Category: News

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

 

I want to talk about what it means to do bottom-up, community-engaged work, and how our recent creation of the Partnership Development Award with the South Jersey Institute of Population Health (SJIPH) furthers that mission. I hope you’ll consider applying for that funding – and that these reflections help you understand why we are providing $5,000 awards to community organizations to start to build relationships with universities.   

I use the language of bottom-up, community-engaged research because I believe in community. I’ve always held these values – whether it be in the faith-filled communities I grew up in, Northwest Philadelphia where I was an AmeriCorps Vista and community organizer, or New Orleans where I worked with neighborhood associations after Hurricane Katrina. In those places, much like in South Jersey, top-down solutions have negative impacts. Too often they undermine trust, have unfunded mandates, or create as many problems as they solve.   

As a researcher, it’s hard to engage in bottom-up work. Our jobs depend on publishing academic work, and academic publishing too often stays in its silos instead of participating in solutions. Engagement and relationship-building take time and resources, two scarce commodities. At the most basic level, this is the key to CURE’s work. If we are going to be a partner in bottom-up solutions, we need to find ways to unlock resources that support that work.   

That’s why I’m so proud of the work we’re doing with the South Jersey Institute of Population Health (SJIPH). CURE has been supporting SJIPH’s evaluation of its initial 11 grants. On October 11th, we hosted an event to share those findings. There were some incredible projects – from the use of augmented reality to better understand the opioid crisis to a program to provide trauma-informed training to teachers. You can read about that work in our 2024 SJIPH Impact Report.

We also shared what we’d learned about our own grant-making process. The mission of SJIPH is to fund community-engaged research projects that address health disparities in South Jersey. But we had pockets of communities that we weren’t reaching – particularly in rural communities. We want to increase funding for those projects – but we’re also realistic. To do so, we have to support new partnerships in communities with fewer connections to Rutgers and Rowan. In other words, the relationships aren’t there yet, and that’s where the work starts.   

That’s how we came up with the idea for the Partnership Development Awards. The premise of these awards is simple: authentic, bottom-up work requires relationships, and relationship-building takes time and resources. These awards for $5,000 support just that. They acknowledge that if you work in a grassroots organization and some of your staff is part-time, it costs the organization to build these relationships. That while Zoom is great, sometimes you need to meet in person; so the awards can be used for lunch or travel costs. The $5,000 Partnership Development Award recognizes the resources required to do this work and provides support to build relationships with folks at Rowan and Rutgers so that our collective work can improve.  

We’ve put together a simple application process, with unintrusive reporting and technical support so that community organizations can meet faculty members from our institutions to explore this work together. If you’re a community organization, we hope you’ll apply. If you’re a professor and interested in this work, reach out to us here at CURE – we have an intake process to help match you with community organizations.   

Most importantly, thank you. This is our small way at SJIPH and CURE to acknowledge and support how important relationship building is to bottom-up, community-engaged research. We hope you join us on this journey.   

– Stephen Danley

A year ago, I was named director here at CURE. As we enter my second year on the job, I want to share my reflections on the past year, and where we’re going.  

The biggest thing I learned at CURE in year one was that our community partners are asking for movement work, not service work. Rutgers does a lot of great volunteering and service, but our partners have been asking us for work that contributes to something bigger. That means taking on research projects that contribute to a wider mission and movement.  

The through line in much our community-engaged research is that something bigger. Over this year, we’ll be sharing reflections from members of our research teams. But to start the year, I wanted to provide you with a snapshot of what community-engagement that is movement-focused looks like:  

 – Our research with One Camden is producing an educational equity analysis of Camden’s unique universal enrollment system. In April, we presented preliminary findings at the Urban Affairs Association Conference. We’re sharpening those findings, and setting up a meeting with stakeholders at the Camden School District so that our findings about the challenges of Spanish-speaking households in navigating Camden’s school choice eco-system can impact policy. 

 – We’ve worked with the South Jersey Institute for Population Health (SJIPH) and will be launching a partnership formation award this Fall that recognizes and funds the work that community organizations put into partnering with academics at Rutgers University-Camden and Rowan University. I’m really excited about this model!  

 – This October, we’ll be partnering with Mighty Writers to launch a youth participatory planning project to help build the drumbeat for a community-owned grocery store in Camden. That project, let by CURE Graduate Assistant Melissa Thompson, has already been highlighted by TapInto Camden.  

 – Our Who Owns Camden? project builds on the success of research by Rutgers in Newark. By working with the Camden Community Development Association, we’ve identified that multiple LLCs are being used to mask corporate purchases from larger corporations. We’ll be releasing more on that study soon.  

– Over the summer, we had 13 Community First Fellows placed in community organizations and trained in community-engaged pedagogies. We’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback about how these placements helped organizations expand their capacity and continue their good work. Many have already asked when they can next receive a fellow.  

There are more projects than just those, and through the year you’ll be hearing about them. I’m extremely proud of this research. For each of these projects we sat down with community folks and talked about what research could mean for community work that was already happening. In doing so, we imagined projects that support local work while also producing academic knowledge.  

That’s why we say CURE is a place where community work and research go hand-in-hand.  

This Tuesday (September 10th, 4-6pm) we’ll be celebrating that work with our Fall Friends of CURE event. It’s the first of many chances to meet the community we’re building, get involved, and join the movement. I hope you’ll join us.  

– Stephen