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Persons living with dementia (PLWD) constitute a global epidemic of more than 50 million people around the world, and tens of millions more serve as their caregivers. Public libraries must learn to assist, support, and sustain those with dementia in their communities. The good news is that some of the most powerful non-pharmacological interventions for PLWD – healthy lifestyle choices, lifelong learning for mental stimulation, and the stimulation and support of social networks – all are embedded in public libraries’ core mission. Thus, library services for the underserved population of PLWD and their caregivers can make a huge collective impact toward sustainable communities, social justice, and strong institutions.

Libraries can provide this help through dementia-friendly customer service and through programming that both supports individuals and develops and strengthens social relationships. Libraries can further promote good health and well-being, both through information resources and with targeted older adult programming. We can simultaneously contribute to social justice, mitigating the stigma and the deleterious effects of dementia which can be worse within minority communities. The positive impact of library dementia services can even be magnified through collective impact when different institutions within a community work together toward dementia-friendly standards.

This reflective chapter details the operation of library services for PLWD and their caregivers, providing concrete examples of dementia-friendly customer service, collection development, information and reference services, and a wide variety of older adult programming. Together, these library dementia services can create a powerful and positive impact through lifelong learning, mental stimulation, and social connections.

Food Loss and Waste (FLW), a result of non-sustainable consumption and production, has significant socio-environmental impacts and is addressed in the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.3. To address current research on FLW and SDG 12.3, the authors aim to evidence the current state of knowledge on drivers and barriers to SDG 12.3 through a comprehensive literature review.

The authors employed a multi-step systematic literature review process and retrieved 171 studies addressing SDGs, with 83 explicitly addressing SDG 12.3. The analysis involved a qualitative content analysis of studies retrieved by analyzing key findings and relationships between drivers and barriers to FLW.

While academic research focuses on SDG 12.3 by stressing the necessity of FLW reduction, it fails to explain the drivers and barriers to minimizing FLW. The authors developed a conceptual framework to demonstrate how barriers and drivers can inhibit or stimulate the dynamics that will achieve SDG 12.3 through effective planning and management.

This study addressed the theoretical limitations of existing studies and clarified the critical gaps in the current literature, thereby guiding future researchers in the food supply chain (FSC) context.

The research to date focused on high-income countries, and future empirical studies should focus on consumption patterns, the associated drivers and barriers of food waste in low-income countries and its social impact.

This article aims to investigate collaborative procurement as a sourcing strategy amongst competing small enterprises in an effort to reduce their material supply costs through increased efficiencies, bargaining power and economies of scale.

A case study approach is applied to a network of breweries that are regionally clustered. Interview data from producers, suppliers and industry experts is inductively interpreted to understand the viability, organisational impact and benefits/limitations of joint procurement activities.

The craft brewing industry follows a market place strategy of differentiation to achieve competitive advantage. This has supply chain implications that promote raw material diversity, which is in conflict with standardisation – a necessary factor for collective buying. Competition impacts information sharing and governance mechanism, while the structural factors of size asymmetry along and across the supply chain influence returns. These issues impact the potential economic benefits of collaborative procurement.

The research propositions have been developed in a specific industry but are generalisable to other companies with a differentiation strategy, especially in the consumer packaged goods sector.

Enabling conditions and constraints are captured in a framework and capability matrix, which can be used by practitioners to assess industry and product feasibility for collaborative procurement.

Previous studies of collaborative procurement have been in the public sector amongst large organisations. This work focusses on coopetition in the context of small businesses to identify the viability and cost-benefit of this strategy.

The Whole Child Initiative (WCI) was developed over the past 15 years as a blueprint to promote long-term development and success of all children, as well as their families and communities. This chapter describes three aspects of the WCI model: (a) the need for a public health approach to sustainable, communitywide change targeting the whole child; (b) a clear, future-oriented vision for equipping educators, caregivers, and service providers with the skills and attitudes required to deliver high-quality instruction; and (c) the infusion of social and emotional learning practices to transform environments in which youth live and play. We provide examples of how schools, communities, and families can come together to create a common culture fostering stable and nurturing relationships essential for enhancing youth well-being. We close with recommended “super strategies” – low-cost, simple, and effective practices that can be broadly implemented to keep every child healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged in the community at large.

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.

Food choices profoundly affect one's dietary, nutritional and health outcomes. Using alcoholic beverages as a case study, the authors assess the potential of genetic data in predicting consumers' food choices combined with conventional socio-demographic data.

A discrete choice experiment was conducted to elicit the underlying preferences of 484 participants from seven provinces in China. By linking three types of data (—data from the choice experiment, socio-demographic information and individual genotyping data) of the participants, the authors employed four machine learning-based classification (MLC) models to assess the performance of genetic information in predicting individuals' food choices.

The authors found that the XGBoost algorithm incorporating both genetic and socio-demographic data achieves the highest prediction accuracy (77.36%), significantly outperforming those using only socio-demographic data (permutation test p-value = 0.033). Polygenic scores of several behavioral traits (e.g. depression and height) and genetic variants associated with bitter taste perceptions (e.g. TAS2R5 rs2227264 and TAS2R38 rs713598) offer contributions comparable to that of standard socio-demographic factors (e.g. gender, age and income).

This study is among the first in the economic literature to empirically demonstrate genetic factors' important role in predicting consumer behavior. The findings contribute fresh insights to the realm of random utility theory and warrant further consumer behavior studies integrating genetic data to facilitate developments in precision nutrition and precision marketing.