Energy is becoming a prominent driver of economic development. Each year, billions of dollars are invested around the world by the public and private sectors in low-emissions energy development and energy efficiency planning. Energy-based economic development (EBED) is a domain that seizes the opportunities inherent in clean energy development to drive innovation and generate economic growth. Energy-based economic development: How clean energy can drive development and stimulate economic growth delivers working definitions, common approaches, descriptions of supportive policy mechanisms, and suggested metrics for evaluation. The book offers a unified framework for EBED that is supported by examples and leaves readers better equipped to design, plan, and implement EBED initiatives. Case studies illustrate how national and subnational initiatives adopt to a locale's energy asset base, energy and economic development needs, and the context in which the initiative operates. Descriptions of the energy projects supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act offer insights about what worked and what did not and suggest ways in which governments can be better prepared to manage EBED projects in the future. This book provides the tools necessary to work toward simultaneous energy and economic development goals and facilitates discussion for an advanced policy agenda of energy efficiency, energy diversification, innovation-led economic growth, and job creation.

Energy is becoming a prominent driver of economic development. Each year, billions of dollars are invested around the world by the public and private sectors in low-emissions energy development and energy efficiency planning. Energy-based economic development (EBED) is a domain that seizes the opportunities inherent in clean energy development to drive innovation and generate economic growth.   Energy-based economic development: How clean energy can drive development and stimulate economic growth delivers working definitions, common approaches, descriptions of supportive policy mechanisms, and suggested metrics for evaluation. The book offers a unified framework for EBED that is supported by examples and leaves readers better equipped to design, plan, and implement EBED initiatives. Case studies illustrate how national and subnational initiatives adopt to a locale’s energy asset base, energy and economic development needs, and the context in which the initiative operates. Descriptions of the energy projects supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act offer insights about what worked and what did not and suggest ways in which governments can be better prepared to manage EBED projects in the future.   This book provides the tools necessary to work toward simultaneous energy and economic development goals and facilitates discussion for an advanced policy agenda of energy efficiency, energy diversification, innovation-led economic growth, and job creation.

Narrative in Social Work Practice features first-person accounts by social workers who have successfully integrated narrative theory and approaches into their practice. Contributors describe innovative and effective interventions with a wide range of individuals, families, and groups facing a variety of life challenges. One author describes a family in crisis when a promising teenage girl suddenly takes to her bed for several years; another brings narrative practice to a Bronx trauma center; and another finds that poetry writing can enrich the lives of people living with dementia. In some chapters, the authors turn narrative techniques inward and use them as vehicles of self-discovery. Settings range from hospitals and clinics to a graduate school and a case management agency. Throughout, Narrative in Social Work Practice showcases the flexibility and appeal of narrative methods and demonstrates how they can be empowering and fulfilling for clients and social workers alike. The differential use of narrative techniques fulfills the mission and core competencies of the social work profession in creative and surprising ways. Stories of clients and workers are, indeed, powerful.

From growing their children, parents grow themselves, learning the lessons their children teach. "Growing up", then, is as much a developmental process of parenthood as it is of childhood. While countless books have been written about the challenges of parenting, nearly all of them position the parent as instructor and support-giver, the child as learner and in need of direction. But the parent-child relationship is more complicated and reciprocal; over time it transforms in remarkable, surprising ways. As our children grow up, and we grow older, what used to be a one-way flow of instruction and support, from parent to child, becomes instead an exchange. We begin to learn from them. The lessons parents learn from their offspring voluntarily and involuntarily, with intention and serendipity, often through resistance and struggle are embedded in their evolving relationships and shaped by the rapidly transforming world around them. With Growing Each Other Up, Macarthur Prize winning sociologist and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers an intimately detailed, emotionally powerful account of that experience. Building her book on a series of in-depth interviews with parents around the country, she offers a counterpoint to the usual parental development literature that mostly concerns the adjustment of parents to their babies' rhythms and the ways parents weather the storms of their teenage progeny. The focus here is on the lessons emerging adult children, ages 15 to 35, teach their parents. How are our perspectives as parents shaped by our children? What lessons do we take from them and incorporate into our worldviews? Just how much do we learn often despite our own emotionally fraught resistance from what they have seen of life that we, perhaps, never experienced? From these parent portraits emerges the shape of an education composed by young adult children an education built on witness, growing, intimacy, and acceptance. Growing Each Other Up is rich in the voices of actual parents telling their own stories of raising children and their children raising them; watching that fundamental connection shift over time. Parents and children of all ages will recognize themselves in these evocative and moving accounts and look at their own growing up in a revelatory new light.

