Welcome to Day 27 of Summer Academy!

1. Welcome to Day 27 of Summer Academy!

2. One in every four women is a victim of domestic physical violence at some point in her life, and the justice department estimates that three women and one man are killed by their partners everyday. Traditional approaches to addressing domestic violence, including relocating victims to shelters and issuing restraining orders, are reactionary rather than preventative and have not dramatically decreased violent incidents. When it comes to domestic homicide, these interventions are often come too late; while survivors of domestic violence can seek out these solutions, murder victims cannot. New high-risk programs, like the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center, are a better approach because they focus on preventing domestic homicide by predicting when it will happen and limiting the access that potential perpetrators have to potential victims.

3. Julissa wrapped her velvet cape around herself as she enthusiastically recited the lines of one of three witches in MacBeth. My students were rehearsing for our class play, and nearly everything they wore, including swords, tiaras and Julissa’s cape had come from kindly donors courtesy of DonorsChoose.com. At the time, I was grateful for the donations, as were my students. However, I have since realized that this very popular nonprofit organization is not the most effective way to address the funding inequities between different schools. In fact, donations from private organizations and individuals may even do more harm than good, as they mask the real problem of unequal funding and allow us to ignore this pressing issue.

4. Rough Plan Review Are you planning to: • Explain the significance/extent of the social issue • Describe the intervention for change • Support why you think the intervention is as effective as you claim* • Acknowledge what other people say about it • Address the skeptic* • Justify why it’s important to think (write!) about the effectiveness of this intervention (the so what?)*

5. How do you prove how effective an intervention is or has been? • Data (preferably comparative, preferably from multiple sources) • Anecdotal evidence • Historical evidence from a different, related situation • Expert testimony about general best practices of interventions (Bornstein, Gawande) • Expert testimony about your specific intervention, preferably someone independent

6. Let’s Hear From the Skeptic: • Just because an intervention is popular or reaches a lot of people doesn’t mean it necessarily addresses the social issue effectively. • Who is most affected by this intervention? Should that group be the target audience? • Is awareness necessary or helpful in the case of your social issue? • Just because an intervention happened and then the social issue improved doesn’t mean the intervention led to the social issue improving. • If your intervention is so great why is the social issue still a problem? • Your social issue is such a big problem and your intervention, while perhaps effective, is only addressing it for a small percentage of the people affected. The skeptic in this paper is someone who places your intervention on a different point on the line from effective to ineffective. They either think the intervention is better than you do or worse than you do.