Category: News

One of my favorite scholars, Dr. Anetha Perry – known to many of us on campus as Sister Anetha – was recently profiled by Rutgers–Camden (link). I had the honor of chairing Sister Anetha’s dissertation, and contributed a quote to the article:

“Dr. Perry’s dissertation changed what I thought was possible in community-engaged research,” said Danley. “Her work was a groundbreaking study of Black settlement houses, and the impact was felt by neighbors and scholars alike.”

I wanted to take a moment today to talk about what I find so incredible about Sister Anetha’s work – and how’s it’s influenced our work, and our Community First Fellows program, here at CURE.

Sister Anetha conducted the first autoethnography in the history of the MS/PhD in Public Affairs/Community Development. Ethnography involves immersing oneself in a research context and collecting data through participant observation. For Sister Anetha, the subject of her study was her own life.

Her dissertation examined her own efforts to open the Black Settlement House that her parents ran when she was young – the Perry House. The dissertation is a remarkable piece of work, demonstrating both the challenges of opening such a facility, and the impact it had on the neighborhood. She recently published her first article from the dissertation: A Year to Go Home: A Story of Fighting Deep Disinvestment in Built Environment (link).

A critical moment during Sister Anetha’s dissertation was when her fellow PhD students conducted a fundraiser to raise $5,000 to help with repairs that would allow the Perry House to reopen. It was a tremendous moment of camaraderie and generosity within the program. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt like an indictment of how we support research here within academia. We were able to fund Sister Anetha’s scholarship through a graduate assistantship for years. But we were unable to fund the community work at the center of her scholarship.

Why couldn’t we fund those repairs? Why couldn’t we contribute to Sister Anetha’s work at the Perry House more directly? I began looking for models that integrated work done in the community with research. Was it possible to fund research in ways that more directly strengthened work happening on the ground? I found good examples. One example comes from Public Health, where “interventions” are often considered pilot programs, and funding includes both the money to run the pilot and to study it. A second is funders, such as the Rutgers Equity Alliance for Community Health (REACH) and Rutgers-Camden’s Urban Innovation Fund, that require a portion of funding go directly to the community partner participating in the research. 

Here at CURE, Sister Anetha’s example was the starting point for our Community First initiative, which focuses on projects that not only invest in research, but which contribute to the mission of a community partner. The centerpiece of that initiative is our Community First Fellows – graduate students placed with community organizations over the summer to partner on research projects that move forward the mission of the placement organization.

This past week we had our final training with those fellows – trainings that focus on research skills, how to engage with community, and how to build community-engagement into their careers. I couldn’t help about how proud I was that at CURE we’re able to fund so many talented, community-engaged scholars to follow in Sister Anetha’s footsteps. And how much we owe to her example.

– Dr. Stephen Danley, Director, CURE

The next few months are a going to be a special time for CURE – and I want to share a little bit about why that is. Over the past 18 months we’ve engaged in multiple community-engaged research projects of which we are exceptionally proud. Some of these projects include:

• Work with One Camden to evaluate equity in Camden’s universal enrollment system
• Research with local CDCs on “Hidden Hands: Property Ownership in Camden“
• Collaboration with the Rowan-Rutgers Board of Governors on youth participation in the development of a community-owned grocery store here in the city

We’re now getting to the point where we are able to share some of what we’ve found across these research projects. We’ll be doing that in a number of ways. One of those is through formal academic papers. For example, we recently published a piece (co-authored by Dr. Patrice Mareschal and Dylan O’Donoghue) on higher education spending and extraction that is based on our experience co-sponsoring and organizing the PA Theory NET conference last summer. Another approach is working directly with our community partners to share our results with community members – as we’re partnering with One Camden to do with our event discussing our findings that Spanish-speaking households in Camden are more likely to apply directly to their guaranteed neighborhood school. Our third approach is to create a CURE Policy Brief series that will live on our website that shares our findings directly with our CURE community.

Today, we’re releasing the first brief in that series – an interim policy brief on our “Hidden Hands: Property Ownership in Camden” project authored by JP Rosewater, Ojobo Agbo Eje, and myself. The brief introduces the logic of the project – research that shows the use of multiple LLCs to obscure ownership by the same owner leads to worse conditions at these properties. This interim report shows how we’ve traced ownership of Camden properties and found similar issues around owners using multiple LLCs that obscure how many properties they own. In one case, we found a buyer who uses 19 LLCs and owns 512 properties!

For that policy brief and more on the “Hidden Hands” project, plus other projects mentioned above, please click the links below. And keep an eye on this space for more about CURE’s ongoing research.

Policy Research Brief: “Hidden Hands: Property Ownership in Camden” Interim Report

Discussion in Administrative Theory and Practice on higher education spending and extraction

– Dr. Stephen Danley, Director, CURE

This post was edited on 18 February 2025 for clarity and to reflect the updated title for the “Hidden Hands” research. 

