Arizona State University

Rhonda Phillips, an expert on asset-based community and economic development, is taking the reins as director of ASU’s School of Community Resources and Development.

Phillips brings a combination of academic and practitioner perspectives as well as more than 20 years of experience with private, public and nonprofit organizations at the international, national, state and local levels to her new role. Phillips will also serve as professor in the school, part of the College of Public Programs.

Phillips’ most recent position was founding director of the Center for Building Better Communities at the University of Florida, an appointment she held concurrently with faculty appointments in the Urban and Regional Planning Department and the College of Design, Construction and Planning. In May, Phillips was named editor of Community Development Journal (Oxford University Press), the journal of the Community Development Society, which provides an international forum on community action, village, town and regional planning, community studies and rural development.

One of her specialties is developing community indicator measuring systems, which are used in urban planning internationally. As a 2006 Fulbright Fellow at the University of Ulster, Phillips worked across sectors to design and apply a community development framework which gauged progress towards desired public policy outcomes in Northern Ireland. She has also recently been involved in projects focusing on alleviating poverty by incorporating technology-based economic development, and community-based planning that uses a sustainable and culture-based approach to development.

At ASU’s School of Community Resources and Development, Phillips will oversee 15 faculty members involved in a diverse array of research and academic programs. The school is part of the College of Public Programs, which focuses broadly on improving the quality of life for communities, individuals and organizations. More than 600 students are enrolled in the school’s tourism development and management, parks and recreation management, nonprofit studies and therapeutic recreation programs. It also is home to the Center for Nonprofit Leadership and Management, and the new Megapolitan Tourism Research Center to be launched this fall.

“Rhonda is an ideal fit for the School of Community Resources and Development and the Downtown Phoenix campus,” says Debra Friedman, dean of the College of Public Programs. “She is a boundary-spanner who looks at communities and organizations through a multidimensional lens. Her expertise encompasses the complex elements of healthy, sustainable communities and global problem-solving, a tremendous asset for ASU, Phoenix and the entire region.”

Phillips and co-editor Robert Pittman’s “Community Development Handbook” was the first text of its kind adopted as the text for the Community Development Institute, a national training program for development practitioners at various universities across the United States. She is also co-editor of “Community Quality-of-Life Indicators: Best Cases III,” focused on global communities that are using indicator systems for community and regional progress.

“Community development is a mindset,” Phillips says. “Instead of poverty reduction, we are learning to say ‘asset or wealth enhancement,’ which brings a whole new perspective to the solutions. We focus on the inherent assets of a community or organization versus the needs. We identify not only financial assets, but leadership, relationships, talents, natural resources and traditions that help our communities and organizations thrive.

“We will never be able to address all needs, but this approach helps identify and enhance underutilized resources and helps attracts new resources.”

Phillips has been the lead investigator on nearly 20 grants and has served as chair of the American Planning Association’s Economic Development Division. Her academic experience includes positions at the University of Ulster, the University of Florida, the University of Southern Mississippi, Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University.

Phillips holds a doctorate in city and regional planning from Georgia Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in economics from Georgia Institute of Technology, and a master’s degree in economic development and a bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of Southern Mississippi. She also earned dual professional certifications in economic development and urban and regional planning.

ASU Baseball will hold its annual walk-on tryouts on Saturday, Aug. 25.

Interested players must be enrolled full-time at Arizona State University, have remaining NCAA eligibility, and have played competitive baseball in the last three years. A walk-on information packet is available in the baseball office located on the third floor of the Carson Student-Athlete Center inside Sun Devil Stadium.

Players are encouraged to pick-up the packet on Monday, Aug. 20 to ensure that the requested material is returned by a 5 p.m. deadline Aug. 23.

Edward Allan Brawley, Professor Emeritus of Social Work at Arizona State University, has written “Speaking Out for America’s Poor: A Millionaire Socialist in the Progressive Era – The Life and Work of Robert Hunter,” the first full-length account of the turn-of-the-19th-century social reformer.

