SPEC Learning and Changing by Doing is a three-year, action research, and organizational change project designed to ultimately promote social justice and well-being in the community. SPEC is an acronym that stands for Strengths, Prevention, Empowerment, and Community Change. The project consists of five organizations tackling internal organizational change in order to better promote justice and well-being in their respective constituencies. In this article we present a formative evaluation of this multicase study of organizational change in human services. This article contributes to the empirical and theoretical literature on organizational change in the nonprofit human service milieu.

The accurate interpretation of hurricane risk graphics is expected to benefit public decision-making. To investigate public interpretation and suggest improvements to graphical designs, an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach is being undertaken. Drawing on a series of focus groups with Miami residents that focused on understanding interpretations of the National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) track forecast cone or “Cone of Uncertainty,” we developed an online survey targeting a much larger sample of Florida residents (n = 2,847). The findings from this survey are the primary focus of this short article. We attempt to answer three questions: 1) What are the most frequent and trusted sources of information that Florida residents use when they learn that a hurricane is coming their way? 2) How accurately are Florida residents able to interpret risk based on the NHC Cone of Uncertainty graphic? 3) What is the relationship, if any, between the number of correct interpretations and income, age, education, housing location, housing type, or “most trusted” sources of information? Unlike previous public surveys that focused more on evacuation decisions, forecast usage, and perception of hurricane risk, our approach specifically pays attention to the details of design elements of the forecast graphics with the long-term goal of minimizing misinterpretation of future graphics. Our analysis suggests that many residents have difficulty interpreting several aspects, suggesting a rethink on how to graphically communicate aspects such as uncertainty, the size of the storm, areas of likely damage, watches and warnings, and wind intensity categories. Graphical communication strategies need to be revised to better support the different ways in which people understand forecast products, and these strategies should be tested for validity in real world settings.

Research on heat and its risks has focused on heat waves as an increasing emergency under climate change, but this emphasis has obscured the chronic—not just acute and episodic—exposure of billions of people globally to increasingly dangerous levels of heat. In many regions, predominantly in the global tropics, heat index exceeds a level of extreme caution according to the US National Weather Service (90°F, 32.2 °C) for more than an entire season and in some cases for much of the year. We propose chronic heat as an alternative framing for heat-related hazards in these regions and demonstrate how its risks differ and are incompletely captured by current heat–health research practices. Chronic heat poses unique risks compared to acute heat because the intersection of enduring societal- and individual-level factors leads to substantially divergent cumulative exposures over seasonal timeframes and associated health outcomes, quality-of-life impacts, and tradeoffs. These multiple interacting factors are difficult to tease out and attribute with traditional heat–health research practices, and therefore understanding of the impacts of chronic heat has remained poor. Further, managing chronic heat requires use of social services, programs, and partners not previously engaged in the context of heat, going beyond heat response as emergency management. Our chronic heat framework identifies a shift needed in heat research and practice to understand and address chronic and cumulative heat exposures increasingly experienced worldwide under intensifying climate change.

Hurricane forecast graphics have the challenging task of communicating information about spatial and temporal uncertainty. Although forecasting accuracy has improved, the popular track forecast cone or “Cone of Uncertainty” graphic, produced by the National Hurricane Center, is poorly understood by the general public. A better understanding of the forecast can potentially assist in timely decisions and life-saving actions. This study evaluates the impact of visualization design, tropical cyclone characteristics, subjective numeracy, and subjective graphicacy on visual attention to and user interpretation of hurricane forecast graphics. Forty-three non-expert participants completed forecast path estimates for nine tropical cyclones, comparing their responses when using the National Hurricane Center’s cone of uncertainty graphic and two alternative forecast visualizations. Results show that design modifications did not alter visual attention patterns or improve interpretations. Results also indicate that subjective numeracy, subjective graphicacy, and tropical cyclone characteristics, in combination, influence estimates of hurricane forecast tracks. The findings from this study inform redesign efforts of hurricane risk communication products.