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The Institute for the Future (IFTF) has collaborated with the Rockefeller Foundation and its Searchlight function to create a framework for broad engagement in strategic thinking about ways to catalyze change in the lives of poor or vulnerable communities. This paper seeks to focus on this broad‐based approach.

Starting from the top‐down horizon scan of the foundation's Searchlight partners – a network of horizon scanning organizations – IFTF created a public database of signals of innovation and disruption in the domain of poverty and social change. This signals database was used to build a visual map of catalysts for change, creating a simple hierarchy of four catalyst types, each containing four action zones and a pivotal challenge. This map provided the language and framework for engaging a global community in a serious game to extend the vision of the Searchlight function and capture novel ideas for innovations that could improve the lives of those in marginalized communities.

With an estimated global reach of 160,000 views and 1,600 game players from 79 countries, the game produced more than 18,000 ideas about catalysts for change.

This framework of foresight (the signals database) to insight (the visual map of catalysts for change) to action (global strategic game) demonstrates a way to integrate top‐down expert foresight with bottom‐up strategic ideation on a global scale.

The Rockefeller Foundation has developed the first‐of‐its‐kind trend monitoring effort in the philanthropic and broader social sector, conceptualizing and operationalizing an approach that surfaces cutting‐edge intelligence with a distinctly on‐the‐ground perspective from individuals and institutions living and working throughout the developing world, known as the Searchlight function. The Searchlight function consists of a network of forward‐looking, regionally focused horizon scanning and trend monitoring organizations that conduct regular, ongoing scanning for novel ideas, research results, and “clues” as to where the world is evolving. This article aims to focus on the Searchlight function and to introduce the Special Issue.

The article describes the goals and evolution of the Searchlight function, an important set of lessons learned, and an overview of the synthesis and visualization efforts that have been applied to the Searchlight outputs.

The insights demonstrate that multiple, complementary synthesis and visualization methods can be applied to pull together the findings from a diverse range of horizon scanning activities. These cover a broad spectrum of approaches, ranging from the qualitative to the quantitative, from automated to non‐automated, from local to global, and from top‐down to bottom‐up. They show how different audiences can be reached effectively, from engaging the interested lay public to producing materials for experts in the field.

The articles outlined help to advance methodological thinking and provide benchmarks for horizon scanning, trend synthesis, and visualization that the foresight field can learn from and adopt over time.

Organizations across a range of sectors face the common challenge of how to monitor the current context in which they operate. While governments and businesses have developed novel ways of generating, processing, and acting on timely information that has long‐term relevance and significance, the development and philanthropic sectors have generally been slow to adopt these foresight practices. The Searchlight function is beginning to fill this gap in the social sector.

The Searchlight function demonstrates how the practice of anticipating and tracking trends and envisioning different alternatives for how global issues might evolve can be harnessed to shape the future of human development and to improve the lives of poor and vulnerable populations. Creating such a global endeavor on this scale requires an iterative process linking together talented and committed individuals and institutions dedicated to a common goal.

The Searchlight function demonstrates one way that the philanthropic and broader social sector can take steps to think and act with the long‐term future more explicitly in mind by anticipating the most challenging problems and opportunities that might impact the lives of poor or vulnerable populations over the long‐term future. It shows how an organization can use trend monitoring and horizon scanning to better understand how the dynamic issues facing poor and vulnerable populations intertwine to create the complex realities of today and how they might fit together to illuminate the new realities of tomorrow.

Crowdfunding has become a significant way of funding independent film. However, undertaking a campaign can be time consuming and risky. The purpose of this paper is to understand the predictors likely to produce a film campaign that meets its funding goal.

This study analyses 100 creative crowdfunding campaigns within the film and video category on crowdfunding website Kickstarter. Campaigns were analysed in relation to a number of variables, followed by a discriminant analysis to highlight the main predictors of crowdfunding success.