Recognized as a pioneer in the area of social work – mentored by Jane Addams and a contemporary of Sinclair Lewis and Lincoln Steffens – Hunter was a reformer who believed that poverty was preventable by appropriate government action. His proposals helped launch local and state programs and were a precursor to much of the social legislation enacted under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Hunter was a truly inspirational person,” said Brawley, who taught social policy at ASU’s West campus from 1992 through 2003 with periodic interruptions for different administrative assignments. “He was motivated by strongly held but not sanctimonious or judgmental religious principles, and he was tireless in his pursuit of solutions to the most pressing social problems of his time.”

A social worker from Indiana, Hunter created headlines in 1903 when he married New York socialite Caroline Phelps Stokes (her father, Anson, was a prominent financier and philanthropist who donated the trophy known as the America’s Cup that is still awarded to the winner of the prestigious international yachting competition) and moved out of a Manhattan mansion to live in the slum district of Minetta Lane on the city’s Lower West Side in order to serve the poor. In his landmark book, “Poverty,” published in 1904, Hunter estimated that between 10 and 20 million Americans were in dire straits, despite the relative prosperity of what came to be called the Gilded Age.

Despite the major impact that Hunter’s work had in forcing needed social reforms in the Progressive Era, his contributions have been, for the most part, overlooked or forgotten.

“Many wealthy people of the time responded to the needs of the poor among them by giving hand-outs of food, fuel, clothing or money,” noted Brawley. “Others who had the means and motivation established philanthropic organizations or foundations, some of which still exist today. A few, including Hunter, Addams and others, chose to live among the poor and fight for the social changes they believed were needed if poverty was to be prevented or reduced.”

As much as Brawley’s “Speaking Out” is a biographical sketch of Hunter, it is also a look into the history of social reform and social change, utilizing biography to examine social and intellectual history.

“Brawley does what he has consistently done in his scholarly works – analyze social change through an unconventional lens,” wrote Rufus Sylvester Lynch, dean of the Whitney M. Young, Jr., School of Social Work at Clark Atlanta University in a review of the book. “His biography of Hunter throws penetrating new light on early social reform efforts in America.”

Brawley, who has authored six books on social policy, including “Social Care at the Front Line” and “Human Services and the Media,” says much of what he taught in his classes at Temple, Penn State University and ASU can be traced to lessons learned from Hunter.

“One of the Hunter lessons that has always resonated with my students is about how he had worked for a couple of years as a social worker in the worst slums of Chicago,” remembered Brawley, who earned his Ph.D in social work from the University of Pennsylvania. “He eventually realized that his case-by-case approach had helped very few families to extract themselves from the morass of poverty, hunger, and the disease in which they lived. He compared his well-intentioned but ineffective efforts to swatting mosquitoes in a malarial swamp. He decided that, in order to be effective, he would have to re-direct his efforts to draining the swamp. Thenceforth, he devoted his life to changing social conditions that cause poverty and all its attendant miseries. He was serving as an early model for today’s professional social worker.”

Brawley’s “Speaking Out” is published by Humanity Books.

It’s an unfortunate, reoccurring theme among many of the teenage girls incarcerated at Black Canyon School in North Phoenix. They speak of backgrounds marred by drugs, fights, broken families – and perhaps most telling of all – the lack of anyone in their lives who really cares.

That scenario is changing for teenage girls who have been paired with student mentors through the Youth in Transition Service Learning Program internship, part of Arizona State University’s Academic Community Engagement Services at University College. Youth in Transition mentors meet with incarcerated girls twice weekly to participate in activities, work on plans for re-entering society and simply talk about what’s going on in their lives. ASU student mentors visit Black Canyon School, a year-round school operated by the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections, to meet with young women who are mostly between the ages of 16 and 18.

Twenty-two year old Kortney Mosher is a mentor for Patricia, 17. Their relationship has undergone a series of upheavals including building a sense of trust that was eroded when Patricia ran away from a group home. When Patricia came back to the correctional facility, Mosher told her she felt used.

“Patricia started to cry,” Mosher says.

Even though it was tough, that confrontation helped solidify their relationship.

“I didn’t know if she really cared. I test people out. I wanted to know if she was here for me or for the program,” Patricia says. “It’s hard coming back here and facing these people who believe in me so much.”

Patricia says that having someone like Mosher in her life makes her feel like “she’s a person.”

