Category: News

My introduction to community-engaged work came as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. I was trained in the Political Science department, where I had Professor Rogers Smith for class. And got my own start at the Fox Leadership Center, where I first met Senior Fellow Mary Summers. Recently, I had the chance to sit down with both of them. We talked about what it means to do this work when higher education is under attack, community has more needs than ever, and research too often feels disconnected from those struggles. What started as a chance for me to reconnect with mentors turned into action – Rogers and Mary’s Ivywood Foundation has pledged $75,000 to CURE to fund research with policy impact.

I think of the research conundrum as this: research should ensure policy is evidence-based but academic research is often produced too slowly to play this role. Funding cycles take too long, research is slow to get published, and important evidence lags behind the policy process.  

Part of our vision at CURE is to be nimble and produce research that impacts policy. The Ivywood Foundation’s three-year, $75,000 gift helps that goal.  

We’re already putting the gift to good use. Just days after the Ivywood Foundation’s commitment to CURE, we had the chance to sit down with a new partner: the Philadelphia Office of Immigration Affairs (OIA). The office wanted research support in their language access program, which ensures city services are accessible to all Philadelphians regardless of English language proficiency through meaningful and high-quality language translation and interpretation services.

A data audit within the office would cut the cost of these translation and interpretation services, allowing the city to expand language access in more intentional, strategic and cost-effective ways, and to continue to enhance the program at a critical time when Philadelphia’s immigrant and diaspora community is under tremendous pressure. According to census data, 24% of Philadelphians speak a language other than English at home, and 11% don’t speak English very well. The City of Philadelphia’s language access program is widely considered to be the gold standard, given the city-wide requirement to provide language access in all city services and the priority that the many city offices, departments, boards and commissions place on language accessibility.

It’s the exact time of project that rarely gets off the ground because of funder timelines. What the Ivywood Foundation gift allows us to do is start this work – by assigning a Community First Fellow to work on the project over the summer – while we work with the Philadelphia Office of Immigration Affairs on grant applications to fund the entire project.  

This is what research for policy impact looks like. It’s the ability to sit down with a community partner and make change on the timeline of community needs not academic funding. And with the chaos around us that’s more important than ever. So thank you to Rogers, Mary, and the Ivywood Foundation for making this work possible. And thank you to the Philadelphia Office of Immigration Affairs and the rest of our community partners for partnering and making this work happen.  

– Dr. Stephen Danley, Director, CURE

 

A few years after I came to Camden, a community leader asked me to meet for coffee. Their issue? That their neighborhood organization didn’t have 501(c)3 status and had to use a fiscal sponsor – and the fiscal sponsor had been leveraging that position to ensure the majority of the grant dollars in the grant application went to existing programs at the fiscal sponsor. The community leader was stuck between a rock and a hard place – the status quo was bad, but they worried if they complained to the funder they were less likely to receive the grant. So they asked if I could backchannel and talk to the funder. I did, and I’ll never forget the funder telling me “we’re the good guys here” and that the neighborhood organization should be thankful for the fiscal sponsor because without them neighborhood associations would not get any money at all. That was the start of my writing and work in philanthropy.

Dr. Brandi Blessett and I wrote up that story, and other similar observations, in our piece Nonprofit Segregation writing that:

With each grant that goes to a high-capacity nonprofit, the divide across the sector deepens. The initial challenges of becoming professionalized are compounded for grassroots nonprofits. Worse still, grassroots that do pursue such funding rarely receive it, leading to a perception that such efforts are wasted time. As a result, professionalized nonprofits continue to send signals that they are capable of managing funds and performing on short-term objectives, whereas grassroots non-profits are unable to build the capacity to compete for similar or larger grants in the future. The residential and economic segregation of the region becomes built into the segregation of the nonprofit sector.

It took years to get it published –philanthropy scholars blocked its publication echoing the argument that the philanthropists are the ‘good guys’ and shouldn’t be criticized. But once it was published, we heard from practitioners, scholars, and philanthropists interested in trying to change the ways philanthropy excluded community organizations.

Rutgers-Camden Associate Provost Dr. Naomi Marmorstein was familiar with my work and asked if I was interested in becoming co-lead of the South Jersey Institute for Population Health (SJIPH). SJIPH serves as a funder for community-engaged research to improve health outcomes in South Jersey. I was already familiar with the institute and its “Sandbox” model. Co-founders Drs. Nicole Vaughn (Rowan) and Sarah Allred (Rutgers-Camden) had developed a Sandbox event for grant applicants that brought teams to a half-day workshop before their final applications to get feedback from reviewers and strengthen the applications. I’d recommended the model to philanthropists who had read my piece and wanted to know how they could be more friendly to community organizations applying for grants.

