Colorado Trust

In October 2016, The Foundation Review published an article describing a new vision for grantmaking at The Colorado Trust that shifted power from the foundation to community residents to determine locally relevant issues and solutions for advancing health equity. It discussed major shifts underway at The Trust as it developed its Community Partnerships for Health Equity strategy, which it believed would result in measurable change that was authentically planned, implemented, and led by residents of Colorado communities. This article describes the initial years of the strategy, which began with a phased approach to sharing power with communities, and how the lessons from those years led The Trust to pivot to a new approach to achieving the effort’s central vision. This next iteration, the Community Partnerships Organizing Strategy, has evolved to include both building power in communities and wielding power in support of communities. This evolution is not complete. The Trust is still learning from the communities that continue in the phased approach as well as those who are part of the Community Partnerships Organizing Strategy, and continues to go through major internal transformations that are necessary to authentically engage in community change work.

Genome‐wide association studies, DNA sequencing studies, and other genomic studies are finding an increasing number of genetic variants associated with clinical phenotypes that may be useful in developing diagnostic, preventive, and treatment strategies for individual patients. However, few variants have been integrated into routine clinical practice. The reasons for this are several, but two of the most significant are limited evidence about the clinical implications of the variants and a lack of a comprehensive knowledge base that captures genetic variants, their phenotypic associations, and other pertinent phenotypic information that is openly accessible to clinical groups attempting to interpret sequencing data. As the field of medicine begins to incorporate genome‐scale analysis into clinical care, approaches need to be developed for collecting and characterizing data on the clinical implications of variants, developing consensus on their actionability, and making this information available for clinical use. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the Wellcome Trust thus convened a workshop to consider the processes and resources needed to: (1) identify clinically valid genetic variants; (2) decide whether they are actionable and what the action should be; and (3) provide this information for clinical use. This commentary outlines the key discussion points and recommendations from the workshop. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

We propose a value-based conceptualization of partnership, defining partnership as relationships between community psychologists, oppressed groups, and other stakeholders, which strive to achieve key community psychology values (caring, compassion, community, health, self-determination, participation, power-sharing, human diversity, and social justice). These values guide partnership work related to the development of services or supports, coalitions and social action, and community research and program evaluation. We prescribe guidelines for building such partnerships and conclude by considering some of the challenges in implementing value-based partnerships.

I: The Siting Dilemma. 1. Introduction. 2. The Dilemma of Siting a High-level Waste Repository. 3. A Framework for Examining Siting Efforts. II: Public Opposition to a Repository. 4. The Dynamics of Public Opposition. 5. Objection #1: Noxious Impacts. 6. Objection #2: Doubts about the Appropriateness of a Repository. 7. Objection #3: Inequity in Outcome and Process. III: Empirical Analyses of Repository Attitudes. 8. Models of Public Acceptance. 9. The Doughnut Effect. IV: Current Strategies for Overcoming Opposition to a Repository. Introduction. 10. Scientifically Based Choice of Technology. 11. Reducing Public Perceptions of Risks. 12. Compensation and Benefit Sharing. 13. Fairness in Site Selection. V: Recommendations for Successful Siting. 14. A Siting Process to Gain Public Acceptance. 15. Applying the Voluntary Approach to Permanent Disposal. Appendix I. Appendix II. Appendix III. Appendix IV. Bibliography.

The analyses in Chapter 5 identified a set of factors that determine whether or not an individual opposes or tolerates a proposed facility: the extent of risk that the facility appears to impose on the health of nearby residents, anticipated impacts to the physical environment and the local economy, the degree to which building the facility appears appropriate from a social welfare standpoint, and the perceived fairness of the siting process. In order to gain public tolerance for a facility, the developer needs to elicit favorable perceptions along each of these dimensions.

In addition to mandating the construction of geologic repositories, the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act also allowed for the construction of monitored retrievable storage facilities which would hold high-level wastes on a temporary basis until they could be shipped to a permanent repository.1 Various designs have been suggested for MRS facilities, but in all cases the wastes are isolated through engineered, rather than geologic, barriers. This includes, at a bare minimum, a sealed metal canister. Given that the wastes are eventually to be transferred to a permanent repository, they must be retrievable.2 In addition, the facility is to allow for the monitoring of the wastes over time.

The main aim of this chapter is to identify exactly what is meant when discussion focuses on the global development of IT, and move on from there to describe the geographical dispersion of IT capacities and draw out themes and issues related to technology transfer. A core observation is that there is no realistic notion of global development, but quite the reverse, given that IT development work has been closely confined to a very small group of countries. There is a somewhat wider spread of IT manufacturing, to take account of favourable resource and labour conditions. If there is a global scene to be described, it is a global market for IT products and applications, and even here it is not a free market, but one bound up with restrictions based, in the main, on political considerations. The role of the military is noted. The recognition that IT has a very restricted developmental and production base, and a less than open market place, focuses attention on the vagaries of the transfer of technologies between different nations and regions, in particular transfer from rich to poor communities. Problems are noted in gaining acceptance for the idea that there should be a process of technology transfer to poor parts of the world, justified on altruistic or humanitarian grounds. Even where transfer takes place there are techniques of handling it which are creative and helpful for the receiving society, and alternative routes which risk the long-term ability of those communities to make their own way. The argument is made that technology transfer should be based firmly on principles of community growth, rather than on patronage and paternalism. However, by way of a prologue the chapter takes a closer look at the concept of development. IT progress has been dramatically fast, as in consequence have been the changes to economic and social functioning. In one sense this is attractive and exciting, a real roller coaster, but we ignore at our peril the relationship between technological or scientific change and the much slower rate of change in our minds, cultures and bodies. In the last chapter we contrasted the pace of technology progress with its social integration. Here we are more concerned with the fundamental capacity of human beings and their cultures to keep in step.

Human societies have thrived or suffered in relation to the degree of integrity with which our intelligence has been used. Intelligence in itself has often been viewed as threatening, because of its potential for harm, and in consequence a vital role of religions and philosophies has been to emphasise the value of the partnership between intelligence and another human ability, to understand and act according to moral codes. For many centuries human judgement ruled social systems, but the rise of science has undermined human capacities to make right decisions, and put in their place scientific experiment and the accumulation of factual knowledge.