What's New 

• The Center for Regional Change and Rabobank have partnered to develop The UC Davis CRC-Rabobank Rural Opportunity Index (ROI), a new index of community and regional opportunity for the 19 counties of California's Central Valley. The goal of the ROI is to guide investments by Rabobank and other organizations under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) toward people and places with the greatest need, to foster thriving communities of opportunity for all Californians.
• UNICEF's Chief of Child Protection, Dr. Susan Bissell, gave a series of lectures and workshops last week as part of the Healthy Youth/ Healthy Environments, a joint initiative of the Center for Regional Change, Department of Human Ecology, and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources.Dr. Bissell's talk was entitled, The Protection of Children in our Globalizing World: Change, Challenge and Champions. The podcast can be accessed here. Dr. Bissell leads a global team dedicated to improving the well-being of young people in the face of violence, armed conflict, trafficking, and other threats: http://www.unicef.org/protection/. 
  
  UC Davis and UNICEF are now in dialogue about prospects for long-term and institutional collaboration. Dr. Nancy Erbstein and Human Ecology Chair Patsy Eubanks-Owens led the planning team for the event.
• CRC faculty affiliate Dr. Nancy Erbstein has released a series of issue briefs on the topic of chronic absence in the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD). Dr. Erbstein presented the briefs to the SCUSD School Board last week and they are now informing a new district-wide effort to engage school principals, social services, community-based organizations, local leaders, youth and families in addressing chronic absence. The series includes an overview of chronic absence and its financial and learning costs, characteristics of SCUSD's chronically absent students, populations and places that may benefit from additional support, and recommendations. The series can be accessed here.