News and Events

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. 

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