John Paul Rosewater is a Ph.D. Candidate in his third year of the Public Policy and Community Development program. He is a political theorist who uses community-engaged research to document the ground-level manifestations of late-state capitalism as well as the strategies employed by community members to adapt to these challenging circumstances. He first began working on the “Who Owns Camden” project as part of Doctor Danley’s “Community Research” class in 2024 and was able to continue that work throughout that summer in the Community First Fellows program. He is currently a Graduate Assistant at the Center for Urban Research and Education.  

I began studying the social sciences because I was curious about how people behaved — I stayed because I came to believe it represents the clearest pathway to a more just society. That sentiment is what drew me to both Rutgers-Camden and to the Center for Urban Research and Education. One of the most important things to my cohort of graduate students is the concept of epistemological justice; where does knowledge come from? Who gets to decide what information is worth sharing and worth trusting? How often does our knowledge reflect the world as it is, and how often is it merely a recreation of our internal biases? While there are many ways to answer these questions, our cohort ultimately agreed that for scholars in our field, epistemological justice necessitated community input in community research. I believe very strongly in this concept, despite coming from a theoretical background with limited community interaction. I wanted more experience, and enrolling in Doctor Danley’s “Community Research” class last spring and participating in the summer Community First Fellows program gave me the opportunity I was looking for.  

While there were many incredible community partners to work with as a Community First Fellow, I knew I wanted to be a part of the “Who Owns Camden?” project from the moment I heard its name. This project aims to uncover and analyze property ownership patterns in the city of Camden to better understand ownership patterns and how they influence neighborhood development and potentially disenfranchise local community development corporations (CDCs). The power of property ownership is one of my key research interests, and in the context of Camden, which had experienced the disinvestment and injustice that had befallen so many American cities, the project was an extraordinary opportunity. I quickly learned that many of our community partners had joined the project for similar reasons: between the power of our research question and the detailed dataset provided by PBCIP, everyone could tell that the work had serious potential, even if we didn’t know exactly what to expect.  

Despite our collective enthusiasm for the work, this hasn’t been a seamless or straightforward project. There’s a reason why community-engaged research isn’t more common: it’s hard! Community organizations tend to be more outcome-oriented because they need to organize their time in terms of projects and funding and deliverables, whereas academics tend to be more process-oriented. No research is ever really over, after all. One project provides evidence for the next, and the roots established in one partnership grow into the branches of many more. 

In the beginning of the summer, I didn’t have this insight and it seemed to me that I had so much to learn that there was no way I would be able to deliver useful results to our partners, and I was actually worried I would let them down. I would actually argue that the stress I felt around the project was one of the benefits of the summer fellows program; there are some lessons you simply can’t learn without experiencing the associated difficulties firsthand, and in time I came to realize that the balance between the goals of the community and those of the academy can only be found through trial and error. Yes, academic work is a process that never truly ends, but it can be organized with milestones that provide tangible benefits to community partners. Ideally, community-based research can be broken up into a series of win-win scenarios. As I started my research, the Who Owns Newark report which inspired the Camden effort was a fantastic tool for figuring out what to look for, and throughout the project I’ve received news articles, market analysis reports, and additional datasets from our various partners to help the investigation along. It’s been a very collaborative and extremely rewarding process, and I’m grateful to our partners for both the opportunity to do this work and the support they’ve offered throughout it.  

As time went on and I developed a better sense of the housing situation in Camden, I became more confident in my research and took on more leadership responsibilities as more graduate students were brought onto the project. I had the extraordinary opportunity to work with four amazing Community First Fellows over the summer, and about halfway through the fellowship I came across our most significant finding: a single entity that was using over a dozen LLCs to control over 500 properties in Camden city. As our partners had anticipated, the LLCs were being used to obscure the number of properties tied to individual people. Further research showed us just how many homes are owned by the City, which added a whole new element to the conversation that we’re still unpacking.  

I have continued to work on Who Owns Camden this academic year as a graduate assistant at CURE and I’m excited to report that the project is gaining more and more support, and I look forward to sharing our findings with the community and academia this spring. 

–  John Paul Rosewater

Over the last few years community participation has become trendy in urban research. And while that’s a step in the right direction, it also leads to two competing challenges: 1) tokenistic participation done for good public relations and, 2) naïve participation that assumes getting community involved will fix deep structural challenges just because community is there. Those of us who have been immersed in this work know that getting participation right is hard.

