TABLE OF CONTENTS

Welcome

New Publications

Accomplishments

• Dr. Nicole Nunoo

Project Updates

• St. Paul's 4 Life Featured in VT News
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Heat, Ready Roanoke!
• VTIPG Profiles Series featuring Dr. Andrea Briceno Mosquera

Five Pieces Worth Reading

Community Change Collaborative (CCC)

• Introducing and Defining Trust with Dr. Guido Möllering

Pondering Past Podcast Programs

• Pam McMichael: "Did Horton Hear a Who"- An Exploration of Small and Mighty Voices of the Highlander Center
• Ramon Zepeda: Organizing to Support Workers and Build Community

Legacy Tidings and Soundings

• Mobilizing Rhetoric as Emblem of Enervating Democratic Capacity
• Thoughts on Community Change and Higher Education

Featured Opportunities

• 2024 Environment Virginia Symposium
• 2024 American Society for Public Administration Annual Conference

Welcome

New Publications

Accomplishments

Dr. Nicole Nunoo

Project Updates

St. Paul's 4 Life Featured in VT News

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Heat, Ready Roanoke!

VTIPG Profiles Series featuring Dr. Andrea Briceno Mosquera

Five Pieces Worth Reading

VTIPG Communications Coordinator Billy Parvatam shares five articles each week that address timely and meaningful concerns that address the state of democracy and civil society in the Institute’s Five Pieces Worth Reading series. Five Pieces treated the following concerns during July and August.

August 11: These articles focused on Virginia Tech studying solar farms, Ohioans overwhelmingly voting against 'Issue 1', the Federal Reserve's efforts to reduce inflation, the possible implications of prosecution of former President Donald Trump, and right-wing criticism of the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team.

August 3: These stories addressed former President Trump's third indictment, how this summer's European heatwave could change future tourism, the recent trend of teachers of color leaving the profession, how western democracies have been built in part on the suffering of others, and how voting in the 2020 election could portend voting patterns in coming elections.

July 28: These pieces treated the question of how conceptions of masculinity divide Democrats and Republicans, the effects of curfews on youth crime rates in Roanoke and Lynchburg, whether Alabama will continue to defy the Supreme Court's decision in Allen v. Milligan to draw a second Black-majority congressional district in that state, the trend toward fewer public swimming pools in the U.S., and why urban areas are generally warmer than their rural counterparts.

July 21: These stories examined the role of hatred in politics, the prevalence of Alzheimer's in southern Virginia, how a second Trump term would very likely damage America's standing in the world, the rise of active club groups, and the heat wave that has affected much of Europe this summer.

July 10: These articles described the role of the Declaration of Independence in arguments for the abolition of slavery, the Supreme Court's decision to disallow President Biden's student debt forgiveness initiative, the fact that July 3, 2023 was the hottest day ever recorded, several reasons to be encouraged about the state of U.S. democracy, and why the world could be at an inflection point. 

Community Change Collaborative (CCC)

Introducing and Defining Trust with Dr. Guido Möllering

We began our exploration of trust theory in this episode with a conversation about how that construct might be defined and operationalized. Our guest scholar was Dr. Guido Möllering, the Director of the Reinhard Mohn Institute of Management at Witten/Herdecke University, Germany, where he holds the Reinhard Mohn Endowed Chair of Management.

Professor Möllering earned his Ph.D. in Management Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his habilitation (postdoctoral degree, venia legendi) in Business Administration at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His principal research interests include inter-organizational relationships, organizational fields, and trust. He has published several books, including Trust: Reason, Routine, Reflexivity (2006), and articles in leading journals, including Organization Science and the Journal of International Business Studies. He now serves as a Senior Editor of Organization Studies and previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Trust Research.

Professor Möllering's work on trust is vast, but these publications provide a useful introduction to his scholarship addressing the topic:

Möllering, G. (2006). Trust: Reason, routine, reflexivity. Emerald Group Publishing.

Möllering, G. (2005). The trust/control duality: An integrative perspective on positive expectations of others. International Sociology, 20(3), 283-305.

The Social Science for Public Good Podcast is a project of the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance and VT Publishing intended to make social science theories accessible and available to individuals and organizations seeking to promote social change.

Link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ss4pg/episodes/Introducing--Defining-Trust-w-Dr--Guido-Mllering-e27k987

Pondering Past Podcast Programs

Trustees Without Borders (TWB) is a podcast series produced by the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance (IPG) and the Community Change Collaborative (CCC). TWB features leading practitioners, thinkers, and designers working to reframe and strengthen communities, doing so without borders or limits on their ideas and aspirations, without borders on what they think is possible, without borders concerning with whom they will work and without constraints on their dreams for a more just and inclusive community.

