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Most professional athletes are broke financially within a short few years after they stop playing. It is easy for outsiders to place the blame squarely on the athlete himself. This rush to judgment, however, is not entirely accurate. Black student-athletes who have the talent and ability to play professional sports are hyper-focused on getting to the next level, and the system around them is built to accommodate that focus. A lack of educational, financial, and legal structures creates a dynamic that sets the athlete up for failure. This chapter will focus on the legal and financial realities that Black males face when transitioning into and out of professional sports. In order to shift the current paradigm, this chapter will also provide solutions for both the athlete and the coaches, friends, family members, and agents who surround the athlete, in order to empower the athlete to positively impact himself, his family, and his community.

Rapidly evolving fintech and decentralized finance environments present an opportunity to reconsider how best to teach financial reporting, internal controls, auditing, taxation, and accounting information systems. Industrial firms have found considerable success in growing the customer value/cost ratio by applying “design thinking” (DT) to product and service innovation. DT may serve a similar, value-enhancing role in curriculum development and accounting pedagogy. The authors demonstrate the application of DT to the accounting curriculum using non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as an illustration. This chapter defines NFTs and DT, proposes a DT-based curriculum development model, and offers specific recommendations for teaching about NFTs in the classroom.

In this chapter the authors describe the development of an interdisciplinary graduate program focusing on sustainable urban development at Chicago’s DePaul University. Locating the curriculum both in the administrative institutional context and the historical geography of a racially and economically segregated urban area, the authors discuss the process of program formation and adjustment over its first five years of operation, 2013–2018. The chapter highlights some of the challenges encountered by program faculty, from internal curricular competition to external classification of the program under federal educational designation, and notes some of the interdisciplinary innovations, such as requiring courses in Geographic Information Systems to aid spatial data analysis and visualizations. In the second part of the chapter, to assess the impact of the graduate program on students, the authors review and draw from reflection essays written by students who, while completing their studies, pursued internships with nonprofit organizations in Chicago. The chapter concludes by discussing the employment status of recent alumni to suggest how these former students are pursuing jobs that may come to impact sustainability policy and practice. The authors maintain it is necessary to push the understanding of “sustainability” beyond solely environmental concerns to incorporate understandings of how economic development and community engagement must be included to deliver a sustainable city. The interdisciplinary curriculum described challenges students to become leaders in local efforts to make urban areas not only more environmentally sustainable, but also more economically and socially sustainable for all residents.

As we opened this chapter in relation with Loyla's life, we did so with a transcript excerpt from a research conversation in which Loyla spoke about a series of experiences shaping much unhappiness in her life; they were experiences also creating significant concern for Orie. On the day in May when Loyla, Orie, and Janice engaged in the conversation from which the transcript excerpt is taken, Orie and Loyla had, just hours prior, participated in an after-school meeting with Mrs. Gallagher. Orie explained to Janice that she had requested the meeting as a result of a series of situations unfolding over a number of months between Loyla, Cicily, and Ahlam. Recounting the events to Janice, Orie began with Loyla's shift in inviting Ahlam to her birthday party. Initially, Loyla suggested Ahlam as a friend she wanted to invite but then, the next morning, she told Orie she no longer wanted to invite Ahlam because Cicily had said that if Ahlam was invited, she would not attend (Journal entry, Orie, December 8, 2008).

Although a basic need, housing and its development activities impinge on the environment. As part of efforts to promote sustainability, there have been several initiatives since the Brundtland Commission's work in 1987 to minimise the adverse impact of housing development activities on the environment in the developing world such as sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This chapter explores housing development activities in Ghana within the context of environmental sustainability based on the extant literature. The aim is to examine the state and promotion of environmental sustainability in the housing development sector. The chapter establishes that although there are some efforts to promote environmental sustainability within the housing development sector, uptake of environmental sustainability practices has been less satisfactory due to lack of incentives as stakeholders perceive that environmentally sustainable homes are more expensive than conventional ones. The chapter, therefore, recommends further investigations into the cost and benefit of environmentally sustainable homes as well as other drivers in Ghana to give additional insights to provide the appropriate doses of incentives both contrived and instinctive to drive uptake.

Engaging in activism and sustaining the self at a research university with a diverse student body is no simple task. From marching at Edmund Pettus Bridge as part of engaging in the Bridge Jubilee to the New Mexico Latino Education Task Force, Rick has invested much in activism as a scholar, even as such activities go unrecognized and unrewarded in the academy. In this chapter, Rick discusses his long career standing up for families and children in New Mexico and the origins of that work. He presents the roots of his activism in his life as a white Jewish male in a progressive family that demanded thoughtfulness and action. Starting at 14 years old with involvement with the movement to protect Soviet Jewish refugees to gaining conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War, Rick soon found that education and activism are not often overlapping spheres, but in his work with young children and eventually teachers, students, and families, he found ways to make sure they did.