Publications

Building Native Communities

“A Native community is more than the sum of its parts. It embodies the mystique of community, the circle of inclusion. Within each member it generates powerful feelings of cultural solidarity. That precious spirit cannot survive without the underpinnings of economic development. But the development must be for everyone—not for just a few. That is the Native understanding.”

This quote is from a guide to financial investing titled Building Native Communities: Investing for the Future. The workbook—designed to teach the basics of investing—was developed with guidance from an advisory group of Native financial experts.

Investing for the Future provides an overview of basic investing concepts in an accessible, easy-to-use format, and is the latest addition to the First Nations Development Institute’s Building Native Communities curriculum series on financial education. The workbook’s interactive exercises and accessible style work well for use in a classroom or educational workshop. Investment concepts are introduced through stories, exercises and illustrations, allowing the reader to apply investment practices to their own life while thinking about investing for the future.

Investing for the Future is part of the ongoing efforts of First Nations Development Institute to recognize and develop the assets, talents and abilities of Native people. This project is supported by the NASD Investor Education Foundation.

Building Native Communities: Investing for the Future is available from the First Nations Development Institute at (540) 371-5615, http://www.firstnations.org.

Increasing the Odds for
High-Performance Teams

The use of self-directed teams in business, industry, government, charitable groups and educational institutions is increasingly prevalent. They can provide increased employee engagement and creativity, plus enhanced productivity of products, services or both.

Those familiar with self-directed teams have wondered why some work teams greatly out-perform others within similar organizational settings, and whether teams from very different sectors of the economy and society achieved a high performance level by using similar means. They want to know what they or others might do to help teams increase their chances of becoming truly high performing.

Increasing the Odds for High-Performance Teams addresses these questions and more. This book, through a series of case-study chapters, shows how various teams started and became very high performing, and what organizational and team conditions helped propel them to that high performance. The experience-based book also highlights lessons that can be learned—those specific to the individual cases and those broader lessons that cut across the teams analyzed.

The authors intend the book to assist professionals in private, public and not-for-profit organizations, including educational institutions, who want to use the team approach to improve their performance. Also, it is intended to be helpful to team members, team leaders, mentors, coaches and administrators across these sectors who want to diagnose their team and organizational conditions in order to make improvements.

The cases of high-performing teams are diverse—food manufacturing, laboratory analysis of genomes, automotive product testing and development, education and technical assistance, and a women’s interest group for farm and community development. Three of the five case-study chapters in the book include administrative support teams—a team at the top in food manufacturing, a team leaders group in laboratory analysis, and a regional administrative team in extension education. Included are both co-located teams and virtual teams.

Increasing the Odds for High-Performance Teams, by Arlen Leholm and Raymond Vlasin, is available from Michigan State University Press at (517) 355-9543, http://msupress.msu.edu.

The Joy of Farm Watching

Penn State Cooperative Extension has released a roadside guide to help non-farmers better understand and appreciate the types of agricultural activities they may encounter in Pennsylvania. The Joy of Farm Watching: A Roadside Guide to Pennsylvania Agriculture provides a short overview of each of the major farm types in Pennsylvania and includes a description of their production activities and maps that show the counties where the different types of farms typically exist.

The Joy of Farm Watching is available from Penn State University’s College of Agricultural Science’s Publication Distribution Center at (814) 865-6713, AgPubsDist@psu.edu or http://www.farmwatching.psu.edu.

What’s for Dinner?

For many individuals, stopping by a well-stocked grocery store on the way home is a pretty painless task. It’s fast, convenient, and a cost-effective way to purchase nutritious foods. But rural areas risk becoming “food deserts” as young families move away and market pressures continue to squeeze small grocers and retailers. Food deserts are defined as counties in which all residents must drive more than 10 miles to the nearest supermarket chain or supercenter.

The latest issue of Rural Realities, titled “Starved for Access: Life in Rural America’s Food Deserts,” examines the distribution of food deserts across the United States and describes the major socioeconomic attributes associated with these places. To gain a clearer sense of the economic and health consequences for rural people who live in food deserts, the authors highlight findings from a case study in Iowa. The brief concludes with insights on what local communities and policy makers might do to expand access to quality foods for rural people living in food desert areas of the country.

Rural Realities is a quarterly publication of the Rural Sociological Society. The latest issue, “Starved for Access: Life in Rural America’s Food Deserts” is available at http://www.ruralsociology.org/pubs/RuralRealities/Issue4.html.

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North Central Regional Center for Rural Development
Iowa State University
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Last updated April 10, 2007 .