Mosher is a case manager for ValueOptions who became involved in the program at ASU before she graduated with a degree in psychology.

“I feel like she’s a little sister,” Mosher says. “I care for her deeply.”

And Patricia has learned that Mosher is one adult she can trust.

“We have seen young women who have previously been rightfully leery of adults learn to trust and build relationships with their mentors and the program partners,” says Katie Barclay Penkoff, Youth in Transition program coordinator. Barclay Penkoff leads mentoring sessions at Black Canyon School with Jennifer Morgan, Youth in Transition program assistant and Barbara Strachan, Just Us program manager for Girl Scouts, Arizona Cactus-Pine Council.

Youth in Transition was developed in 2004 as an outgrowth of another program for incarcerated women called Adelante Jovencitas or “Moving Young Women Forward” that was spearheaded by the Girl Scouts, Arizona Cactus-Pine Council; Catholic Charities, DIGNITY Services/Diversion Programs; and the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections. The program’s sponsor is the Arizona Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities. Youth in Transition’s goal is to help young women successfully re-enter the community, thereby reducing recidivism rates.

Mentors work with the young women they are paired with while they are incarcerated and after their release. Although some young women have gone back to their former lives, others have made real progress by earning their General Equivalency Diploma (GED), securing employment and staying sober.

“We have seen the impact of the Youth in Transition Program at many levels,” Barclay Penkoff says.

One measure of success is the praise the program has earned from the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections (ADJC).

“Katie and her team do a phenomenal job educating the ASU mentors. Before they are ever matched with youth, the mentors have learned so much about ADJC, its population and the reasons behind the many rules that guide the program,” says Kathy Twitchell, Black Canyon School volunteer services coordinator.

Teens who are incarcerated can anticipate enjoyable visits when their mentors arrive.

“We love the program,” says Keryl Work, Black Canyon School superintendent. “The girls at Black Canyon School look forward to the mentor program, especially the girls without families.”

Mentors feel like they can relate to many of their mentees experiences, but some are practically impossible to fathom, such as Patricia losing her father a few years ago after he committed suicide. She’s currently awaiting placement in a group home where she can be away from her family.

“They’re all about drugs,” Patricia says. “That’s not what I want.”

Mentors work with incarcerated teens on issues such as creating a re-entry plan, writing a resume and finding a place to live before they are released. Mentors keep in touch with the girls after their release, helping them deal with issues and problems that come up in life. Mentors also undergo background screening including fingerprinting and drug screening.

Brenna Gonzales is a 23-year-old ASU psychology major who is paired with Frankie, 16. Gonzales didn’t know what to expect when she met Frankie for the first time. “I was really nervous. I was so scared,” she says.

After getting to know each other, they formed a close friendship.

“I confide in her a lot,” Frankie says. “I love my mentor.”

Besides writing back and forth in a journal, the two make plans for Frankie to earn her GED and work on things like writing a resume.“We work on my future,” Frankie says.

It’s a future that she sees free of drugs, a habit that she picked up when she was 10. Nor does she see gangs in her life anymore since most of her former friends are either locked up, dead or on the streets.

“I don’t want to be like that no more,” Frankie says.

Gonzales calls upon her own experience as a teen when she works with Frankie.

“I know what it’s like to be a teenager,” Gonzales says. “Whenever she needs help, I’m here to help her.”

And she predicts that their relationship will last past the required year-long commitment.

“I think she’ll be doing really good in five years,” Gonzales says. “This experience has changed me a lot.”

Learning how much one person can do as a mentor has been an added benefit of the program. “Students have told us that the experience has made them grow both personally and professionally,” Barclay Penkoff says. “Several of the mentors have secured employment with youth-serving agencies.”

Aaron Brown, the former lead anchor for CNN, has been appointed the inaugural Walter Cronkite Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University.

Brown will join the full-time faculty of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in January. He will hold the faculty rank of professor of practice.

ASU President Michael Crow says Brown is the ideal person to be the school’s first Walter Cronkite Professor of Journalism.

“Aaron Brown is a master of the kind of high-quality, thoughtful, in-depth, objective journalism that was the hallmark of the great Walter Cronkite for so many years,” Crow says. “We are confident Aaron will be a leading national voice on the future of journalism and play a significant role in helping us reach our goal of making the Cronkite School the finest and most inclusive professional journalism program in the country.”

