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The journal "Urban Social Work" is pleased to announce a new partnership with the Howard University School of Social Work. The journal focuses on strength-based perspectives, equity-based policy and practice, and social justice initiatives in urban communities. The current issue features original research articles on topics such as the impact of residential relocations on low-income families, the emotional responses of language interpreters, the role of housing stability in recovery and recidivism reduction, and the effect of public housing on a sense of community. The editors wish readers a peaceful holiday season and look forward to expanding knowledge in partnership with urban individuals, families, and communities. [Extracted from the article]

This paper takes a point of departure in a ghost story. Two social workers working in a community house in Copenhagen have both encountered a ghost. The first part of the paper wonders about the kinds of questions that are tempting to ask when listening to a ghost story as well as about how more careful questioning may allow organization studies to learn from ghostly encounters. Listening to what the two social workers have experienced, the paper identifies four sets of questions that the ghostly encounter may offer to organization studies, namely questions about inheritance, what it means to feel at home in an organization, temporality and affect. Thereafter, the paper discusses how organizational inquiries that are attentive to ghostly matters may look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human services sector is under increasing pressure to deliver services to clients, improve social justice outcomes, and host social work students on field placements -- all within the limited human, financial, and organisational resources of the agency. This article outlines how a community housing organisation and a university in Queensland collaborated to support social justice outcomes while concurrently meeting the learning needs of social work students on placement. This article, jointly authored by the agency and university, discusses the organic development and goodwill between the field education team and the housing agency to support and shape practice. This collaboration has used Kolb's (1984) learning cycle as a framework to guide the project team reflection and knowledge creation. The team adopted this process of reflection to illustrate the importance of relationship and collaboration in working together to develop goals and meet challenges in field placement and agency demands. The use of collaborative inquiry has also been included to illustrate the development of the working relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the housing conditions of immigrant households has tended to focus on their spatial distribution in metropolitan areas, the discrimination they face in the search for housing, and their housing trajectories, in particular their access to homeownership. Little research has been done on what role, if any, housing plays in their integration in their host society. This research tests the hypothesis that community housing, in which tenants participate actively in the management of their buildings, gives immigrants social contacts and skills that help in their integration. The authors conducted interviews and focus groups with renters, homeowners and housing specialists in order to understand better what respondents understand by "integration" and to investigate the possible causal relationship between life in community housing and social integration. The findings both support and contradict the original hypothesis and are the basis for recommendations for community housing developers. The most important lesson to be drawn from the research is that participation in in-house activities in community housing are not necessarily a positive factor in social integration-it may actually be perceived negatively by some immigrants-and are clearly secondary to questions of housing quality and affordability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article describes the planning of a multi-agency and multi-stakeholder evaluation of the implementation of supportive housing. The Ottawa HousingPlus Collaborative Communities project is a collaboration between university-based evaluators and members of a local network of supportive housing providers. The objectives of the initiative are (1) to develop tools and methods for evaluating the implementation of supportive housing by network members, (2) to evaluate program implementation, and (3) to use evaluation findings to assist network members to collaborate in finding solutions to shared implementation challenges. This article examines the early planning of the project. It describes the process used to engage stakeholders in the conception and planning of the project, the challenges and successes in the early planning efforts, and the issues that will need to be addressed over the course of the 3-year project term. These challenges and successes of engaging stakeholders are discussed in the context of adapting educational concepts to the evaluation of social services and in engaging multiple agencies, at multiple levels, in a collaborative evaluation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Emergency shelters, transitional housing, and permanent supportive housing are distinct programmatic responses to address the housing and service needs of the homeless population under the Continuum of Care (CoC) model for homeless service delivery. Using organizational-level data collected from a multi-site survey of 300 homeless residential programs in 14 communities, this study examines the extent to which operationalization of these programs is in accordance with the CoC model. Findings suggest consistency with as well as deviation from the CoC model in the operationalization of homeless residential programs. Recommendations are provided for local community service planning and development that can assure effective delivery of services for meeting the needs of homeless people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides a brief history of military family housing in the United States. Military family housing is a unique form of public housing. Its development paralleled other forms of public and assisted housing. However, the history of military family housing is largely unknown to social welfare and housing policy historians, and its lessons are not applied to contemporary housing policy. This article examines the social, economic, and political forces and themes that shaped the development of military housing and communities. The implications of this history and the recent trend toward privatization of military housing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]