UCLA Grants Deepen Ties to the L.A. Community Projects by Luskin faculty will build collaboration among scholars, students and local partners

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The first goal of UCLA’s Strategic Plan is deepening collaborations and connections with Los Angeles. This academic year, several UCLA Luskin faculty are helping the university meet that mark.

As recipients of grants from the UCLA Center for Community Engagement, these faculty will explore ways to strengthen ties between community partners and UCLA students and scholars, with the goal of finding solutions to L.A.’s most pressing issues.

This year, the UCLA Community-Engaged Research Grants will fund exploratory projects including:

Achieving and Implementing Abolition in Los Angeles

Co-Principal Investigators: David C. Turner III, assistant professor of social welfare, and Kelly Lytle Hernandez, professor of history, African American studies and urban planning

Community Partners: Justice LA; Check the Sheriff’s Coalition; Police-Free LAUSD Coalition; People’s Budget LA Coalition; PUSH LA Coalition; LA Youth Uprising Coalition

Million Dollar Hoods is a UCLA research project that advances the labors of activists and advocates working to change how public dollars are spent in Los Angeles. In particular, it advances the work of those seeking to reduce criminal justice budgets while expanding health services, housing options, welfare benefits and employment opportunities. This grant will fund a deep strategic planning and research process focused on implementing community-led policy initiatives that reallocate public resources to supporting human-centered services.

Aligning Housing Policy With Popular Demand for More Housing

Co-Principal Investigators: Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, associate professor of public policy, and Paavo Monkkonen, professor of urban planning and public policy

Community Partner: Abundant Housing Los Angeles

Angelenos understand the scarcity of housing and want to see more constructed. According to a November 2020 survey by the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, 64% of Angelenos call increasing housing supply a top or high priority. Support for more housing is one of the few bipartisan policy issues in the country, yet new housing construction in Los Angeles remains at multi-decade lows and rents and housing prices continue to rise. Untangling this puzzle is the focus of this community research.

Building Urban Soil Networks in Los Angeles for Research and Action

Co-Principal Investigators: Kirsten Schwarz, associate professor of urban planning and environmental health sciences, and Jennifer Jay, professor of civil and environmental engineering

Community Partners: TreePeople; Physicians for Social Responsibility – LA; Communities for a Better Environment; Watts Labor Community Action Committee – Better Watts Initiative

Urban soils are an important regional and national equity concern that shape the health and well-being of urban dwellers. They also represent a paradox of sorts, as contaminated soils are a hazard and clean soils are beneficial to the ecosystem. This project brings together community groups active in urban soils work in the L.A. region to build relationships, identify potential collaborations, and begin the process of coalescing around a common set of research priorities and actions.

Building Worker Power: Support for Low-Wage Worker Leadership With the Los Angeles Worker Center Network

Co-Principal Investigators: Chris Zepeda-Millan, associate professor of public policy, Chicano/a and Central American studies and political science, and chair of UCLA’s Labor Studies program; and Tobias Higbie, professor of history and director of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

Community Partners: Los Angeles Worker Center Network, including: CLEAN CarWash Worker Center; Garment Worker Center; Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance; Los Angeles Black Worker Center; Pilipino Workers Center; Restaurant Opportunities Center Los Angeles; Warehouse Workers Resource Center

The UCLA Labor Center, a founding member of the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, seeks to document best practices around multi-racial, multi-industry, multi-language organizing in support of labor standards, immigrant rights and anti-discrimination enforcement. In this project, researchers and worker centers will determine the best methods — such as popular education, storytelling, academic journals and social media — to document successful and replicable L.A. worker campaigns since 2009. They will also implement legal clinics and provide technical assistance to local agencies enforcing fair labor laws.

Healing Within While Incarcerated: The Role of Credible Messengers in Transformative Justice in L.A. County

Co-Principal Investigators: Lauren Ng, assistant professor of psychology, and Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare

Community Partner: Healing Dialogue and Action

Incarcerated youth experience a multitude of poor social, emotional and physical health outcomes after detention. To address these concerns, Los Angeles County has adopted a “rehabilitative, care-first model” of juvenile justice that is being implemented by Credible Messengers — leaders with the lived experience of incarceration. There has been limited academic collaboration investigating Credible Messenger programs. This partnership with an organization working in county juvenile justice facilities will advance the science behind the Credible Messenger approach with the aim of promoting healing of justice-involved youth.

