About/ Research
For over a decade, Jennifer has led community-engaged and policy informing research. Currently, she is a Co-Principal Investigator of the Parent Power and Leadership Study (PPL), a collaboration between Community Change and the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools.
Funded by the Spencer Foundation, 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. The PPL team will create a national Parent Power Directory and a State of the Field Report with survey responses. Phase 2 involves deep case study research or "In-Depth Conversations" with six organizing groups who participated in our survey, prioritizing diversity in geography, demographics, and issue areas. Stay tuned for more updates on this project!
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At Community Change, Jennifer provides policy and advocacy support to grassroots community organizing partners primarily around housing justice. She translates research into accessible tools for the field, creates policy explainers, and is particularly interested in participatory action research and methods of creating healthier social movements that are kinship and healing centered. 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 proud to be 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).
The Dissertation: 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.