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Since the start of cash transfer programmes in developing countries in the late 1990s and its spread, studies have demonstrated a variety of outcomes comprising education, health, and nutrition for the poorest households. These studies focused on macro analysis of programmes' outcomes but paid little attention to an in-depth micro study of the everyday intersubjective accounts and actions of local community focal persons and caregivers, which construct programme outcomes. The objective of this study is to highlight the everyday concrete outcomes of a cash transfer programme in Ejisu-Juaben Municipality in Ghana. This study draws on Foucault's notion of subjectivation and discourse to construct a conversation and membership categorisation analyses framework to explore community focal persons' and female caregivers' conversations from focus group discussions. The Livelihood Empowerment against Poverty cash transfer programme in Ghana is the empirical case. This article demonstrates that caregivers and poor households are happier, practice joint decision-making, and have cohesive social relations in poor households. Thus, localised programme outcomes improved participation in the decision-making, happiness, and social cohesion of beneficiary poor households. Evaluation mechanisms for programme outcomes could consider the everyday intersubjective accounts, practices of focal persons, caregivers/beneficiaries in poor households at the micro-level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Nutritional quality of school lunches improved between 1991 and 2010. • Children who eat school lunches are more likely to be obese at kindergarten entry. • Eating school lunches does not predict faster growth in obesity in elementary school. There has been significant national attention to the issue of childhood obesity, leading policymakers to reform the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to include stricter nutritional requirements. We use data on school lunch menus to document improvements in the nutritional quality of school meals between 1991 and 2010. We then evaluate how this change in nutritional content maps into obesity outcomes, using panel data on a nationally representative cohort of children, tracking them from kindergarten entry in fall 2010 through the end of fifth grade in spring 2016. We find little evidence that participation in the school lunch program leads to weight gain, as measured by changes in obesity, overweight, and BMI. These results suggest that improvements in the nutritional content of school lunches have been largely successful in reversing the previously negative relationship between school lunches and childhood obesity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A pandemic waiver for national universal free school meals (UFSM) expired June 2022. • Six state governments subsidized UFSM into the 2022–2023 school year; others did not. • States that did not had comparatively lower rates of school meal participation. • States that did not had comparatively higher rates of food hardship among children. In the United States, the federal government subsidized universal free school meals (UFSM) nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. This policy ended in June 2022. In response, several state governments subsidized extensions of UFSM statewide into the 2022–2023 school year. I leverage variation in state extensions of UFSM to examine the policy's impact on school meal participation and rates of food insufficiency. Using data from the Household Pulse Survey and a difference-in-differences approach, I find that children in states that did not extend UFSM were 12.6 percentage points less likely (38.3% reduction over the sample mean) to participate in school meal programs and 1.5 percentage points more likely (9.8% increase over the sample mean) to experience food insufficiency relative to those in states that did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US Department of Agriculture's school meal programs have wide reach during the school year, but food insufficiency among households with children increases during summer months. The US Department of Agriculture summer meal programs are designed to fill this gap, yet participation has historically been low. To examine the facilitators and barriers to participation in a 2021 summer meal program while the COVID-19 pandemic regulation waivers were in place. Cross-sectional mixed-methods survey research. All parents/guardians of children enrolled in a school district in Connecticut were invited to participate in an online survey in December 2021. The respondents included summer meal participants (n = 622) and nonparticipants (n = 294). Survey respondents reported demographic variables, current food sufficiency, communication preferences, satisfaction with the program, reasons for using or not using the program, and whether they found the program helpful financially. The survey included three open-ended questions about barriers to participation. Respondents who used the summer meal program indicated that the pandemic-related regulatory waivers were key to their decision to participate. Reported barriers included lack of awareness of the program, inability to travel to sites during the times they were open, lack of transportation, concerns about dietary restrictions, and lack of variety in the menu, and concerns about wasting food. Parents/guardians expressed strong preferences for receiving communication about summer meals directly from their child's school and being able to access meals outside of typical work hours. The pandemic waivers allowed sponsors to test different models of distribution. Parents/guardians responded positively to the opportunity to access grab-and-go meals, multiple meals at once, and meals without a child present. These findings can be used to inform potential policy changes to reduce barriers and increase participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) provides free meals to children in low-income neighborhoods as a summertime replacement for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Unlike the NSLP, the SFSP does not directly means test its recipients, and there are no large-scale administrative data describing the children it serves. I provide the first descriptive evidence of how SFSP site availability and meal provision varies across states and correlates with area demographics. I find that there is a positive relationship between an area's likely need and SFSP availability, but availability plateaus before reaching full coverage in the highest poverty areas. As a second-best measure of household take up of the SFSP, I link these data to transaction-level records on household grocery expenditures and study the effect of SFSP availability on households' grocery food spending. I use variation in the timing and intensity of SFSP meal provision to show that, under some assumptions, households with children reduce weekly grocery food spending by 1.8 percent for each additional meal received. These spending reductions are driven by households who are ineligible for subsidized meals during the academic year, providing suggestive evidence of targeting inefficiencies in the SFSP. • Summer meals may not reach children that receive free meals during the school year. • Limited Summer Food Service Program availability in areas with the most need. • Summertime meal provision may benefit from targeting individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the shifting of responsibilities for food provision and health promotion from governments to communities or individuals/ households which also means that programs have to apply for funding every year and compete with other schools to support these programs. It discusses that schools are food hubs where regional food producers and community stakeholders work together to provide local foods to children.

I The Chambermaid i Kino Lorber, 2018 The aspirations and daily life of a young woman who works at a posh hotel in Mexico City are the subject of this insightful feature film. I The Perfect Candidate i Music Box Films, 2019 A young doctor in Saudi Arabia is tired of seeing patients suffer because the road to the small-town clinic where she works is not paved. I The Bell in the Lake i By Lars Mytting Overlook, 2018 This absorbing novel centers on a young woman in an isolated rural community in Norway in the 1880s who searches for a way to transcend rigid gender roles. [Extracted from the article]

The modern world, including highly developed countries, which focus a significant part of their financial flows on increasing environmental capacity with propaganda and a call to stop global warming, quite openly demonstrates its commitment to replenish and restore «green» reserves. Today, in the system of economic relations and financial support of Ukraine’s economic development, the involvement of the environmental component of such development is becoming increasingly important. When studying alternative energy sources as a relatively new way for Ukraine, it was found that the development of such energy affects a number of socio-economic factors, including transport, environment, health and nutrition, agro-industrial management, energy, etc. Government support, support, support and formation of a general strategy for the development of investment in alternative energy should become a priority in increasing the greening process in the country. The only conceptual approach to ensuring the development of «green» energy is a guarantee of establishing a mechanism to ensure the investment potential of the direction. For the effective functioning of renewable energy sources (RES) it is necessary to bring national legislation in line with international requirements, in particular to international acts of the European Union. Creating optimal guarantees and providing quotas for investors. Necessary conditions for development are: development of software and technical and technological support not only for the generation, accumulation and use, but also the accumulation and generalization of information, accounting, analysis, control over the consumption and sale of such energy; innovation and investment support at the level of deepening and expanding research, creating work programs, projects and groups; institutional support for attracting investment in the development of «green» energy, development of a state target program for the development and support of RES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aid agencies implement food aid programs to alleviate chronic hunger. These agencies can choose direct, in‐kind distribution of food commodities, or they can provide cash or vouchers. To determine which aid modality to use for distributing aid, organizations currently use decision trees or other guidelines. In this study, we present a novel mathematical formulation to determine the optimal approach for allocating modalities and quantities of aid to beneficiaries, while also considering the beneficiaries' needs and preferences. This also enables aid agencies to estimate the benefits of their programs for all stakeholders (i.e., beneficiaries, local retailers, and the organization) and help them design more tailored programs. The proposed model has three objectives to assess potential solutions: program costs, beneficiaries' nutrition levels, and economic contributions to the local economy. The beneficiaries' consumption behavior is incorporated into the model through a bilevel optimization structure to capture and prevent inefficient cash use by beneficiaries. We validate the model using data from the World Food Programme's operations in Garissa County, Kenya. We analyze how robustly our solution handles possible variations in different cost parameters, including food commodity prices and operational costs. Finally, we demonstrate how to use the model to evaluate policies intended