed here. The PolicyOptions Wiki uses MediaWiki software and is hosted by SiteGround.com. Contributors must register with the wiki in order to edit entries. Hackett says it has enabled the project to attract faculty and students and could engage citizens and community experts as well. In the spring semester, faculty members will recruit student interns to produce local policy news, research and other information for the Web site. Students will work part time during the semester and full time in the summer. One faculty member will serve as a managing editor of the interns’ work, and other faculty will encourage students to write issue briefs. For now, the wiki has been an important starting point. “We will be developing templates for the locally focused pages of the PolicyOptions Wiki so we can experiment with gathering not just the Trenton-focused issue briefs but also the relevant news, research, and resources,” Hackett writes. “In addition, we will explore using the wiki to produce RSS feeds and e-mail alerts.” Back to 2006 Grantees \| Back to Home Page \| E-mail This \| Print This


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