TCNJ, in partnership with the Bonner Foundation, has been awarded a $12,000 New Voices grant for the start-up of the Trenton bureau of PolicyOptions.org. The Trenton Community Information Bureau will be a project of the Trenton Center for Campus Community Partnerships (involving four area higher education institutions: Rider University, TCNJ, Princeton University, and Mercer County Community College).

This project is focused on providing local policy and program information to Trenton, New Jersey area residents and community leaders, including directors of non-project and community-based organizations, elected officials, and faculty and students from area campuses.

The primary form this project will take will be a website: Trenton.PolicyOptions.org that will contain information on Trenton area and New Jersey policy news, research, and non-profit organization resources. The website will be supplemented by a weekly email newsletter of current news and resources, funding, opportunities, workshops, etc.

Information from the website will be used to support issue forums, study circles, and leadership training. Our initial issue areas will be on education, youth development, affordable housing, violence, community and economic development, and hunger.

This project will provide valuable information needed by local Trenton area community leaders to enable them to make informed program design and policy recommendations on issues that affect the communities in which they live and work.

New Voices is a pioneering program to seed innovative community news ventures in the United States. Through 2006, New Voices is helping to fund the start-up of 20 micro-local news projects with $12,000 grants; support them with an educational Web site, and help foster their sustainability through $5,000 second-year matching grants. New Voices is administered by J-Lab at the University of Maryland and supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

"The grantees were selected from a diverse pool of 185 applicants. The award winners not only signaled a deep hunger for better hyperlocal coverage, they also exhibited an appetite for using cutting-edge technologies including wikis, datacasting and Skype Interntet telephony to cover their subject." - Jan Schaffer, New Voices director

For more information on the Trenton-based PolicyOptionsorg, please contact Robert Hackett, Vice President of the Bonner Foundation, at (609) 924-6663 or Patrick Donohue, Director of Community-Engaged Learning at TCNJ's Bonner Center for Civic and Community Engagement (609) 771-2362.

In our conference calls this week, the 25 participants (representing 21 campuses and the Bonner Foundation) expressed genuine enthusiasm for the aspirations of this initiative. We shared a variety of ideas, challenges and questions about the PolicyOptions.org strategy that now will shape how we move forward. Below are few highlights:

Ideas:

• Using the PolicyOptions IssueBrief template when assigning public policy analysis research papers as part of academic courses, academic internships, or service-based scholarship programs (i.e., Bonner Scholars/Leaders);
• Identifying thematic public policy research projects (e.g., public health, environment, achievement gap, etc.) that can be done collaboratively in multiple local sites
• Presenting this public policy CBR model to disciplinary associations (e.g., public policy, history, social work, etc.) as an approach for undergraduate research and faculty-student research;

Challenges

• Ensuring that the PolicyOptions Issue Briefs are comprehensive and objective or balanced presentations by developing a community of activists and academics who will form the "peer review" function similar to an academic journal;
• Finding ways to connect researchers working on this initiative with others researching the same or similar issues;
• Reaching out to new faculty in a wide ranch of disciplines who could incorporate the PolicyOptions Issue Brief research assignments into their courses;

Questions

• As we seek to raise grant funds to launch this initiative with participating campuses, what budget items will be most useful (e.g., faculty development, student research internships, travel to meetings on this topic, etc.)?
• How can we reconcile a standardized PolicyOptions Issue Brief template with the wide ranch of policy analysis requests that are likely to be requested by community partners?
• How do we ensure quality when working with undergraduate students? What role might the faculty member be expected to play in editing final student research before being published on the PolicyOptions.org website?

In addition to the above, there are two other challenges I am faced with as the lead organizer for this initiative:

• Working with our programmer to move the real PolicyOptions.org website (as opposed to this organizer's blog) to version 1.0 status by early in the new year (see the beta version at trenton.policyoptions.org);
• Finding resources and strategies to pilot a network of campus community information bureaus that engage in both the policy analysis (Issue Briefs) and news and resource research for local and state PolicyOptions.org websites and email news digests.

This week we hosted two conference calls that kicked off the recruitment of faculty and campus staff interested in participating in the PolicyOptions.org initiative. I was really pleased with the enthusiasm everyone had for the overall idea and their concrete strategies for moving forward on their own campuses, as well as suggestions for ways we can support their efforts in the coming months.

The main focus of our discussion was on the PolicyOption Issue Brief template and research methodology, and how faculty are or will be incorporating this research approach into an academic course or internship.

As one participant wrote prior to the call:

"I'm intrigued. I've been thinking of having my students write policy briefs, not just policy analysis papers. Schools and programs of social work ought to be very interested in your plans, as we all have policy courses with policy analysis assignments. Next term, I'll have 2 sections with a total of 30 seniors who are in field placements and I'm looking to involve them in more practice policy analysis, research and advocacy activities."

Out of this call we have created a wiki (policyoptions.pbwiki.com) to facilitate sharing of resources and strategies for working with students to research PolicyOption Issue Briefs. In addition, we will experiment with discussion boards (http://policyoptions.proboards91.com/index.cgi) to encourage discussion on specific issue research as it gets underway.

The following people from around the country were involved in the first organizing conference call which took place Monday, October 16, 2006:

1. Lisa Whitaker, Associate Director of the Center for Community Development & Social Justice, Lynchburg College
2. Stephanie Shirley Post, Stephanie Shirley Post, Executive Director, Center for Civic Engagement, Rice University
3. John Schorr, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Social Research, Stetson University
4. Robin Fife, Director, Center for Civic Engagement, Tusculum College
5. Michael Dover, Assistant Professor of Social Work, University of Michigan
6. Amy Howard, Acting Director, Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, University of Richmond
7. Rick Ellis, Assistant Professor of Human Services and Director of the Center for Civic Enagement, Washburn University
8. Sandra Hayslette, Service Network Coordinator, Washington and Lee University
9. Ariane Hoy, Senior Program Officer, Bonner Foundation
10. Bobby Hackett, Vice President, Bonner Foundation

The second conference call took place Wednesday, October 18 with the following participants:

1. Serena Seifer, Campus-Community Parternships for Health
2. Judy Owens-Manley, Hamilton College
3. Diane Elliott, Lafayette College
4. Paul Schwadewald, Macalester College
5. Beth Blissman, Oberlin College
6. Trisha Thorme, Princeton University
7. Patricia Longo, St. Mary’s College of CA
8. Bill Ball, The College of New Jersey
9. Nancy Andes, University of Alaska — Anchorage
10. Diane Hersberg, University of Alaska — Anchorage
11. Frank Von Hipple, University of Alaska — Anchorage
12. Mike Bishop, University of California — Berkeley
13. Keith Kelley, Whitworth College
14. Bobby Hackett, Bonner Foundation
15. Christi Owen, Bonner Foundation
16. Erin McGrath, Bonner Foundation

If you are interested in learning more about this project, read over this website and then give me a call (609-924-6663) or send me an email (rhackett@bonner.org).