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In 1993 President Clinton signed into law the National and Community Service Trust Act, the centerpiece of which was a new national service initiative--AmeriCorps. The overall purpose of AmeriCorps was to promote community building through volunteer service. AmeriCorps was one high-profile program established in part to highlight government-nonprofit partnerships and their capacity to improve communities and service delivery to the most vulnerable in communities--poor children, frail elderly, and teenagers who are at risk of dropping out of school or getting into serious juvenile delinquency problems. AmeriCorps' programs nationally work to achieve three goals--Getting Things Done, Member Development, and Strengthening Communities. Few of the studies on AmeriCorps have explicitly studied their impact on community strengthening. This article reports on a two-year study of twenty two AmeriCorps programs in Florida from 1997-2000, emphasizing their objectives and success in community strengthening. Program results are limited. The programs increased the number of volunteers delivering their services and developed one or more community partner organizations at each site. Nearly all of the program staff and community partners believed that the AmeriCorps programs positively influenced the community's self-help capacity to some extent. However, data indicating broader community strengthening impacts were hard to find and difficult to track. Reasons for this relatively modest impact on broader community strengthening goals are articulated based on surveys, interviews, and site visits. Keywords: AmeriCorps, civic engagement, community capacity, nonprofit organizations, volunteers

This article illustrates managerial responses to different performance feedback signals in decision-making processes for improving performance. First, we conceptualize and illuminate distinctive dimensions of feedback signals—internal feedback, external feedback, and comparative feedback signals. Then, we test how these different feedback signals improve performance of public-sector programs based on a 10-year panel data set from the Korean Performance Assessment Rating Tool (K-PART). We find that performance signals from sources internal to individual programs and from external reference points of problem identification (social performance comparison) affect program performance. This suggests an association between internal management and social comparison mechanisms relative to performance improvement. The novel contribution of this research lies in promoting scholarship on performance management by identifying three unique sources of performance feedback signaling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a study related to disaster management strategies and the role that volunteer managers and nonprofit entities can play in integrating volunteers into disaster and emergency response. It informs that the few programs have been able to maximize the benefits of volunteers while minimizing barriers to their participation in strategy making.

Various scholars have identified multiple sources of accountability in nonprofit and voluntary organizations (NPVOs) and have offered several typologies categorizing various streams of accountability. Only a few have attempted to offer strategies, however, to implement these differential forms of accountability. The study identifies multiple sources of NPVO accountabilities by engaging distinctions between these organizations' instrumental and expressive activities. From a qualitative study in 16 Chinese Canadian NPVOs, three forms of expressive accountability and two forms of instrumental accountability are distinguished. The study further develops a two-dimensional accountability matrix for categorizing organizations into four types according to their levels of commitment to expressive and instrumental accountabilities. Lastly, by associating organizational and managerial factors with the task of balancing the two accountabilities, the authors draw conclusions and offer implications for managerial practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing literature on the topic, our understanding of organizational sensemaking remains somewhat fragmented, and discussions have not yet fully integrated related ideas into a conceptual framework that includes the contextual terrain in which these activities occur. This article offers such a model. We begin with a story from a Korean fire inspector, delineating the process of his sensemaking into three stages: noticing, interpretation, and action. We demonstrate how sensemaking can be understood in three separate contexts- the ecological, institutional, and social relational. We show how each context provides a setting for a unique account of the three stages of sensemaking. We derive four theoretical propositions and conclude with implications and discuss prospects for this promising research area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the disparity between formal plans and actual networks in practice for emergency services in a local government setting. This study found that the accuracy of participants' collective perception of the network has a strong positive relationship with the centrality of the lead agency within each emergency support function, In addition, the centrality of influence within and collective accuracy about the network may be key indicators for creating network effectiveness. Finally, this study offers a simplified network analysis process to assist policy makers in creating more effective network structures for their emergency management activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]