Community-Engaged Researcher
Jennifer has over a decade of community-engaged research experience including program evaluations, and policy informing investigations. As a former Graduate Research Fellow at the Center for Urban Research and Learning, she collaborated on many policy informing projects and publications including but not limited to work related to: community organizing, housing, and the criminal justice system.
Currently, as a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at Community Change, Jennifer serves on the New Deal for Housing Justice Advisory Committee, to advance racial equity within federal housing policy (see link below).
As a Public Fellow, Jennifer draws from research to inform policy solutions to race and gender inequities within intersecting issue areas including: housing, poverty reduction, immigration reform, and economic justice. Translating research into accessible tools, she creates content for leadership trainings of grassroots organizers across the country, particularly focused on participatory action research and methods of creating healthier social movements that are kinship and healing centered
Before this, Jennifer was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Poverty and Inequality Research Lab (PIRL) at Johns Hopkins University (2018-2019). She co-directed a study of investment, divestment, and grassroots responses to neighborhood change across 16 different neighborhoods in Baltimore. She worked with Stefanie DeLuca, Kathryn Edin, Philip ME Garboden and Christine Jang (Principal Investigators). While at PIRL, she also helped to lead a study of property landlords in opportunity areas.
Studying Family-Focused Organizing
“'Hear Us, See Us!': How Mothers of Color Transform Family and Community Relationships through Grassroots Collective Action”
2019 Dissertation of the Year Award- Social Sciences Division,
LUC Council of Graduate School Programs
- This study documents the local grassroots organizing of motherleaders affiliated with Community Organizing and Family Issues, a Chicago-based organization that engages parents through a distinctive "Family-focused" model of organizing. The case study of COFI and the parent-led group, Parents Organized to Win Educate and Renew Policy Action Council (POWER-PAC) highlights the work of women of color whose local collective action is often erased from studies of national social movements, whose intersecting gender, race, class, and immigrant identities are seldom supported by traditional models of contestation that ignore or devalue their family lives and contexts, and whose collective action produces intimate social effects that are often erroneously deemed peripheral instead of integral to their mobilization.