Cronkite, the longtime CBS News anchor, was active in recruiting Brown to the school that bears his name.

“I have long been an admirer of Aaron Brown both on ABC and later on CNN,” Cronkite said from his vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard. “He’s a terrific journalist with high ideals and great integrity. His passion for our profession and his commitment to its highest standards of objectivity and fairness has been the hallmark of his work – and will be a source of great inspiration for our students. I could not be more proud that he is joining our journalism school.”

Brown was at ASU in the spring semester as the John J. Rhodes Chair in Public Policy and American Institutions, a one-semester visiting lecturer position at the Barrett Honors College.

Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan saysBrown “was nothing shortly of spectacular” in the seminar he taught with Assistant Professor B. William Silcock, “Turning Points in Television News History.” Brown is a “natural teacher” who will “inspire Cronkite students for years to come,” Callahan said.

Brown, 58, served as news anchor of CNN’s flagship show, “NewsNight,” from 2001 to 2005, covering stories from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to the 2004 presidential elections and the Iraq War. Brown won the coveted Edward R. Murrow Award for his Sept. 11 coverage, broadcasting from a rooftop in lower Manhattan.

Before joining CNN, Brown was a founding anchor for ABC’s “World News Now,” the network’s overnight newscast, and later was the anchor of “World News Tonight Saturday” as well as a correspondent for “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.”

In addition to the Murrow Award, Brown also won three Emmys, a DuPont, two New York Film Society World medals and a George Foster Peabody Award during his illustrious career.

I can’t wait to begin,” Brown said. “This is a great and wonderful chance to work with smart and capable professors, engaged, ambitious and talented students and a university administration that is committed to the journalism program and all its potential.”

Brown is the 12th new professor to join the Cronkite School in the past two years. Others include former Minneapolis Star Tribune Editor Tim McGuire, BET Vice President Retha Hill and former Akron Beacon Journal Publisher Jim Crutchfield.

The Cronkite School, a nationally recognized professional journalism program with more than 1,600 students, is home to the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, the New Media Innovation Lab, the Frank Russell Chair in the Business of Journalism and the Knight Chair in Journalism. Cronkite students this year took first place nationally in both the Hearst Awards and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence awards.

The school, located on ASU’s Tempe campus, will move into a new six-story 223,000- square-feet journalism education complex in downtown Phoenix in August 2008.

ASU President Michael Crow, in a column in Newsweek, is arguing that American universities need more than innovation for the country to keep a competitive edge.

Crow, writing in a column published in international editions and online, says the American university "has proved capable of almost anything, from developing advanced economic theories to creating new life forms." But, other countries are beginning to follow the same model - and making great strides.

"From the European Union to China, India to Mexico, many national leaders understand that the university is the critical catalyst for America's adaptability, economic robustness and emergence as a great power," writes Crow. "That is bad news for the United States. The past two decades of American university development have been characterized largely by self-satisfaction arising from steady progress by the top 20 or so research universities."

Crow writes "that the success of the higher-education system must be measured by more than just innovations. Its long-term performance depends on its ability to provide learning to a broad cross sections of citizens, to advance national proficiency in math and science and to create an adaptable work force, as well as to develop a national appreciation for discovery, entrepreneurship and the creative process."

For the complete article, visit, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20226758/site/newsweek/.

At the end of each semester, students flock to the ASU Bookstore to sell their used textbooks back for a little cash back. Some of them are out-of-print editions, however, and the bookstore cannot buy them back.

“We offer to recycle them, and the students usually leave them,” says Val Ross, the bookstore’s director.

What happens to these unusable, unwanted books?

Some end up in Kosovo, which makes Ross very happy. Otherwise, many of the books would end up in the trash, useful to no one.

“The books that go to Kosovo are old-edition books,” Ross says. “They are good books, but they are not being used anymore. We try to market them, and we sell some to dealers for $15 per box.”

The books’ journey to Areopag, an academic resource center geared toward students at the University of Pristina, began with a contact made through a church.

John Askew, a retired doctor who belongs to Bethany Community Church in Tempe, works with a group called Paraclete, which offers leadership support for business, civic and education institutions and has an outreach in Kosovo.

