Participation of Minorities in Cost-share Programs-The Experience of a Small Underserved Landowners’ Group in Alabama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article highlights aspects of the historical, social and policy developments of cost-share programs in the USA. The experiences of African Americans who are members of Limited Resource Landowners Education Network in attempting to access available cost-share resources in Alabama are presented. Literature reviews, participation in and response to the USDA’s Cooperative Conservation Partnership Initiative (CCPI), and discussions with stakeholders were the primary sources of information and data used in this exploratory analysis which was conducted within the framework of a “modified action research model”. Until recently underserved landowners’ participation in cost-share programs in Alabama has been very limited. Although in theory access has been open to underserved landowners, these landowners have historically encountered a range of challenges in trying to participate in the cost-share programs. Many of those challenges, the analysis has indicated, stemmed from: (a) Natural Resource Conservation Service’s (NRCS’) limited pool of available and relevant technical personnel, (b) the agency’s interpretation of existing program policy guidelines and (c) the low level of underserved landowners’ trust and confidence in the transparency and fairness of federal and state agencies and their officials. Successfully navigating such obstacles and challenges during the implementation of the CCPI initiative in Alabama necessitated much understanding, perseverance, collaboration, and a willingness to compromise by all project stakeholders. Strategies likely to assist other similar groups in successfully navigating the various Federal and State requirements for participation in cost-share programs are proposed. Lessons learned will inform future application of the action research model in this continuing study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".