Publications

Measure, Manage and Communicate your social and environmental impact. A presentation by Sara Olsen of SVT Group

Broadband infrastructure is an essential and basic component of today’s global economy. Yet, with only 61% of U.S. households currently connected to a high-speed network, significant parts of the population – especially low-income, minority, immigrant, non-English speaking, rural, senior and disabled communities – cannot fully participate in this digital revolution due to lack of service by private telecom providers, lack of economic resources to pay for access and equipment, and/or lack of education about the relevance of technology in their lives.

Community WiFi is an emerging concept and best practices for deployment and related programming are still being developed. Read the report to learn how sharing key lessons will add to the collective knowledge base and help increase the probability of success of future deployments.

ZeroDivide has evolved through several stages in its short life span.  At the heart of its shift toward community enterprise is the underlying belief that underserved communities can generate their own capital—new or enhanced businesses, jobs and enterprises—to improve social and economic conditions.

Conducted by Blueprint Research and Design Inc., the paper provides an up-close look at what it takes to change how you do business  and illustrates some of the larger trends currently shaping philanthropy. These trends include efforts to build sustainable enterprises, the push for greater accountability, the development of quantifiable measures of social impact, calls for increased transparency, and a move toward closer working relationships between donors and nonprofits.

Investments in technology-based community non-profit enterprises can yield substantial combined financial and social returns. In the continuing quest to measure and document our philanthropic impact, we at ZeroDivide struggle with the same evaluation issues as many of our peers. High on this list is study design and reliable data collection. We offer this case study of the YMCA Long Beach Youth Institute, one of our community enterprise investments, as a contribution to the ongoing discussion over evaluating social returns on investment.

As part of the study funded by ZeroDivide, Social Impact of Voice over Internet Protocol on Latinos, researchers examined Latino awareness and perceptions of VoIP and Internet-based phone services; Latino attitudes about and use of landline phones, cell phones, computers and the Internet; and how much Latino VoIP users pay for communication services compared to those Latinos who do not rely on VoIP options.

CSULA's new policy reports on "Assessing the Geography of the Digital Divide in California" ZeroDivide funded a research grant to build upon prior research on technology isolation in Los Angeles by examining technology isolation at the census tract level for the entire state of California and contextualizing this information within a socio-demographic context. By looking at the entire state, this research looks at variations in the technology index within the context of urban-rural, county-to-county, and metro-to-metro variations. The research will lead to the creation of a California Atlas of technology indicators and an area-based hierarchy/priority list for policy interventions to ameliorate the digital divide in California.

Read the report: http://www.scribd.com/doc/11233703/In-Search-of-Digital-Equity

Funded by ZeroDivide and CETF, the purpose of this series is to inform policymakers, encourage discussion, and raise public awareness about information technology issues. The current survey focuses on trends in information technology access and use, and on public perceptions and attitudes about current policy issues. We use survey data to examine California trends over time, differences between California and the U.S. as a whole, and to increase our understanding of the “digital divide” in California.

By Eugene Chan, Phillippe Wallace and Georgette Wong

What connects a company's philanthropy to its business practice? What motivates and shapes a corporate giving program? What are the current challenges of and future opportunities for corporate philanthropy?

Through a generous grant from the Ford Foundation, this report explores the link between the value a company creates through its business and the values it represents through its philanthropy.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger commissioned the California Broadband Task Force (CBTF) to “remove barriers to broadband access, identify opportunities for increased broadband adoption, and enable the creation and deployment of new advanced communication technologies.” The governor also requested that the CBTF “pay particular attention to how broadband can be used to substantially benefit educational institutions, healthcare institutions, community-based organizations, and governmental institutions.”

The Task Force’s final report, “The State of Connectivity – Building Innovation Through Broadband.” This report represents the culmination of more than a year of work by the Task Force, and includes maps of current broadband availability and speed, recommendations to increase broadband access and use, and a timeframe in which to meet these critical goals. The report is available online at http://www.calink.ca.gov/taskforcereport.

By Manuel Pastor Jr. and Justin Scoggins

http://cjtc.ucsc.edu/docs/r_golden_state.pdf

In response to rising in low-wage employment and increasing debate over the issue of "working poverty", this report closely examines the impact that a variety of ways of defining working poverty have on our perception of the size and composition of the working poor in California. By taking advantage of the unusually detailed information that is available in the 1990 and 2000 Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS), the demographic, geographic, and labor market dimensions of working poverty are compared and contrasted across 18 different definitions, while at the same time providing estimates of the extent, nature, and trajectory of the problem.

The result is an uncovering of biases that exist under some of the definitions that have been used to measure working poverty and a recommended "best" definition for the state that is both politically feasible and computationally practical, along with a detailing the characterization of working poverty in California and its regions in 2000 and the rise in working poverty that took place over the 1990s.