Pages 333-341 of Cabinet of the Muses: essays on classical and comparative literature in honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, edited by Mark Griffith and Donald J. Mastronarde (Atlanta 1990).

In August 1996, Congress passed sweeping reforms to the nation's welfare system, requiring most recipients to work and placing a 5-year limit on benefits. The California Communities Program at UC Davis has been studying the progress of welfare reform in six California counties, and comparing the state's experience to national trends. Through more than 200 interviews and an extensive literature review, we have found that welfare reform is succeeding in reducing caseloads and reinventing local social-service bureaucracies. But these changes must be joined with long-term job creation and work-force development strategies if they are to truly reduce poverty. California's welfare reform policies and experiences highlight the particular challenges facing rural counties, which generally have fewer staff resources, a less-developed infrastructure of nonprofit service organizations, and lower expectations about their ability to implement major reforms.

California’s Proposition 10, a tax on tobacco products passed in 1998, provides counties with funds to improve the health, education and school readiness of children up to age 5. A foundation-sponsored Civic Engagement Project (CEP) seeks to promote inclusive participation in Proposition 10 decisions by engaging a broad spectrum of parents and other community members. Based on our systematic evaluation of the CEP’s initial years of work, we describe six different civic engagement tools adopted by counties, strengths and weaknesses of each, and what we learned about the conditions under which they are most effective. The results illuminate a key public challenge — how to welcome culturally and linguistically diverse Californians as active and valued participants in local civic processes while obtaining meaningful guidance for decision-making.

Based on research-to-policy narratives provided by UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE) academics, we argue that current, effective Cooperative Extension (Extension) practices support a broader, more convincing account of Extension's public value than its leaders often articulate. This proposed account incorporates the familiar Extension narrative in which technical expertise and objectivity are emphasized. It also incorporates the insight, derived from our data, that Extension can achieve its greatest relevance in policy circles when it weaves together its ability to provide trustworthy technical knowledge with its capacity to influence policy dialogue, debate and practice across multiple settings and over the long term. In a policy world often marked by short-term thinking and polarization, Extension's ability to foster deliberative, context-sensitive and future-oriented policymaking is a critical contribution to society. Interview data reveals three approaches to effective policy-oriented relationship building: community-government partnership building; stakeholder-oriented experimental research; and community empowerment. Understanding these approaches can help reframe the story that we in the Extension system tell ourselves and the public about the public value we create.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented spikes in food insecurity. In California, food banks, which were already facing high demand for emergency food assistance, rallied federal, state and local resources to help meet the challenges of the pandemic. Our study draws on interviews with food banks and their partners approximately one year into the pandemic to learn how they responded to enormous challenges in staffing, procurement, distribution and infrastructure. These interviews captured lessons for resilience planning and food security policy that might otherwise have been lost. We found an encouraging story of resilience, and a story of how government agencies and community networks can work together to create and strengthen food security policies, even under the most dire circumstances.