Marge Reitsma-Street

The Conceptual-Level Matching Model in Corrections

The Conceptual-Level Matching Model (CLMM) is reviewed with a focus to its application in the development of treatment/rehabilitation programs with offender groups. The CLMM is a theoretical model describing outcomes from hypothesized interactions between a person variable, conceptual level, in interaction with differing types of environments described in terms of structure. Reliability and validity of both CL and the matching model are presented with emphasis given to a review of studies involved with CL and offender groups. On both theoretical and empirical grounds, the CLMM holds considerable promise as a means of organizing offender programs to elicit optimum effectiveness from existing resources.

Promoting engagement: An organizational study of volunteers in community resource centres for children

Abstract The article examines how people living in poor communities speak of their volunteer experiences in multicultural community resource centres for children, and how they understand the organizational conditions that promote or discourage meaningful volunteer work. Their volunteering experiences in community resource centres geared to the development of children and neighbourhoods are explored in focus groups. Calculations of volunteer hours over three years complemented the qualitative data along with participant observation and documents. Respondents value three dimensions of volunteering: engaging in relationships; accomplishing tasks; and experiencing the power to make decisions. Volunteering is fostered when organizations contribute financial resources to pay core staff and cover some costs of volunteering; ensure core staff build and maintain a respectful atmosphere in which meaningful participation is supported; and create substantial opportunities for community governance. The discussion speaks to several options that can be considered when the organizational supports for the experiences that volunteers value are threatened by economic restructuring and public cut-backs in services.

Connecting Policies, Girls, and Violence

Hungry and alone, Kimberly Rogers died in August 2000. She was serving a six month sentence of house arrest in Sudbury, Ontario for the crime of collecting student loans while on welfare (MacKinnon & Lacey, 2001). Although Kimberly had been the first person to appeal successfully the automatic suspension of welfare upon conviction for welfare fraud, she could not support her unborn baby and herself on the meager benefits. Had she gone to college several years ago she would not have been convicted for completing college successfully while collecting both student loans and welfare. It had been legal to do so before. But in 1997 new welfare laws and policies made this option illegal.

Beyond Caring Labour to Provisioning Work

Beyond Caring Labour to Provisioning Work is based on a four-year, multi-site study of women who are members of contemporary community organizations. the authors reveal the complex ways in which these women define and value their own work, investigating what supports and constrains their individual and collective efforts. Calling on the state to assist more with citizens’ provisioning responsibilities, Beyond Caring Labour to Provisioning Work provides an excellent basis for new discussions on equitable and sustainable public policies.

Women's provisioning work: counting the cost for women living on low income

This paper reports on a research project that uses the concept of provisioning as a starting place in understanding the activities women in marginalized communities undertake to provide for themselves and members of their households and neighborhoods. This project explores the household and collective provisioning undertaken by women who are all part of formal community organizations in Canada. The work women do is explored from the dimension of womens relationships of responsibility. This vantage point uncovers a complex web of activity including paid employment, voluntary work, care work, exchanges of goods and services, community work, and self-provisioning. In addition, the provisioning strategies that women use when public resources are scarce are explored. In the face of significant cutbacks in public provision of goods and services, women are engaging in a complex network of activities in order to compensate through private provisioning for resources that are no longer available through public provisioning. The policy context in which these strategies are pursued is explored as well as the way in which risky policies produce risky coping strategies.

Women's community work challenges market citizenship

This article examines the connection between womens community provisioning work and their participation in citizenship activities that seek to alter an inequitable distribution of rights and resources. As neo-liberal policy regimes restructure the collective work of women, we explore whether womens community work has become a substitute for public resources or whether it serves as a fundamental challenge to an individualization of citizenship by reconnecting citizenship and social rights. We draw on interview and focus group data from a multi-year year investigation of what supports and what limits the provisioning work women perform in six community organizations in Canada serving vulnerable populations and neighborhoods. Three connections between citizenship activities and community provisioning are discussed: how women challenge notions of the worthy citizen; how they bring privatized need back into the public arena; and how they move from solidarity to advocacy.