Housing and Homelessness Justice Research Collaborative

Co-Principal Investigators: Chris Herring, assistant professor of sociology, and Ananya Roy, professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography

Community Partners: LA Tenants Union; Union de Vecinos

This grant supports a recently established collaborative partnership between UCLA faculty and the Downtown local of the LA Tenants Union. The funds will allow the partners to broaden a study of Los Angeles’ Permanent Supportive Housing initiative to address homelessness. Despite billions of dollars recently committed to this initiative, no research to date has examined its success or weaknesses. The UCLA grant will allow additional community partners to participate and aid the collaborative in envisioning a multi-year tenant justice research agenda.

Interdisciplinary Center on Housing and Homelessness

Co-Principal Investigators: Till von Wachter, professor of economics; Michael Lens, professor of urban planning and public policy; and Elizabeth Bromley, professor in residence of psychiatry and anthropology

Community Partners: Individual community members; Los Angeles Homelessness Services Authority; L.A. County Department of Health Services; L.A. County Department of Mental Health; L.A. County Department of Social Services

L.A.’s housing and homelessness crises are caused by a complex web of factors ranging from lack of housing production and zoning policies to structural racism in labor markets and justice systems. This project focuses on developing an interdisciplinary center that brings research communities together with people with lived experience of homelessness and policymakers from Los Angeles government and nonprofit agencies. The project emphasizes structural reforms needed to reduce homelessness and aims to inform the public debate by replacing misconceptions with data and research.

Previous awards from the UCLA Center for Community Engagement supported the development of two courses designed to immerse undergraduates in community-engaged research. The grants went to Associate Professor of Public Policy Meredith Phillips, who developed a course on data analysis for educational research, and Associate Professor of Social Welfare Lené Levy-Storms, who developed a course on human aging through an interdisciplinary lens.

Read about all of the 2024-25 Community-Engaged Research Exploratory Grants.

Honors for UCLA Luskin Social Welfare Professor and Alumna

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Two members of the UCLA Luskin Social Welfare community have been honored by the California Social Welfare Archives (CSWA).

Professor Laura Abrams received the Frances Lomas Feldman Award in recognition of her lifetime of work as an educator and researcher. And Aurea Montes-Rodriguez MSW ’99, a vice president at the nonprofit First 5 LA, received the George D. Nickel Award for outstanding professional services by a social worker.

CSWA cited Abrams’ work as an “esteemed social worker who has focused on improving the well-being of youth and adults with histories of incarceration.”

Aurea Montes-Rodriguez MSW ’99 was honored for her career serving Los Angeles’ families.

Abrams, introduced by longtime UCLA Luskin Social Welfare colleague Gerry Laviña, told the gathering that she was honored to receive an award named after Feldman, a social work trailblazer in Los Angeles.

“Working over 50 years, from 1940-1992, she had to innovate to a rapidly evolving society, such as the war on poverty, the movements for civil rights that swept the nation and the growing role of women in the workplace,” Abrams said. She called on social workers to follow Feldman’s lead and meet today’s challenges with determination and creativity.

The CSWA awards committee said Montes-Rodriguez “has a passion for building African American and Latino leadership, capacity and strategies that are inclusive and effective toward community transformation.”

After more than 25 years at the nonprofit Community Coalition, she is now vice president of community engagement and policy at First 5 LA, supporting the region’s youngest children and their families and catalyzing public policy efforts at the local, state and federal levels.

A Feb. 27 luncheon celebrated the achievements of Abrams, Montes-Rodriguez and a third honoree, Andrea Garcia, a physician specialist at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. Garcia received the George Nickel Award for outstanding contributions to social welfare for her work with American Indian and Alaska Native communities.

 

Abrams on the Decline of Juvenile Incarceration in the United States

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Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare at UCLA Luskin, was a guest on a KQED Forum broadcast on the significant decline in juvenile incarceration from 2000-2020 in the United States. Abrams was part of an expert panel discussing shifts in the juvenile justice system and what has been learned about youth crime and incarceration during that time period. There is no one solution, magic or panacea, she pointed out. “Does treatment always work? No. Does punishment work? Not usually on its own,” said the author of two books on the subject: Everyday Desistance: The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth (2017) and Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C (2013). “The goal here is to reduce the harmful effects and still promote accountability and have a system rooted in care and compassion for the young people in the system to help mitigate some of the detrimental effects,” she said.

