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In the context of increasing risk for aid workers, a growing body of scholarship is focused on risk management in contexts of humanitarian assistance and development work. Much less attention, however, has been given to how staff and volunteers experience such risks. This paper adopts a feminist geographical approach to explore how development workers make meaning of risk in specific contexts. Adopting a qualitative approach, it draws upon 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews with international (7) and local (7) staff of an international educational and sporting non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Afghanistan. After exploring differences between local and foreign staff perceptions of risk, it also offers a gendered analysis of risk for women development workers in Afghanistan. In so doing, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature in 'Aidland' studies by revealing the complex understandings of risk and fear by both foreign and local staff in the same geographical and organisational context. For NGOs seeking to make life-saving decisions based on the calculation of risk, this paper evidences the need to also create space for the voices of local and foreign staff whose experiences of risk will be highly relational, embodied, gendered and context specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing global attention to the importance of menstrual health and hygiene (MHH) for the lives of those who menstruate and gender equality. Yet, the global development community, which focuses on issues ranging from gender to climate change to health, is overdue to draw attention to how addressing MHH may enable progress in attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To address this gap, we undertook a collective exercise to hypothesize the linkages between MHH and the 17 SDGs, and to identify how MHH contributes to priority outcome measures within key sectoral areas of relevance to menstruating girls in low- and middle-income countries. These areas included Education, Gender, Health (Sexual and Reproductive Health; Psychosocial Wellbeing), and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH). These efforts were undertaken from February – March 2019 by global monitoring experts, together with select representatives from research institutions, non-governmental organizations, and governments (n = 26 measures task force members). Through this paper we highlight the findings of our activities. First, we outline the existing or potential linkages between MHH and all of the SDGs. Second, we report the identified priority outcomes related to MHH for key sectors to monitor. By identifying the potential contribution of MHH towards achieving the SDGs and highlighting the ways in which MHH can be monitored within these goals, we aim to advance recognition of the fundamental role of MHH in the development efforts of countries around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the challenges and benefits of managing non-profit organizations and social enterprise activities in an increasingly complex and difficult environment of austerity, reduced public sector funding, and higher competition for resources. It draws on the experience of women senior managers within the context of small/medium third sector organizations in Wales. Findings indicate diverse perspectives, but a consensus on the relevance of entrepreneurial behaviour to the third sector, and the importance of relationship-building and collaboration within gendered entrepreneurial practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I will explore how knowledge practices among the Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon are informed by the specificity of local gender constructions. I will argue that while men learn to be ‘proper’ persons primarily through the ingestion of substances which penetrate inside their bodies and change them from the interior, women learn to become ‘proper’ Runa through imitating and reproducing specific movements. This difference in learning regimes, I argue, is based upon a priori conceptualisation of men and women as distinct kinds of beings. I argue that the Runa conceptualise as gender difference the way in which exteriority and interiority are played out in male and female persons. Unlike other Amazonian cases, women are understood by the Runa as ‘naturally’ predisposed to exteriority. This has important repercussions in the way cultural change is thought to affect women and men, especially in contrast to other Amazonian people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has been structured in three areas. In the first one, the author shows the relevance that words and conversations among individuals have on social research, both terms being very important to the well-known sociologist and writer Franco Ferrarotti. In the second part, the author explains the necessary qualitative methodology to be used when analysing a main topic. In the third one, the author analyses the reality of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from the gender perspective to detect if they are or not a reflection of that Spanish reality regarding sex discrimination. Finally, this paper states the challenge the Spanish society needs to face to outweigh sex inequality without excluding the NGOs or any other form of association. This paper calls for the involvement of society, which along with the state and market, has an important task to accomplish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to bring to the attention of the AIDS research community the existence of an oral history project known as the Memories of AIDS Project. The project focused on HIV/AIDS support group members, non-governmental organisation (NGO) workers and home-based carers in the Umgungundlovu (Pietermaritzburg) District Municipality, South Africa. The project was carried out by the Sinomlando Centre for Oral History and Memory Work, a research and community development centre of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, over a period of three years (2011–2013). Sixty-five individual oral history interviews of 1 to 4 hours duration and 11 focus group sessions were recorded, transcribed and translated from isiZulu into English when necessary. The life stories of community workers and support group members documented in the interviews show, on the part of the informants, a remarkable degree of agency and assertiveness in matters of sexuality, gender relations and religious beliefs. They found innovative ways of navigating through the conflicting claims of biomedicine, Christianity and African traditional religion. As much as the epidemic caused grief and suffering, it opened the door to new knowledge and new opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically1 reviews three key research challenges that emerged as a result of developing gender-sensitive indicators for an NGO in South Africa. The first challenge faced was finding an appropriate balance between an 'expert-led' and an inclusive participatory research process. The second challenge was identifying a set of criteria, based on explicit research values, to guide indicator development. Third, we were confronted with the task of ensuring that the indicators developed could be implemented in the context of a resource-poor, service-driven NGO setting. A discussion of the challenges