David and Lucile Packard Foundation

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation created Starting Smart and Strong, a 10-year place-based initiative in three California communities, to develop and test solutions that support parents, caregivers, and educators as they prepare young children to be healthy and ready for school. The initiative brings together public and private partners to create comprehensive early-learning systems and ultimately scale what works. This article offers key insights into the foundation’s experience, three years into implementation, with managing this complex initiative and how program officers were compelled to think differently about the best roles staff can play to support grantee communities and amplify constituent voice. Shifts in mindsets and commitments that challenge traditional foundation orthodoxies were essential for effectively supporting inclusive community change. Program officers also had to develop new capacities that both focus on the development of systems that are locally designed and driven and work in service of the foundation’s broader strategy goals. This juxtaposition has upended business as usual and set the foundation on a path that seeks to better understand authentic partnership with communities and the importance of co-creating strategies to sustain lasting change.

Multinational corporations play a prominent role in shaping the environmental trajectory of the planet. The integration of environmental costs and benefits into corporate decision-making has enormous, but as yet unfulfilled, potential to promote sustainable development. To help steer business decisions toward better environmental outcomes, corporate reporting frameworks need to develop scientifically informed standards that consistently consider land use and land conversion, clean air (including greenhouse gas emissions), availability and quality of freshwater, degradation of coastal and marine habitats, and sustainable use of renewable resources such as soil, timber, and fisheries. Standardization by itself will not be enough—also required are advances in ecosystem modeling and in our understanding of critical ecological thresholds. With improving ecosystem science, the opportunity for realizing a major breakthrough in reporting corporate environmental impacts and dependencies has never been greater. Now is the time for ecologists to take advantage of an explosion of sustainability commitments from business leaders and expanding pressure for sustainable practices from shareholders, financial institutions, and consumers.

Governments worldwide are recognising ecosystem services as an approach to address sustainability challenges. Decision-makers need credible and legitimate measurements of ecosystem services to evaluate decisions for trade-offs to make wise choices. Managers lack these measurements because of a data gap linking ecosystem characteristics to final ecosystem services. The dominant method to address the data gap is benefit transfer using ecological data from one location to estimate ecosystem services at other locations with similar land cover. However, benefit transfer is only valid once the data gap is adequately resolved. Disciplinary frames separating ecology from economics and policy have resulted in confusion on concepts and methods preventing progress on the data gap. In this study, we present a 10-step approach to unify concepts, methods and data from the disparate disciplines to offer guidance on overcoming the data gap. We suggest: (1) estimate ecosystem characteristics using biophysical models, (2) identify final ecosystem services using endpoints and (3) connect them using ecological production functions to quantify biophysical trade-offs. The guidance is strategic for public policy because analysts need to be: (1) realistic when setting priorities, (2) attentive to timelines to acquire relevant data, given resources and (3) responsive to the needs of decision-makers.

In our roles as teachers in environmental studies programs at liberal arts colleges, we have mentored many young people whose abiding concern for the environment and for social justice drives a deep desire to live in a manner that lives up to the ideals of the newfound “sustainability” movement. Indeed, we share these values ourselves, doing our best to do our parts as good citizens who think globally and act locally. Still, we know all too well that one individual’s decision to drive a hybrid, eat low on the food chain, or recycle a beverage container is like one drop of water in the sea of forces that are pushing our world in the direction of a socially unjust, environmentally unsustainable future.

To evaluate the ability of women and their providers to assess abortion outcome without the routine use of ultrasonography. This multicenter trial enrolled 4,484 women seeking medical abortion at 10 clinics in the United States. Women received the standard medical abortion care with mifepristone-misoprostol in those clinics and blinded clinical assessments before follow-up ultrasonography. Data were collected prospectively on abortion outcomes, receipt of additional treatment, and clinical, laboratory, and ultrasound assessments associated with the procedure. We constructed five model algorithms for evaluating women's postabortion status, each using a different assortment of data. Four of the algorithms (algorithms 1-4) rely on data collected by the woman and on the results of the low-sensitivity pregnancy test. Algorithm 5 relies on the woman's assessment, the results of the pregnancy test, and follow-up physician assessment (sometimes including bimanual or speculum examination). A total of 3,054 women received medical abortion and had adequate data for evaluation. Twenty women (0.7%) had an ongoing pregnancy; 26 (0.9%) received curettage for retained tissue, empiric treatment for possible infection, or both; and 55 (1.8%) received additional uterotonics or other medical abortion-related care. Screening algorithms including patient-observed outcomes, a low-sensitivity pregnancy test, and nonsonographic clinical evaluation were as effective as sonography in identifying women who received interventions at or after the follow-up visit. Relying on women's observations, a low-sensitivity pregnancy test, and clinical examination, women and their providers can accurately assess whether follow-up care is required after medical abortion without routine ultrasonography. ClinicalTrials.gov, www.clinicaltrials.gov, NCT00120224. II.

ABSTRACT Clark and Murray examine the six Critical Performance Factors for Mega planning in an example drawn from the five-year history of the population program of a major west coast philanthropy. In this article, the authors describe the salience and scope of the population issue as it is relates to other global trends; the steps the foundation took to “scope” the program and establish measurable impacts. It rates performance against the critical factors, then looks at some specific country impacts five years later. This analysis will be incorporated into the plan revision. Summary and What Next Indications are that our funding and the work of the grantees are having good impact in the country programs. Systematic, comprehensive reviews involving outside/inside experts, quantitative and qualitative data will be completed in all five country programs by mid-2005. Also in 2005, the Board will work with staff and outside experts to examine the results of grant making and review and discuss our long term, overall approach. Much has changed since 1998. We will review those changes and see if any longer term shifts in funding emphasis will be appropriate. This effort to refresh our strategic thinking will allow us to revise, as appropriate, the stated missions of the population work, its assumptions, and how it fits into the overall work and goals of the Foundation.

Provides a comprehensive record of the resources that institutional donors provided in response to the Gulf Coast hurricanes. Includes an analysis of interviews with ten of the top twenty-five independent foundations that responded to the disaster.

In aCommentary in Nature last month, Douglas J. McCauley argued that with little evidence to show that market-based conservation works, the time was ripe for a return to the protection of nature for nature's sake. Predictably this has provoked comment, and in Correspondence this week, the issues are aired.