The wisdom of saying goodbye
In this wise and provocative book, the renowned sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot trains her lens on the myriad exits we make in our lives: exits big and small, extraordinary and ordinary, quick and protracted, painful and liberating.
Exits are ubiquitous. Part of the historical narrative of our country, they mark the physical landscapes we inhabit; they're braided into the arc of our individual development, laced into our intergenerational relationships, shaped by economic crisis, global mobility, and technological innovations. But we tend to ignore them, often seeing them as signs of failure.
For two years Lawrence-Lightfoot traveled around the country listening to people tell their stories of leaving, witnessing rituals of goodbye, and producing the penetrating portraits that have become her signature. A gay man who finds home and wholeness after coming out of the closet; a sixteen-year-old-boy forced to leave Iran in the midst of a violent civil war; a Catholic priest who leaves the church; an anthropologist who carefully stages her departure from the field after years of research; and many more. Lawrence-Lightfoot shares their stories with sympathy and insight, finding the universal patterns that reframe our exit narratives.
"Exit" finds wisdom in the possibility of moving on. It marks the start of a new conversation: a chance to discover how to make our exits with dignity and grace.

What makes a good school? A prominent Harvard educator looks for the answers in six schools that have earned reputations for excellence: George Washington Carver High School in Atlanta; John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx, New York; Highland Park High School near Chicago; Bookline High School in Brookline, Massachusetts; St. Paul's in Concord, New Hampshire; and the Milton Academy, near Boston.

"We must develop a compelling vision of later life: one that does not assume a trajectory of decline after fifty, but one that recognizes it as a time of change, grown, and new learning; a time when 'our courage gives us hope.'" --from "The Third Chapter" At a key moment in the twenty-first century, demographers are recognizing the significance of a distinct developmental phase: those years following early adulthood and middle age when we are "neither young nor old." Whether by choice or not, many in their "third chapters" are finding ways to adapt, explore, and channel their energies, skills, and passions in new ways and into new areas. It's this process of creative reinvention that the renowned sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot details in "The Third Chapter," which redefines our views about the casualties and opportunities of aging. She challenges the still-prevailing and anachronistic images of aging by documenting and revealing how the years between fifty and seventy-five may, in fact, be the most transformative and generative time in our lives, tracing the ways in which wisdom, experience, and new learning inspire individual growth and cultural transformation. "The Third Chapter "is not a how-to guide but a fascinating work of sociology, full of passionate and poignant stories of risk and vulnerability, failure and resilience, challenge and mastery, experimentation and improvisation, and insight and new learning. These stories reveal a whole world of learning and discovery awaiting those who want it. In "The Third Chapter," Lawrence-Lightfoot captures a new moment in history and offers us a book rich with insight and hope about our endless capacity for change and growth.

In these many-layered and masterfully written portraits, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot reaches deep into human experience--from the drama of birth to the solemn vigil before death--to find the essence of respect. In her moving vision, relayed through powerfully told stories, respect is not the passive deference offered a superior but an active force that creates symmetry even in unequal relationships.The reader becomes an eyewitness to the remarkable empowering nature of respect, both given and received--be it between doctor and patient, teacher and student, photographer and subject, and midwife and laboring mother. They will feel it in the reverent attention paid by a minister to the last moments of life, and in the Harvard Law School professor's lively curiosity about his student's extracurricular lives.Through the power of her narrative, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot ultimately makes the reader an intimate partner in her observations of respect linking these varied and intense relationships. A book to be savored and shared, "Respect" has the power to transform lives.