Listen to the episode

 

Abrams on Promoting Justice for Troubled Youth

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A Social Work Advocates article on efforts to help youth navigate the juvenile justice system cited Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare at UCLA Luskin. At universities around the country, social workers are being trained in more holistic strategies and practices to advocate for troubled youth. One role of school social workers is helping youth on probation or who are reentering their community following incarceration to “get readmitted into schools and to feel safe there,” said Abrams, who herself was a school social worker while getting her MSW. California recently closed its major youth correctional facilities, and Abrams’ current research is focused on “how counties can receive some of those young people and have the right types of institutions and rehabilitation programs.” She is also studying the experiences of about 1,000 people who were sentenced as teenagers to life without parole but were ultimately released. Social Work Advocates is a publication of the National Association of Social Workers.

Read the article

 

New Study Provides First Nationwide Window on Juvenile Lifer Population The most comprehensive tracking effort to date looks at resentencing, release and other key outcome data, including mortality and exonerations

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By Stan Paul

A newly published study in the Journal of Criminal Justice provides a picture of a unique subset of incarcerated people across the United States — juvenile lifers — or the more than 2,900 minors given juvenile life without parole sentences since the first was meted out in the late 1940s.

The open-access study originated from a grant awarded to Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare, to lead an extensive national study of young people who are ultimately given a chance at freedom after having been sentenced to life in prison.

The study is the first to supply concrete numbers and a full demographic profile of the Juvenile Life Without Parole, or JLWOP, population. It includes information on resentencing and release statuses, plus other key outcomes such as mortality and exonerations.

“The present study offers the most comprehensive national tracking effort of the JLWOP population to date,” the researchers wrote.

The study provides time-series views into core outcomes and considers variation in state-level policy contexts and resentencing mechanisms.

“We are looking at this group as a case study to look at positive outcomes of resentencing that may eventually be applied to other lifers,” Abrams said. “We have a unique group based on their age of conviction, but our research is relevant to second chances and resentencing laws and policies writ large.”

Abrams noted that more than half of all current U.S. prisoners are serving sentences of 10 years or more. Consequently, the study has the potential to inform policies related to prisoners serving long sentences and the thousands — one in seven people in prison — currently serving life terms. Ongoing national efforts to end mass incarceration have largely focused on the decarceration of people imprisoned for nonviolent felony offenses.

This publication is part of a three-year study funded by the Houston-based philanthropy Arnold Ventures. It is an ongoing effort to build a base of knowledge that supports safe and equitable sentencing and second-look policies for people sentenced to life for offenses committed before they were 18 years old, Abrams said.

Many juvenile offenders already have spent years or decades behind bars, and others have passed away, Abrams noted.

The research team includes experts from UCLA, the University of Cincinnati, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University and Temple University, representing disciplines such as social work, human development and behavior, public health and criminology. Abrams and an interdisciplinary team of scholars from across the country are also studying juvenile lifers who were convicted of homicide after being tried in adult criminal courts.

The researchers point out that the United States is the only developed nation in the world that sentences minors to life without parole, a policy that conflicts with provisions of international law. For example, Article 37 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits life sentences for juveniles, which is considered a major human rights issue.

In the United States, harsh sentences for youth convicted of violent offenses increased dramatically with tough on crime policies in the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, two U.S. Supreme Court rulings, known as the Miller and Montgomery cases, found mandatory life sentences for minors unconstitutional, which has led to the resentencing and subsequent release of many.

To identify this subset, the team cross-referenced data to identify the JLWOP population starting at the time of the first Supreme Court case, Miller v. Alabama, in 2012 to build a demographic profile and track resentencing, release and mortality statuses. Statistics and data visualization were used to establish baselines at the national and state levels.

Since the rulings, more than 2,500 individuals have been resentenced and more than 1,000 have been released, the research team found. They also noted significant variations by state in the number of JLWOP sentences, the extent to which JLWOP is still allowed, the mechanisms for sentence review, and the percentages of juvenile lifers released.

Because the findings demonstrate variability in how states have responded to the federal mandates set by Miller and Montgomery, challenges and opportunities for policy reform exist, according to the researchers.

Although California is among the top five states nationwide by cumulative population of juvenile lifers, the state “has effectively resentenced everyone,” the researchers reported. States such as Alabama and North Carolina have taken a slower approach with resentencing, contributing to low rates of release.

