About/ Research
Jennifer has led community-engaged and policy informing research for over 15 years. She is a Co-Principal Investigator of the Parent Power and Leadership Study (PPL) as an Affiliate Researcher with the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools.
PPL explores how children learn and thrive when their parents and family members participate in parent leadership and community organizing. The three year project (2021-2024) involves two phases. The first phase is a field scan survey to identify parent leadership and organizing groups throughout the U.S. that focus on social, economic, gender and racial justice. Phase 2 involves deep case study research or "In-Depth Conversations" with five organizing groups who participated in our survey, prioritizing diversity in geography, demographics, and issue areas.
Want to learn more?
Read: PHASE 1 REPORT ; EXECUTIVE SUMMARY; and a Q&A with lead researchers published in Changewire; and an Op-ed we wrote, published in DC Journal.
Stay tuned for more updates!
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Jennifer is an Associate Research Professor at the Community and Labor Center at the University of California Merced where she conducts research on labor, health, equitable economic development and more.
At Community Change (2019-2024), Jennifer provided policy and advocacy support to grassroots community organizing partners primarily around housing justice. She translated research into accessible tools for the field, created policy explainers, and was particularly interested in participatory action research with partners. As a former Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow, Jennifer served on the New Deal for Housing Justice Advisory Committee, to advance racial equity within federal housing policy.
Before Community Change, 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 Drs. 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.
Jennifer is a former Graduate Research Fellow at the Center for Urban Research and Learning, where she collaborated on many policy informing projects and publications including but not limited to research on: community organizing, housing, and the criminal legal system (2012-2018).
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.