Research by Author & Topic

Publications by Elaine Morley on Public Management, Services

The extent of our nation's preparedness to address large-scale disasters will likely receive renewed attention around the anniversaries of Hurricane Katrina and the attacks of 9/11. This commentary recommends that disaster planning address not only the immediate and short-term responses to disaster, but also the longer-term social service needs of disaster victims, such as mental health services and case management. The Urban Institute's study of the American Red Cross September 11th Recovery Program provides a sense of the need for such services and their value to those affected by disaster. Integrating longer-term recovery services into disaster planning can help ensure their availability in the wake of future disasters.

Nonprofit organizations are a crucial link in our nation’s emergency preparedness and disaster response efforts, but their role is not always well integrated into disaster planning. After both Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, nonprofits provided immediate and longer-term assistance to help people cope with devastating life changes and the emotional aftermath, but the importance of long-term services is not well understood or even acknowledged by victims and policymakers alike. This brief highlights the lessons learned from the Urban Institute’s assessment of the American Red Cross September 11th Recovery Program, which provided grants to community-based organizations to provide longer-term case management, mental health services, and other services to facilitate recovery to eligible individuals.

This report examines the implementation of grants issued in 2004 under the American Red Cross September 11 Recovery Grants Program. Using telephone surveys of the grantees, site visits, and a telephone/online survey of clients, the study found that clients were very satisfied with the services and reported positive outcomes. However, more than half said that they needed additional service to continue their recovery. The report discusses six critical lessons that can inform planning for future long-term recovery programs: (1) the stigma attached to receiving mental health services, (2) the need for culturally appropriate services; (3) the importance of outreach efforts; (4) the special challenges of providing services to children; (5) mechanisms for minimizing staff burnout; and (6) establishing simple and effective reporting systems.

This report presents findings of a telephone survey of 1,500 clients who received services under the American Red Cross September 11th Recovery Program. The program provided longer-term assistance, such as case management, financial assistance, and mental health services, to individuals and families with continuing needs related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Over 80 percent of those who received mental health services said that it helped them cope with stress and other issues, although two-thirds indicated grief continues to interfere with their lives to a large or moderate extent. Additionally, 43 percent said they or their families still needed services to further their recovery.

[IBM Endowment for the Business of Government] This report, which includes 16 case studies of federal programs, finds that many program managers are using outcome information to trigger corrective actions, identify and encourage successful practices, motivate employees, and for planning and budgeting. It offers recommendations to federal managers such as: making outcome data more useful by breaking it out by customer and service characteristics; providing materials and training to managers and staff to encourage their use of outcome information; holding program review sessions with staff after outcome reports become available to identify where improvement is needed and to suggest improvement actions; identifying and rewarding offices, programs, and facilities that achieve good outcomes; and using outcome data to help identify successful practices and to help identify common problems and solutions.

This report describes, and provides examples of, how nonprofit health and human services organizations use outcome information internally. It is based on an examination of the practices of eight health and human services nonprofits in the Washington DC-Baltimore MD metropolitan area. It also discusses factors that appear to contribute to, or hinder, use of outcome information by nonprofit organizations. The organizations examined most commonly used primarily qualitative outcome information to adjust services for individual clients. We also found many cases of use of quantitative outcome data to identify successes, problems and patterns in outcomes across clients, to identify the potential need for program modifications. This represents a "newer" approach to the use of outcome information by NPOs. However, a number of organizations that collected outcome data did not actually tabulate it, leaving it to supervisors and caseworkers to mentally "process" the data to identify patterns and trends.

[Washington Times] The Williams administration's Year 2000 Scorecard pushes Washington in the right direction—toward greater government accountability and better city services. For this, the mayor and his team deserve praise and support. But, as the mayor himself noted, there is room to build on this first step.

This report provides an overview of the current state of groundwater protection at federal, state, and local levels. It also details the coverage and scope of local protection programs, including zoning ordinances, subdivision regulations, site plan reviews, design standards, operating standards, source controls, and wellhead protection ordinances. It identifies a number of issues important to groundwater protection and a number of unresolved issues. Also included is a section on groundwater programs and protection methods that work and an in-depth look at protection measures in six U.S. communities.

Giving more authority and responsibility to individual schools and their staffs has been widely touted as a way to improve teaching and learning in U.S. schools. Science and mathematics education has been a particular focus because of the perceived importance of these subjects to economic progress and the inferior test scores of U.S. students compared to those in many other countries. Extensive on-site interviews with personnel in 12 school systems and 19 individual schools provide the basis for this study of the issues and problems encountered in implementing school-based management and for the authors' conclusions and recommendations.

Giving more authority and responsibility to individual schools and their staffs has been widely touted as a way to improve teaching and learning in U.S. schools. Science and mathematics education has been a particular focus because of the perceived importance of these subjects to economic progress and the inferior test scores of U.S. students compared to those in many other countries. Extensive on-site interviews with personnel in 12 school systems and 19 individual schools provide the basis for this study of the issues and problems encountered in implementing school-based management and for the authors' conclusions and recommendations.