View Research by Author - Shelli B. Rossman

More about Shelli B. Rossman's areas of expertise can be found on this Urban Institute expert's page.

Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/ShelliBRossman

The United States Small Business Administration (SBA) was created in 1953 to help Americans start and build small businesses. Recently, the SBA commissioned the Urban Institute to look at four of the agency's loan and investment programs to assess their past performance and consider how the agency can set benchmarks for future performance management. The studies addressed three key research questions of particular interest to SBA and its constituents: 1) Does SBA assistance help the firms that receive it? 2) To what extent does SBA assistance serve its market? 3) Do SBA programs duplicate or overlap with other public sector programs?

This report synthesizes the findings, conclusions, and policy recommendations derived from six reports generated by our evaluation of SBA's 7(a) Loan Guaranty, CDC 504 Loan, MicroLoan, and SBIC programs. The various studies were conducted to address three key research questions of particular interest to SBA and its constituents: 1) Does SBA assistance help the firms that receive it? 2) To what extent does SBA assistance serve its market? 3) Do SBA programs duplicate or overlap with other public sector programs?

The SafeFutures Program to Reduce Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Violence was a five-year six-site demonstration supported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), U.S. Department of Justice. SafeFutures sought to prevent and control juvenile crime and victimization through a continuum of prevention, intervention, and treatment services to meet the needs of at-risk and delinquent youth. The At-Risk and Delinquent Girls component was intended to provide services to meet the unique emotional and developmental needs of young women. This report examines the programs targeted to at-risk girls in each site. The report also includes a brief overview of some promising national programs. The report then focuses on the efforts of the six SafeFutures sites in developing and maintaining programs targeted to at-risk and delinquent girls.

This report "What Happens to Victims? A Research Guide for Disaster-Response Studies" provides a starting point for research and evaluation studies. It provides a series of "checklists" of outcome and service quality indicators, and related information, considered pertinent to studying emergency services responses for a range of critical service areas and covering a wide array of conditions likely to be important to disaster victims. The intent is to establish starting points for assessments of the extent to which victim services needs are met during and following disasters.

The Opportunity to Succeed (OPTS) program was designed to reduce substance abuse relapse and criminal recidivism by providing comprehensive, case-managed reentry services to felony offenders who had drug offense histories. This article describes how a process and impact evaluation of the multisite OPTS program illuminates the importance of employment and related services for returning prisoners.

[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.

The From Prisons to Home Conference, held on January 30-31, 2002 at the National Institutes of Health, was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The purpose of the conference was to bring together the research, policy, and practice communities to share promising strategies, identify research needs, and inform federal program and policy development for children and families affected by the incarceration of a parent. Eleven papers were commissioned by leading experts to survey the state of knowledge on the dynamics of incarceration and reentry as seen from the perspectives of child, parent and community. This paper focuses on the integration of services that target the prisoner, his family and children during incarceration and upon release. It explores two major issues: the coordination of service delivery across the criminal justice and health and human services systems, and the coordination between in-prison service delivery and aftercare in the community.

Common sense and years of research suggest that community-based collaboratives are the best hope for helping at-risk youth. This report, drawn from evaluations of the Communities in Schools and SafeFuture initiatives, offers a wealth of hands-on advice and real-life examples to help program leaders overcome the challenges of setting up or running their own community-based initiative. Detailed chapters cover fund raising and marketing, case management and service integration, parental involvement, volunteer mentors and tutors, and monitoring program outcomes.

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