Community-Engaged Scholar

Jennifer has 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 a number of policy relevant projects and publications including but not limited to: community organizing, affordable housing, felony deferred prosecution, youth re-entry, and school responses to student survivors of domestic and sexual violence.

While a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Poverty and Inequality Research Lab (PIRL) at Johns Hopkins University (2018-2019), Jennifer studied investment, divestment, and grassroots responses to neighborhood change across 16 different neighborhoods in Baltimore through the "Who Is Moving In?" study. 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 landlords in opportunity areas.

Currenty, as a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at Community Change, Jennifer develops and advances policy and legislative proposals as part of Community Change's work on priority issue areas. These include poverty reduction, immigration reform, economic and racial justice, and early learning and care. She also 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.