Askew became involved with Kosovo when he started a birthing center to help lower the country’s high infant mortality rate. After the birthing center, sponsored by the U.S. and Kosovo governments, was up and running, Askew founded Aeropag.

The Rev. John Wood, outreach pastor at Bethany Community Church, heard about Paraclete’s work in Kosovo and the need for books, he and Askew contacted Ross.

Wood, Ross and Jim Selby, the assistant director of the ASU Bookstore, met last December to talk about how to get books to Kosovo and what kind they would need, and the first 360 or so books were on their way in February. More books – about 190 – went in April, and the ASU

Bookstore has set aside another 700 books for Wood to look through.

The books are shipped to Kosovo through a church-related organization in Indiana on a space-available basis. The students in Kosovo are delighted with the books, which include English literature, medicine, science, history, English language and business texts.

Even though the books are out of print, they are still current in their fields and a boon to Areopag, – which, Ross says, “is designed to assist university students in their studies by providing them with resources, books, study space and Internet access for a cost they can afford.”

Adds Artan Geca, manager of the Areopag Center: “Without these resources and the textbooks from the ASU Bookstore, students at the University of Pristina would lack the resources necessary to carry on their academic work.

The books also help cement an existing relationship. Many administrators at the University of Pristina – and even the president of Kosovo, Fatmir Sejdiu – have ties to ASU, having taken classes here.

The ASU Bookstore takes in about 10,000 outdated textbooks each year, so there are plenty of books to be recycled, Ross says.

"Buzz," Eight/KAET-TV's pilot for an innovative arts program, has won the prestigious CINE Golden Eagle Award. CINE is a national competition that celebrates excellence in film, video and media arts.

The Golden Eagle awards are recognized internationally as symbols of the highest production standards in filmmaking and videography. Since its founding in 1957, CINE has been dedicated to discovering, rewarding, educating, and supporting established and emerging talent in film and video. Among great talents whose first major awards included the CINE Golden Eagle are Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard, and such great documentarians as Ken Burns, Charles Guggenheim, Stanley Nelson, Albert Maysles and Frederick Wiseman.

"Buzz," an Eight production, premiered Nov. 9, and featured three local artists: fashion and costume designer Galina Mihaleva, who creates for dancers, models and nanotechnologists; violist Mark Dix, who brings chamber music to new audiences in downtown art galleries; and architect and urban designer Wellington Reiter, whose drawings envision a Sky Harbor where planes, condos and swimming pools might one day co-exist.

"The half-hour program is a pilot for a series showcasing Arizona’s arts scene,” stated Beth Vershure Eight Station Manager and Executive Producer for "Buzz." “Phoenix’s vibrant and emerging arts community is the focus of this initiative comprising television, an interactive Web site and teacher materials that meet Arizona arts standards with uniquely Arizona content.”

Arizona State University’s athletic ticket office has announced that football single-game tickets will go on sale Thursday, August 16 at 9 a.m. Tickets can be purchased online at www.thesundevils.com, at the ticket office located at the south end of Sun Devil Stadium or by phone at 480-727-0000.
 
Single-game sideline tickets are $35 for the San Jose State (Sept. 1) and San Diego State (Sept. 15) games and $40 for the Colorado (Sept. 8), Oregon State (Sept. 22), Washington (Oct. 13) and California (Oct. 27) games. Sideline tickets for the USC (Nov. 22) and Arizona (Dec. 1) games are $50 each. In addition, fans will also have the opportunity to purchase tickets for each of ASU’s four road contests – at Stanford (Sept. 29), at Washington State (Oct. 6), at Oregon (Nov. 3) and at UCLA (Nov. 10).
 
ASU has recently introduced a “print-at-home” program that will provide greater convenience to fans that order their tickets online and over the phone. Tickets printed at home will have a bar code that will be scanned upon entering Sun Devil Stadium. Those who order on-line will not have to wait on hold and will be able to pick their section just as they would over the phone. A fee of $1 per ticket order will be placed on print-at-home services. Fees will also be applied to tickets that are mailed or left at will call.
 
The athletic ticket office hours are from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. on Saturdays.

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