This study finds key predictors of crowdfunding success and investigates differences between successful and failed crowdfunding campaigns. The attributes of these predictors lead us to question the long-term ability of crowdfunding to aid companies poorer in terms of time, financial and personnel resources, and therefore arguably in the greatest need of crowdfunding platforms.

The findings provide insight to practitioners considering the crowdfunding approach and offers knowledge and recommendations so as to avoid what can be naïve and costly mistakes. The findings highlight that crowdfunding should not be considered lightly and can be a considerable investment of resources to be successful.

The analysis of crowdfunding campaigns provides details on the significant predictors of crowdfunding success particularly relevant to creative campaigns. The findings provide a critique of previous claims about the benefit of crowdfunding for creative SMEs.

Purpose – The gradual release of responsibility (GRR) framework has long been used as a model to provide explicit and scaffolded literacy instruction (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983), but has seen far less application within the teaching of writing. As such, a framework for further incorporating the GRR model into comprehensive writing instruction is presented.

Design – This chapter describes a recursive writing process that includes four iterative and connected steps: we study, we write, we share, and we react and revise. From direct modeling needed to build efficacy (Bloomberg & Pitchford, 2017), prompting in the “we do it together phase” (Fisher & Frey, 2016), and peer collaboration offering students the opportunity to move from the solve it together to the self-regulated stage of learning, the GRR model of writing supports students as they move recursively between the phases of learning.

Findings – The recursive nature of the GRR model of writing offers scaffolded support calibrated to each student’s phase of learning. The gradual release model of recursive writing provides an opportunity for students and teachers to engage in a feedback cycle and permit teachers to pass the pen to students at an ideal time, often encompassing many opportunities to write, react, and revise with their peers serving as an authentic audience.

Practical implications – Writing proficiency is linked to relationship building and social networks (Swan & Shih, 2005) as well as academic and career success (Cormier, Bulut, McGrew, & Frison, 2016). The GRR model of writing offers a new model of a flexible, social, and recursive writing process needed in professional development and teacher education programs.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to consider the historical context of the gradual release model as it emerged following the early twentieth century emphasis on behaviorism as psychologists (and reading researchers) increasingly focused on cognition in the reading process. This “cognitive turn” in educational psychology was followed closely by a “social turn” with its focus on the socially constructed nature of texts, learning, and reading, particularly influenced by Vygotsky and work on scaffolding.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter uses literature from the field to contextualize the gradual release of responsibility (GRR) model and to discuss research or practice chapters included in this edited volume.

Findings – This chapter described the transition from behaviorism to cognition to social construction as it applies to the reading process generally and to GRR in particular. It noted that this transition has required teachers to be more nimble and flexible than ever before, cautioned that the complexity of classroom life and the pressures on teachers can cause techniques such as GRR to be misused, and suggested ways to manage the group work which is central to social cultural approaches to literacy. And along the way it spotlighted the ever-widening range of applications of the GRR documented in the earlier chapters of the book.

Practical implications – The section in this chapter with most immediate practical implication is clearly the section on misuses of the GRR model. This section discusses some misuses of the model: neglecting explicit teaching; missing the middle (i.e., jump from explicit teaching directly to independent practice); and applying in an overly rigid manner.

Originality/value of paper – This chapter makes an original contribution to the field in providing a historical context for the gradual release model and for addressing the chapters in this edited collection. The authors also point to some areas for next steps forward as reminders to those applying the model.