to improve program outcomes, such as educating beneficiaries about nutrition or fortifying grains available locally. Our results show that a modality's effectiveness depends on the population and market characteristics, and no modality should be presumed superior to another without in‐depth analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Physical Education (20736452) is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of International Journal of Arts Management is the property of International Journal of Arts Management and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As lockdown and school closure policies were implemented in response to the coronavirus, the federal government provided funding and relaxed its rules to support emergency food provision, but not guidance on best practices for effectiveness. Accordingly, cities developed a diverse patchwork of emergency feeding programs. This article uses qualitative data to provide insight into emergency food provision developed in five cities to serve children and families. Based on our qualitative analysis, we find that the effectiveness of local approaches appears to depend on: (i) cross‐sector collaboration, (ii) supply chains, and (iii) addressing gaps in service to increased risk populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a policy change to the federally administered National School Lunch Program that allows schools serving low-income populations to classify all students as eligible for free meals, regardless of individual circumstances. This has implications for the use of free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data to proxy for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications, which is a common practice. We document empirically how the CEP has affected the value of FRM eligibility as a proxy for student disadvantage. At the individual student level, we show that there is essentially no effect of the CEP. However, the CEP does meaningfully change the information conveyed by the share of FRM-eligible students in a school. It is this latter measure that is most relevant for policy uses of FRM data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Junk-food taxes have mixed effects on obesity and junk-food consumption. We build a theoretical model to explain empirical results and better understand how to address the obesity crisis. In our framework, hand-to-mouth consumers make an intertemporal choice between junk-food consumption and weight loss. Their choice depends on calorie consciousness, which is influenced by perceived after-tax relative prices and educational attainment. Thus, a junk-food tax modifies consumers' intertemporal choice both through their budget constraint and calorie consciousness. As a result, the effect of the tax on body weight reflects competing income, intertemporal substitution, and calorie-consciousness effects. The model explains empirical observations such as the recent rise in obesity and differences in weight outcomes for different income levels. The model explains circumstances under which junk-food taxes can be effective or ineffective to reduce body weight as well as differences in elasticities of high-calorie food consumption for high- and low-income earners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies of school gardens (Simon et al, 2015; Williams and Brown, 2012) and of the National School Lunch Program (Pringle, 2013; Levine, 2008; Ralston et al, 2008) have posed value questions for school leadership and policy, about production and distribution of school food. This review of the new educational studies scholarship on school lunch (Weaver-Hightower, 2011; Rice et al, 2013) deploys Jane Roland Martin's theory of education as "encounter" (2011) to challenge that daily ritual's educational devaluation as mere food service and to argue that, since foodways are learned (Laird, 2008), school lunch is an unacknowledged normative curriculum of ethical consequence for children's learning to live, an educational aim devalued by the current policy environment's narrowly academic conception of curriculum. This study concludes by proposing Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley as a kind of laboratory school in School Lunch Ethics, worthy of new research in values and leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School meals are a major source of dietary intake for low-income students at high obesity risk. Associations between added sugar and obesity are well known, and the National School Lunch Program prohibits added sugar in fruit and juice; yet, no added sugar limits exist for other meal components. This study measured students’ added sugar selection and consumption in school lunches and compared % of daily calories consumed from added sugar to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) recommendations. In October 2016, this cross-sectional study was conducted in six Virginia Title I elementary schools (>90% racial/ethnic minorities; 100% free meals). Digital imagery plate waste methods assessed lunch consumption in N = 1155, 1st–5th graders. Added sugar (g, %kcal) in foods and beverages selected and consumed were quantified, and kcal of added sugar consumed was compared to DGA recommendations. Students consumed an average 6.6 g of added sugar from foods (grade differences; q = 0.0012), and 3.6 g of added sugar from beverages. Added sugar comprised ~10% of school lunch calories consumed from foods and ~35% of school lunch calories consumed from beverages. Added sugar in the total school lunch meal comprised ~2.5% of student’s recommended daily calorie needs; thus, ~7.5% of daily calories from added sugar remained before students would have exceeded the DGA. Total added sugar consumption was within daily DGA recommendations. Findings contribute to previous reports that school-provided lunches are low in added sugar. Future research should examine added sugar consumed in school breakfast and lunch separately and combined.