Beyond Ticking Boxes: Holistic Assessment of Travel Award Programs is Essential for Inclusivity

Many professional societies utilize travel awards programs to foster inclusion and facilitate the professional development of underrepresented minority (URM) scientists. All member societies that participate in the Alliance to Catalyze Change for Equity in STEM Success (ACCESS) do so to some degree. Members of this meta-organization recently came together to share their different approaches to URM travel award program assessment. The practices of the Biophysical Society (BPS), one of the ACCESS member societies, is used as a case study to discuss the highlights of our findings. We share and discuss a framework for URM travel award program assessment.

Disparate Projects, Coherent Practices: Constructing New Urbanism through the Charter Awards

The Congress for the New Urbanism’s (CNU) annual <em>Charter Awards</em> offers a rich set of documents with which to understand the discursive construction of the New Urbanism movement in the world. Every year, since 2001, developers and designers submit work representing their plans and projects to CNU for consideration of an award. In each case, a collection of urban design practitioners with expertise in New Urbanism comes together as jurors to evaluate the submissions. A handful of projects are recognized with an award and profiled in the <em>Charter Awards</em> booklet. This booklet offers a snapshot of what the movement’s awards program jurors in a given year see as its exemplary work and most innovative accomplishments. Using a framework for understanding the discursive labor that design award programs perform, I examine two decades worth of <em>Charter Awards</em> and analyze narratives and messages presented therein concerning how New Urbanism exists in the world. I advance three claims through this analysis. First, the <em>Charter Awards</em> as a text discursively constructs disparate projects and plans as part of a singular movement. Second, the <em>Charter Awards</em> narrate New Urbanism as a worldwide movement that transcends particularities of place, culture, and history. Finally, CNU uses the <em>Charter Awards</em> to effectively claim universal relevance to urban development despite the particularities of places and the divergence of development contexts.

Scientific Societies Fostering Inclusive Scientific Environments through Travel Awards: Current Practices and Recommendations

This essay compares the approaches that scientific societies in the ACCESS meta-organization use to implement and assess travel award programs for URM trainees and presents a set of recommendations, including both short- and long-term outcomes assessment in populations of interest and specialized programmatic activities coupled to travel award programs.

The Impact of Whistleblowing Awards Programs on Corporate Governance

Since the introduction of a whistle-blower awards program by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010, securities regulators in other countries, including Canada, have adopted, or are considering adopting, similar programs. For example, in 2016, the Ontario Securities Commission adopted its own whistle-blower award program. Although the primary main reason for these programs is to encourage the reporting of securities violations to the regulator, they could also have an impact on corporate governance. This is because the implementation of such a program may prod companies to design, and then instigate, a more effective internal whistle-blowing system. A truly successful internal whistle-blowing system can enable a company to detect and correct potential wrongdoing before it causes significant harm. This article closely examines this connection between whistle-blowing award programs, companies’ compliance and risk management systems, and how a whistle-blowing award program might well result in more effective internal whistle-blowing systems without the need for a regulator to resort to the imposition of prescriptive rules. As such, this article reflects upon how whistle-blower award programs fit within new governance regulatory theory that challenges traditional “command-and-control-type”regulation in favour of an outcome-driven approach.

Scientific Societies Fostering Inclusive Scientific Environments through Travel Awards: Current Practices and Recommendations

Diversity-focused committees continue to play essential roles in the efforts of professional scientific societies to foster inclusion and facilitate the professional development of underrepresented minority (URM) young scientists in their respective scientific disciplines. Until recently, the efforts of these committees has remained independent and disconnected from one another. Funding from the National Science Foundation has allowed several of these committees to come together and form the Alliance to Catalyze Change for Equity in STEM Success, herein referred to as ACCESS. The overall goal of this meta-organization is to create a community in which diversity-focused committees can interact, synergize, share their collective experiences, and have a unified voice on behalf of URM trainees in STEM disciplines. In this article, we compare and contrast the broad approaches that scientific societies in ACCESS use to implement and assess their travel award programs for URM trainees. We also report a set of recommendations, including both short- and long-term outcomes assessment in populations of interest and specialized programmatic activities coupled to travel award programs.