In recent years Lehman Brothers, one of the five largest investment banks in the United States, had grown increasingly reliant on its fixed income trading and underwriting division, which served as the primary engine for its strong profit growth. The bank had also significantly increased its leverage over the same timeframe, going from a debt-to-equity ratio of 23.7x in 2003 to 35.2x in 2007. As leverage increased, the ongoing erosion of the mortgage-backed industry began to impact Lehman significantly and its stock price plummeted. Unfortunately, public outcry over taxpayer assumption of $29 billion in potential Bear losses made repeating such a move politically untenable. The surreal scene of potential buyers traipsing into an investment bank's headquarters over the weekend to consider various merger or spin-out scenarios repeated itself once again. This time, the Fed refused to back the failing bank's liabilities, attempting instead to play last-minute suitors Bank of America, HSBC, Nomura Securities, and Barclay's off each other, jawboning them by arguing that failing to step up to save Lehman would cause devastating counterparty runs on their own capital positions. The Fed's desperate attempts to arrange its second rescue of a major U.S. investment bank in six months failed when it refused to backstop losses from Lehman's toxic mortgage holdings. Complicating matters was Lehman's reliance on short-term repo loans to finance its balance sheet. Unfortunately, such loans required constant renewal by counterparties, who had grown increasingly nervous that Lehman would lose the ability to make good on its trades. With this sentiment swirling around Wall Street, Lehman was forced to announce the largest Chapter 11 filing in U.S. history, listing assets of $639 billion and liabilities of $768 billion. The second domino had fallen. It would not be the last.

This case covers the period from the sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan to the conversion into bank holding companies by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, including the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America. The case explains the new global paradigm for the investment banking industry, including increased regulation, fewer competitors, lower leverage, reduced proprietary trading, and-potentially-reduced profits.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

NO ONE WOULD BE SURPRISED by the assertion that John Bunyan made a deep impression among the devout Welsh for a century or more after his unique career. The standard evidence for such a statement is of course the number of editions of the author, and for Bunyan a special compilation of all his works printed in Wales alone between 1677 and 1931 shows the impressive total of 188 titles (no fewer than 58 of Pilgrim's Progress) in various languages. For a land with only a little over a half million inhabitants and with only two cities with over five thousand population in 1800, this is a record hard to equal, demonstrating an extraordinary devotion to a single author. Yet beyond such eloquent numerical summary another particular witness emerges from an unsuspected quarter. In the 1767 Welsh translation of The Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded is dutifully included the ‘Names of the Subscribers’ underwriting the publication. This particular list is so unusual as to merit perpetuation in its entirety:

Purpose– The purpose of this chapter is to present an overview of the ways in which the Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) model has been enacted in the research and educational practices related to deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) children. While the term GRR is not used in the studies reviewed in this chapter, the interventions described in each study demonstrate core principles of GRR.

Methodology– The chapter provides a brief review of reading comprehension and writing intervention studies with DHH children, adolescents, and young adults. In searching for studies related to the GRR model, key words and phrases included ‘mediated/guided instruction.’

Findings– A critical review of the studies indicates an overall need for improved clarity of the ways in which educators decide when and how to release responsibility to students. In addition, the degree to which students are reported to internalize and independently apply newly learned literacy skills varies significantly. The variation prompts further examination of factors other than the instructional approach, such as intrinsic student characteristics, that might contribute to successful acquisition of skills.

Research limitations– The studies in this review represent educational practice across age/grade levels and educational settings and thus present evidence in support of the potential for implementation of a GRR model in the instructional practices of DHH students. However, because the number of studies is quite limited, we cannot generalize the findings to the diverse population of DHH students and the variety of educational settings within which DHH students are enrolled.

Practical implications– Releasing the responsibility of learning to DHH students, particularly students with a history of significant language delays and limitations, is a challenging task but certainly a possible outcome. Current educational practices are reported to all too often perpetuate a prolonged reliance of the student on the teacher. Educators are encouraged to reflect on different ways in which DHH students can be encouraged and supported in becoming more agentive in their own learning and development. A careful examination of interventions that have successfully supported students in adopting and applying effective learning strategies is needed to improve current practices.

Value– An initial search for literature related to the GRR model, that specifically addresses the needs of deaf students, produced few results. By making connections between existing reading and writing interventions and the GRR model, this chapter provides a means by which educators of deaf children can begin to frame evidence-based literacy interventions within the GRR model. Such a change may prompt deeper discussions of the need to move beyond explicit and guided instruction present in many interventions to instructional pedagogy that supports DHH students in moving toward independence.