From this rich repository, we highlight two podcast episodes that are thematically related and present a particular concept related to community change praxis with complexity and depth. The following conversations with Pam McMichael and Ramon Zepeda focus on organizing as a method for inspiring community change.

Pam McMichael: "Did Horton Hear a Who"- An Exploration of Small and Mighty Voices of the Highlander Center

In this episode, Pam McMichael discusses the mission of the Highlander Research and Education Center and how it serves as a space to enhance grassroots organizing across the southern United States, especially. She describes her experiences leading the Center and explains its model for helping local communities through participatory research and popular education.

At the time of this recording, Pam McMichael served as Director of the Highlander Research and Education Center. She first became associated with Highlander as a long-time activist and organizer in Louisville, Kentucky. For decades, Pam's organizing and cultural work focused on connecting people and issues across difficult divides, with a particular emphasis on helping build a strong, racially just movement. She has co-founded local, state, and regional organizations with this core strategy, including Southerners on New Ground, where she served as co-director for eight years. She was a national fellow with a Rockefeller Foundation leadership project to address the growing crisis in U.S. democracy, and her extensive nonprofit management experience includes social change and social service organizations.

Listen here: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/trustees-without-borders/episodes/Pam-McMichael-Did-Horton-Hear-a-Who---An-Exploration-of-Small-and-Mighty-Voices-of-the-Highlander-Center-e1q1cqv/a-a8pfo6n

Ramon Zepeda: Organizing to Support Workers and Build Community

Ramon Zepeda shares his work with Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) in this episode. He describes how SAF engages with the farmworker community and explores the complexities of organizing work and how theatre arts have become a crucial part of their efforts.

Ramon Zepeda joined Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) as its Youth Organizer in 2011. He has experience as a union organizer and has worked with the Justice at Smithfield Campaign in solidarity with workers in a North Carolina pork processing plant, and a Wage Theft Campaign, in solidarity with day laborers in Washington DC. At the time of this recording he served as the program director of the theatre program within SAF.

Listen here: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/trustees-without-borders/episodes/Ramon-Zepeda-Organizing-To-Support-Workers-and-Build-Community-e1eqis6/a-a7feodq

Legacy Tidings and Soundings

Here are a previously published Soundings (Mar. 5, 2018) and Tidings (Oct. 1, 2018) by Dr. Max Stephenson, Jr. that address rhetoric and higher education as an instrument of community change.

Mobilizing Rhetoric as Emblem of Enervating Democratic Capacity

Cognitive empathy requires deep personal consideration and reflection concerning who one is and what one believes, as well as considered regard for how and why others may live and evidence different values than your own. It demands imagination, perception and sensitivity of a sort grounded in continuing reflection on the human experience. That requirement, in turn, necessitates developing the highest order forms of communication and reasoning both to practice it and to bridge differences among those with whom one is relating. ...

More, one cannot so serve and unleash the agential possibility latent in all individuals with whom one might relate and with whom one might serve, if one fears difference or lacks the analytical wherewithal and emotional maturity born of continuing reflection on one’s own and humankind’s strengths and frailties. Cognitive empathy demands a deep rootedness in what joins human beings a well as a considered awareness of humankind’s propensity for both good and evil, justice and injustice. It also demands the capacity to analyze knotty social problems that are likely to evidence all of those propensities and others at once, especially as those relate to self-governance challenges.[1] ...

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Thoughts on Community Change and Higher Education

As leaders of state universities across the country, including our own, work assiduously to remake their institutions into de facto private for-profit revenue-generating institutions as public funding for their operations continues to fall, I am reminded that this turn has resulted from our society’s collective choice to fear the future. For it is fear, fear of economic and social change particularly, that has persuaded our nation’s citizens to turn to a neoliberal governance philosophy that has promoted an atomistic individualism and that has assigned the market to serve as the primary arbiter of social choice. That collective decision has also resulted in the ongoing delegitimation of our nation’s principal democratic institutions, including its public and private universities, and a companion pressure to make those institutions that do survive this assault resemble for-profit entities.

It is important to emphasize that contrary to the misleading claim that higher education institutions exist apart from society in an “ivory tower,” public universities are rooted in their states and communities and have not been exempt from the overwhelming force of this epistemic shift in our society. Instead, their executives have for decades now attended to the latest management and leadership constructs at play among corporate leaders and adopted and adapted those in an ongoing attempt to retain a modicum of legitimacy and to demonstrate that they, too, can be “entrepreneurial,” efficient and “nimble,” and that their organizations can survive in the neoliberal environment thrust upon them. ...

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