Thesis (D. Min.)--Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, MA, 2002. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 213-214).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, MA, 2002. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 213-214).

Masters of Art / West-End Primary is one of more than 100 public schools in South Africa, which since 1994, has greened large parts of its school grounds with a water-wise indigenous and vegetable garden. The South African National Botanical Institute-Environmental Education Unit (SANBI-EEU) is a government agency that has undertaken responsibility for implementing greening projects in partnership with public schools such as West-End Primary. SANBI-EEU encourages and supports the establishment of indigenous and vegetable gardens to facilitate teaching, to support school nutrition programmes and to make possible the employment of unemployed community members.Anecdotal evidence points to local cases where the “caretaker inherits” the greening project because other stakeholders (educators, learners) no longer participate in garden maintenance or because projects are started but cannot be sustained. The review of theory suggests that project sustainability is achieved and ensured through adopting a people-centred, participatory and sustainable approach to development.Hence, participation, capacity and capacity building is important to ensure this.Incorporating these development approaches into programme, project and operations management strengthens the process for achieving and ensuring project sustainability. This study was exploratory and used an empirical research design which combined qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate sustainability factors. The research population comprised Grade 5, 6 and 7 learners, staff and parents/community members at the West-End Primary School.In general the research findings demonstrated that West-End Primary achieved a degree of sustainability after project implementation. The study found that developmental factors such as participation, capacity, capacity building did in part contribute to achieving and ensuring this degree of sustainability. However a year and several months after project implementation, the degree of sustainability achieved was in a fragile state. This fragility was the result of a mix of weakness and strengths in the factors that have contributed to sustaining the greening project.

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With All Due Modesty: The Selected Letters of Fanny Goldstein is an annotated edition of the correspondence of Fanny Goldstein (1895–1961), librarian, social activist, and founder of Jewish Book Week. Goldstein’s accomplishments include building a significant collection of Judaica for the Boston Public Library; compiling some of the earliest bibliographies of Jewish literature in English; evaluating manuscripts for publishers; writing book reviews; and lecturing and writing on a wide range of subjects related to Jews and Judaism. The purpose of the edition is to provide a picture of Goldstein’s life as a Jew, a woman, a librarian, and a social activist and in so doing, to contribute to a more complete understanding of Boston’s Jewish community in the first half of the twentieth century. I have included in the edition both incoming and outgoing letters with a wide range of correspondents, including Charles Angoff, Mary Antin, Isaac Asimov, Alice Stone Blackwell, Felix Frankfurter, Molly Picon, Ellery Sedgwick, and Friderike Zweig. The letters span the years from 1930 to 1960. The edition includes extensive annotation based on Goldstein’s newspaper and magazine articles, pamphlets, book reviews, and other writings; hundreds of Goldstein’s letters not published here; accounts published in the Jewish press and the mainstream press; and correspondence neither written nor received by Goldstein but bearing on her life and work.

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The notion of community remains an important concern, for individuals, in urban planning practice, and more recently in consumer research. This thesis research explores community at the junction of these areas, through a grounded study of the consumption practices of a place based consumer tribe that exists within an inner city suburb undergoing urban renewal. The process of urban renewal is positioned as a means to revitalise under-utilised inner city areas, and broaden opportunities for city residents and visitors to experience an inner city lifestyle. It can also be seen as a standardising project that commodifies diversity and devalues existing communities and is associated with gentrification. Both perspectives can obscure the possibility that consumption practices can be used to build community like connections. This thesis applies a framework of literature from marketing and consumer research to an urban renewal context, to explore this area of ambiguity. The result of this exploration is a grounded theory of assuming a 'local' identity through consumption experiences in servicescapes. This thesis argues that consumers seek out individual servicescapes for the value experiences that they offer, which can be identity defining. In particular the interaction generated through these experiences can work to build tribal connections to, and within, that servicescape. These consumption experiences can also be used to make assumptions regarding the identity of others; both of the businesses themselves, and the individuals encountered within them. The tribal connections these experiences may generate can have individual benefits in that they can build into existing social networks, but through repetition and shared experiences, may also link an individual to a broader place based community. This thesis also proposes that servicescapes can work to encourage this process, by encouraging identity defining consumption experiences. Like individuals, businesses can come to be assumed to be tribe members and this 'localness' can become a symbolic operant resource that is valued by the tribe. As key sites in which members of the 'local' tribe reinforce their commitment to the tribe, locally owned businesses may benefit by being more likely to be chosen over their 'non-local' competitors. However, as an element of their tribal membership these businesses have a moral responsibility to reinforce the collective ethic of the tribe and assist in integrating new tribe members. In this way they can become ambassadors for the identity of the community, communicating the shared values of the tribe to members and non-members alike. Such a place based tribe is primarily based on public interaction, thus the servicescapes and public spaces that link them can come to work as a theatre in which the tribe is manifested and its rituals performed. As the experience of a sense of shared value is repeated across a range of geographically united servicescapes, this shared experience can be displaced from any one servicescape and generalised into a localness experience that is grounded within the geographic community. It is here that the physical and ideological aspects of the community combine, and the experienced value of a shared identity that originated in a servicescape based consumption experience can come to symbolise the values of the greater community itself. These research findings have implications for inner city urban renewal developments, suggesting that the increased availability of consumption activities that are associated with urban renewal may also be considered as an increased opportunity to build place based consumer tribes. This thesis proposes ways of encouraging this process.