This essay examines community narratives around Keep Virginia Beautiful's Green
Grants initiative. Green Grants is a signature annual program that awards grants to organizations
throughout Virginia in support of projects aligned with one of Keep Virginia Beautiful’s three
pillars: recycling, litter prevention, and community beautification. The primary research
questions are...
The enactment of the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 marked a critical moment in American healthcare history. The ACA introduced Medicaid expansion, a policy designed to extend healthcare coverage to a larger population of low-income Americans. This policy quickly became a topic of debate and led to...
To facilitate the design of Natural and Nature-Based Features (NNBF) for flood protection, this thesis expands an existing engineering design methodology to NNBF systems. The existing approach is a Level III reliability method for the performance-based design of traditional coastal engineering systems. The expanded methodology incorporates uncertainties inherent to both...
The electric power grids of countries across the globe rely on load and generation forecasting to know when, where, and how much resources need to be dispatched to sustain proper grid operation. Because of this, forecasting needs to be highly accurate to avoid unnecessary resource dispatch which can be costly....
In 2021, Oregon’s legislature passed House Bill 2021 with relative ease. House Bill 2021 is a mandate for the state’s two largest utilities to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation on a decreasing scale, reaching 100% below baseline levels by 2040. This ambitious piece of legislation, meant to reduce the...
The energy transition in Oregon poses challenges and offers opportunities to rural areas that tend to be targeted for large-scale renewable energy development. The present case study analyzes how the energy transition has taken place in rural Lake County, to answer the question: to what degree has the energy transition...
Little scholarship exists on the contemporary trance dance movement known as Ecstatic Dance. This thesis investigates the myriad of pathways dancers in the Ecstatic Dance communities of Western Oregon experience movement-induced altered states of consciousness. A secondary aim was to provide a more visually and ethnographically accessible dance annotation system...
This thesis is one part of a study to compare and contrast 10 different proposals and finished projects for microgrids, and the associated community perceptions and response. It has been posited that microgrids have the potential to improve the resiliency and reliability of the electricity grid. In recent years, there...
Few river systems in the world are under equal or more stress than Southeast(SE) Asia’s Mekong River. Several factors threaten the Mekong as the riparian states of China, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam jockey for position within its geopolitical sphere. Climate change, globalization,industrialization, urbanization, economic growth, and hydro-hegemony...
An often overlooked student population within higher education, former foster youth, is a population that needs support. Students who were formerly a part of the foster care system who have since aged out, are left to navigate higher education institutions on their own. College support services tailored for the needs...