That’s why I was so excited when CURE Graduate Assistant Melissa Thompson brought an opportunity to launch a youth participatory planning project to CURE. The program, called Y-Plan and developed by the University of California-Berkley, calls for youth to work with in a Civic Client on a development project. Here in Camden, our Civic Client, the Rowan University/Rutgers Camden Board of Governors, is working on a proposed development of a community-owned grocery store with youth participation through project partner Mighty Writers. For CURE, this is a chance to put our vision for participation into practice. It hasn’t been easy…  

The simple logistics of building a youth program with multiple community partners and community artists on a short timeline have, at times, been overwhelming. Our team at CURE, including new hire Skye Horbrook who is the research manager for this project, has been fantastic.  

The bigger challenge with Y-Plan has been making youth participation meaningful for youth and valuable for our Civic Client. Youth participation has its own perils; youth are often hyper aware of tokenism and adultism. If they have too little control in a project, they’re likely to rebel. On the other hand, if given too much freedom, youth sometimes bite off a bit more than they can chew, resulting in frustration and poor outcomes. Kirshner (2008) highlights this challenge and calls for “guided participation”, where youth maintain autonomy within projects, but are given support and structure.  

Building that in our Y-Plan program has been difficult, but rewarding. We are balancing the goals and timeline of our Civic Client with realistic goals of what a youth program can accomplish in 10 weeks. The secret ingredient has been local artists who are working with youth on their vision. Folks from Muse Collaborative, We Live Here Collective, and other artists such as Erik James Montgomery and Reet Starwind have been working with youth on art projects that capture youth ideas for a community-owned grocery store.  

On Dec. 17th (4-7pm), at Erik James Montgomery’s gallery on Market Street, we’ll have a showing of that art. Please save the date. We hope you can join us!  

I look forward to sharing the latest news and reflections on Y-Plan in the coming months. You can sign up for updates Rowan University/Rutgers Camden Board of Governors on the development Co-Op Camden here. 

–  Stephen Danley 

Dylan O’Donoghue is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-Camden in the Department of Public Affairs/Community Development. She is community-engaged scholar focusing on labor, immigration, and organizing. This summer she served as one of CURE’s Community First Fellows and was placed with the No Arena Chinatown movement in Philadelphia, where she supported the movement’s work to raise public awareness about the impacts of the potential arena on the local community. As a GA for CURE, she has worked as the Cities and Justice Initiative lead over the past two years. 

This is my second year as a Graduate Assistant at CURE. One of the best things about the job is that not only do I work on other faculty projects, but I’ve gotten the chance to bring my own research agenda under the CURE umbrella. For me, that means having support to pursue abolition work. I want to share some of that work with the wider CURE community – including the story behind my recent publication with Dr. Tanisha Cannon on banning slavery (in the form of prison labor) in prisons. That work was recently published by Metropolitics and featured by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Modern Slavery Here’s the story of how it happened: 

Dr. Tanisha Cannon and I met at the Abolitions conference hosted by the University of California in DC, where she and others from Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC) were presenting about their organizing efforts. I attended that conference with Dr. Stephen Danley to present our research on local movements to abolish university special tax status. Attending this conference focused on Abolition, and this subsequent collaboration builds on CURE’s vision of finding community-based and alternative solutions to address systemic issues in urban settings. 

In the fall of 2023, I interviewed Tanisha as part of my work under CURE’s Cities and Justice initiative. We discussed her work as LSPC’s Managing Director, and the organization’s advocacy efforts to end slavery in California’s prisons. In California, like many states across the U.S., there is an exception to the 13th Amendment that allows slavery to be used as a punishment for crime. LSPC and other organizations have fought hard to change this harmful practice. After years of advocacy efforts, this issue is on the ballot, and in November 2024, California voters will decide whether to end this practice (learn more about Prop 6). 

Tanisha and I used the interview to work on two projects together. The first project was a report to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Modern Slavery. We outlined conditions of slavery in prisons, legal concerns, and policy suggestions. In August of 2024, the Rapporteur released their findings on slavery in prisons and cited our submission multiple times in their Human Rights Council Report, highlighting the ways that California’s prisons deny human rights during forced prison labor. The second project was an article in Metropolitics, which features our interview and narrative on how prison slavery creates challenges in urban settings. We also discuss how LSPC conducts its essential work and accepts funding. 

This work builds on my dissertation research which uses an Abolition Feminist theoretical framework to explore how labor exploitation in migrant labor is related to the carceral immigration system. Exploitation under a carceral immigration system impacts the safety and stability of workers and their communities. Using a similar lens, Tanisha and I explain in the Metropolitics article that forced prison labor not only impacts incarcerated people, who are disproportionately black and Latinx, but also their communities and cities. This modern-day example of slavery does not promote rehabilitation; it causes incarcerated people harm and squeezes resources from their support networks, which are primary resources when people leave prison. This extraction of emotional and financial resources creates further challenges for the health and safety of communities. 

I hope you will consider reading and sharing our work! 

 

–  Dylan O’Donoghue