faced exposes the complex and sometimes murky process of developing indicators that are relevant, appropriate, and usable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volunteering is presented as part of the resource attraction function of nonprofit marketing, a type of helping behavior, and a form of symbolic consumption. From a sample of volunteers, findings show that male and non-working volunteers are more likely than female and working volunteers to spend more time on volunteering and to volunteer for more number of organizations. Females and working volunteers are significantly more empathetic than males and non-working volunteers. Male and female volunteers and working and non-working volunteers are also differentiated in terms of their values. Managerial implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employee control over work-time arrangements promotes work-family reconciliation and buffers against stress. But which human service context provides employees with the best opportunities to control their work schedules? Analysis of Australian survey data shows that after accounting for the low levels of work-time control in human service occupations like teaching and nursing, nonprofit organizations offer superior prospects for work-time control. However, whether this is true is strongly influenced by other occupational, employment and personal characteristics, such that for personal-care workers, work-time control is lowest in nonprofit organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The National Vigilance Association was the most prominent organization to take on the fight against sex trafficking in turn-of-the-century Britain. In 1899, it established and presided over the first global multidenominational anti-trafficking task force, the International Bureau for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic (later Traffic in Persons). This article focuses on the configuration of the National Vigilance Association's anti-trafficking work during the formative years of the Bureau, paying particular attention to the relationship between the Association and the state. It sheds new light on the nature and significance of both the Association's role in the Bureau and the Association's domestic anti-trafficking operations. It exposes the way in which, while making notable advancements in the fight against trafficking, the Association brought an assumption of British superiority to its international work, and operated on the basis of a misdiagnosis of ‘sexual exploitation’ informed by a gender- and class-biased xenophobia, such as to detract from its commitment to the suppression of trafficking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of diversity as an organizational value has become an integral part of many organizational policies, yet women and minorities continue to be underrepresented as managers. Scholars have drawn attention to the paradox in which managers recognize diversity as an organizational value and yet top level managerial ranks remain primarily homogenous. How senior managers negotiate the use of the discourse of diversity and the underrepresentation of women and minorities at managerial levels has received relatively little scholarly attention. The purpose of this study is to interrogate the use of the organizational value of diversity by examining how constructions of diversity and of women and ethnic and sexual minorities by senior managers working in nonprofit organizations inform discursive practices of diversity and homogeneity. We assume managers use implicit and explicit norms to differentiate among individuals and assign them to groups, and draw on various discourses to justify these categorizations and related exclusion. In this study, we explore how senior managers in nonprofit organizations construct diversity and homogeneity and create categorical groups such as women and minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Black male crisis thesis promulgated by the social science literature, public policy, and mainstream discourse, respectively. The authors contend that the stock-story that the majority of African American males are 'at-risk' for engaging in self-destructive behavior or on the verge of extinction perpetuates a discourse of Black male pathology, which leads to over-emphasis of behavior modification as a strategy for their collective improvement. Subsequently, de-emphasis on the historical and structural role of race as a life opportunity-shaping variable occurs, which renders an incomplete understanding of the social and educational status of Black males in the United States. As a result, public policies and social programs guided by this deficit discourse are unlikely to create meaningful change for this population, because society's existing political economic structures are left unchallenged. The article concludes with the assertion that a 'new narrative' is needed in order to rethink the complex and systematic ways the social and educational status of Black males in the United States are constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many human-service agencies and nonprofit organizations are experiencing increasing difficulties recruiting new volunteers. As a demographic group, young adults are very involved in volunteer activities and may reflect an excellent source of volunteers. The effect of gender on the motivations of young adults to volunteer, however, has received relatively little research attention. Examining the effect of gender on the motivations of young adults to volunteer was the objective of this study. The results support the existence of a gender difference in the motivations of young adults to volunteer. Interestingly, significant gender differences were not observed for two of the six ,motivations-social and career motivations-the two motivations for which gender stereotypes would suggest a difference. The gender difference observed, however, was relatively weak, especially when compared to the differences observed across the motivations for both males and females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the legal ban on untouchability over four decades ago, caste discrimination and atrocities perpetrated against 'untouchable' women (or Dalits) continue to be a part of the social landscape in India. Based on a decade-long partnership between a Canadian NGO, a partner Dalit/Adivasi local organization and 75 partner villages in South Orissa, this article provides a localized snapshot of the contemporary nature of caste atrocities committed against Dalit women in the Mohana administrative block. It briefly elaborates on Dalit explanations for such assaults and suggests that when it comes to addressing gendered-caste victimization, there are limits to open democratic advocacy which need to be acknowledged by activists and critical scholarship engaged with the cultural politics of 'voice'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author answers the question of what role politics plays in her life as a historian and broadcaster and discusses the gender politics in the educational system in Great Britain. She discusses her work in education,in broadcasting as a member of the British Broadcasting corporation, and in the public sector as chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) and talks about gender related issues she had encountered from old views of gender roles to equal treatment issues.