I wanted in. I’d spent years writing about these challenges and wanted to be part of an organization looking to rectify them. That partnership with SJIPH was the first contract I brought to the Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE).

We recently announced SJIPH’s 4th cycle of funded community-engaged research projects. It’s a cohort I’m exceptionally proud of. In the run up to this funding cycle, CURE and SJIPH provided Partnership Development Awards to 10 community organizations to try to improve their chances at receiving funding and expand the reach of SJIPH. We’ve worked closely with those awardees: matching them with faculty at Rutgers-Camden and Rowan; meeting with them about their research projects; ensuring they understood the nuances of our request for proposals; and, yes, inviting many of these partnerships to this year’s Sandbox event where they received feedback and support from the very same people that would evaluate their final applications. In the world of philanthropy, funders too often serve as arbiters of what a “good” project is, these applicants had the chance to meet, discuss, and strengthen their projects to increase their chances to receive funding.

The results have been remarkable. Seven of the 10 community organizations that received Partnership Development Awards received positive scores from our external reviewers and received a second, larger community-engaged research grant from SJIPH. SJIPH itself – already a leader in funding community partnership – has expanded the geographical reach of its grantees deeper into hard-to-reach areas in rural South Jersey, and funded more grassroots organizations directly serving South Jersey residents. The latest cohort also includes our first research partnership between faculty and an Indigenous tribe – the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation of New Jersey. This new cohort is addressing critical health issues throughout the region, ranging from the impact of prescribing art classes to support mental health, to patient feedback on different forms of HIV mediation, to interventions that address grief and depression within churches, to health impacts of switching to homemade meals for seniors in Salem County.

I cannot wait to see the impact these projects have on health outcomes throughout South Jersey, and I’m exceptionally proud of the work SJIPH and CURE have done to make our philanthropy accessible for community organizations.

– Dr. Stephen Danley, Director, CURE

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been on a mini media tour talking about the New Jersey gubernatorial election. I’ve been asked what the election means for New Jersey. I’ve been asked what the election means for the rest of the country. For example, in this article from the Courier-Post on the success of New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill’s campaign:

“That is proof-of-concept of the Sherrill campaign’s strategy of being `appealing to many but exciting to few,’” Danley said Nov. 5. “Sherrill’s campaign was able to appeal to independents by focusing on her bio with relatively few controversial positions, trusting on anti-Trump sentiment to drive turnout.”  — Read full article: “South Jersey voter turnout surged in the 2025 election,” Courier-Post, 12 November 2025. 

But I haven’t been asked what the election means for the future of Rutgers. I want to take a moment to discuss why a Democratic governor in New Jersey likely means a momentary respite from the contested politics of higher education, and why it is a critical time to clarify the value of our research.

For the most part, Rutgers has stayed out of the culture war that is redefining higher education. And with the election of Gov. Mikie Sherrill, New Jersey is likely to remain largely supportive of its higher education institutions. But that won’t last forever. As the New Jersey state budget tightens, and as the value of higher education becomes polarized politically, it is becoming critically important that we reflect upon and then communicate the value of what we do. The spotlight on what we do is coming, and when that spotlight shines on Rutgers we need to be ready.

So here’s my answer from my own work and corner within Rutgers:

At CURE, we’re running to where we think the ball will be; making research more relevant for community work happening on the ground. There’s often a gap between “academic research” and the basic research needed for community organizations to affect meaningful change. That’s difference is reinforced through academic structures: the way we publish, the projects we fund, the academic journals hiding behind paywalls. There are not enough incentives to encourage academics to conduct research that’s meaningful on the ground.

I’m proud of our partners here at CURE – especially Rutgers’ Urban Innovation Fund and the Rutgers Equity Alliance for Community Health — both of which require community partners to be included and paid in research they fund. I’m proud we’ve built our own models that support research that contributes to community work, including our Community First Fellowships, our partnership to fund community-engaged scholarship with the South Jersey Institute for Population Health, and the myriad of young scholars we’re training to conduct meaningful, on-the-ground dissertations.

Reorienting research to be useful on the ground isn’t the only answer for universities who have to defend the value of research on their campuses. But it’s one I’m proud of.

– Dr. Stephen Danley, Director, CURE

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.