Nashville To Help Homeless With "Adopt a Meter" Program

To me:
A- the "inherent need for businesses to advertise"
sets the occasiaion for:
B- "adopting a meter"
which causes:
C- homeless outreach.

The mayor needs help refurbishing outdated parking meters, as well as additional funding for homeless outreach programs. The original intent of parking meter's is for two things, 1- moderating how long cars stay parked in one area (i.e. eliciting appropriate "parking length behavior" from motorists), and 2- making money off of inappropriate "parking length behaviors" by punishing violators with parking tickets. The tickets, I would guess, are where the city makes most of its money, not off of the actual coins placed into the meters.

So the mayor has developed a program which seemingly solves a number of problems. Parking meters get refurbished by positively reinforcing companies to refurbish them (providing advertising space which translates to money); the city still makes money off of negatively punishing people with parking tickets, and they (the meters) still act as an establishing operation for appropriate parking behaviors. Finally, what money was actually being made from the meters goes towards homeless outreach which was one of the initial problems, and also acts as a further establishing operation for more "homeless outreach" behaviors.

In essence the publicity causes the discriminative stimulus of homeless outreach to be available to an incredibly large number of people. The more people exposed to the discriminative stimulus, the more opportunities there are for people to recognize that the appropriate response is to emit "homeless outreach" behaviors of their own.
I think this is behaviorally sound. I think the advertising space is reinforcing enough for companies to continue adopting parking meters. Basically I think it is behaviorally sound because the mayor has appropriately (although maybe not intentionally) followed the ABC’s of b-mod. The need sets the occasion for the behavior which then has the desired consequence. Although the money may not be “enough” for homeless outreach it helps, and will cause other people to emit homeless outreach behavior to make up for what is lacking in the meters themselves.
BMod Vocab: elicit, emit, punishing, positive/negative reinforcement, establishing operation, discriminative stimulus, response.

The following is what I think the instigators of this program are hoping to achieve for ABCs.

A=People walk by parking meters.
B=People put money in the parking meters.
C=People feel good because they are contributing to a good cause.

This is a similar reinforcement technique to most charitable causes. The consequence or positive reinforcement is the receiving of a good feeling about oneself. This is a good idea in my opinion because the people involved are trying to change the context so that people will be more likely to donate. Normally, the context for donation is just thinking of concern for the cause. But the context here is that people are seeing these meters everywhere they walk. They just stumble across them, and people seem more likely to emit donation when it's easier for them. If it takes less energy to donate to a cause, people are more likely to do it. This could be because if it convenient, the positive reinforcement (feeling good about oneself) outweighs any negative punishment (loss of time, energy trying to figure out how to donate).

Terms: positive reinforcement, context, negative punishment, emit

The number of terms used is four.