“Every state has different laws, with California being somewhat ahead of the curve on sentencing reforms for JLWOP. This is why we look nationally but also state-by-state,” Abrams said.

“There has been a dizzying amount of variety in how states have responded to the Supreme Court cases, and how those responses have shifted over time,” said co-researcher Rebecca Turner, an attorney and associate legal director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. “Since every state has its own criminal code, parole procedures and sentencing procedures, the process for resentencing and resentencing outcomes have varied widely across the country.”

For example, some states retain life without parole as an option for people under 18 but now require a discretionary sentencing process that considers several factors that relate to youth, Turner explained. In such states, individualized resentencings for individuals already serving such a sentence are therefore necessary.

“This has been the case in some states with the largest JLWOP populations, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania,” she said.

Turner noted that based on underlying brain science, reforms to include young adults between ages 18 and 25 have been expanded in some jurisdictions, including California, Connecticut and the District of Columbia. A few states have taken no action in response to the Supreme Court decisions, she said. At least one is challenging the legal precedent.

“The variety in legislative responses and associated procedures has been hugely influential in terms of resentencing and release outcomes, so the work of our group to analyze these complex policy responses alongside broader data trends will be critical in assessing the current landscape, as well as future policy,” Turner said.

Abrams said that the next step is developing a survey tool to reach the 2,900 individuals who were found, of which roughly 1,800 are still incarcerated.

Poco Kernsmith Appointed New Chair of Social Welfare Alumna will return to her doctoral alma mater this summer as a professor

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By Stan Paul

Poco Kernsmith, a social welfare scholar from the University of Texas at Arlington, has been appointed to serve as the next chair of UCLA Luskin Social Welfare.

Kernsmith, who earned her PhD in social welfare at UCLA Luskin in 2002, currently serves as the doctoral program director at UT Arlington’s School of Social Work. Previously, she was a longtime faculty member at Wayne State University in Michigan, where she recently finished a second master’s degree in public health focused on public health methods.

Originally from Minnesota, she graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 1994 with a bachelor’s in psychology and women’s studies, then earned a master’s in social work at the University of Michigan in 1995.

“We are excited to welcome Poco to Luskin this summer,” announced Interim Dean Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris. Kernsmith will officially join the UCLA Luskin Social Welfare faculty as professor and chair on July 1.

Kernsmith said in an interview that she is looking forward to coming back to the Westwood campus after more than two decades and getting reacquainted with the Luskin School.

“Really, I want to understand this whole experience and the people who are in the School and the students, so that I can get a big-picture understanding of what’s happening now.”

Loukaitou-Sideris noted Kernsmith’s expertise in violence prevention, school-based violence interventions and intimate partner violence. Her research has received substantial funding and recognition from federal sources, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In 2020, she received $2.25 million in federal funding to strengthen violence prevention and response efforts in Michigan schools. Other CDC support has included a $1-million grant for Supporting Healthy Adolescent Relationships and Environments (SHARE), which explored causes of intimate partner violence and identified school connectedness, parental engagement, hopefulness and community involvement as important protective factors for preventing violence perpetration among youth.

Kernsmith’s current work involves the analysis of school policy to create inclusive, trauma-informed environments to prevent and respond to violence or threats of violence in middle and high schools. Other areas of her research include sexual health education, hate-motivated violence and domestic terrorism.

“She will also bring her leadership experience in directing the PhD program at UT Arlington for the past two years and her experience for 20 years prior to this, as a scholar, teacher and faculty member at Wayne State University School of Social Work,” Loukaitou-Sideris wrote in a memo announcing the appointment.

Kernsmith said she is also interested in mentorship and best practices related to graduate and doctoral students — as well as faculty — over their careers, explaining that people who are just starting out or new to a position are generally the only ones considered for mentorship.

“Mentorship is something we need across our lifespan … any time you are making a change to the next step in your career and even into retirement,” she said. “Every transition brings new questions and new opportunities.”

For Kernsmith, one of the biggest challenges in education is promoting respectful dialogue and a free exchange of ideas from different perspectives.

“How do we engage in our intellectual curiosity to better understand separate perspectives when the issues are so heated and emotional? … It’s always a balance.”

Kernsmith will step into a leadership position held by Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare, for seven years. Under Abrams’ leadership, the program saw its reputation grow, achieving the No. 8 standing among social work programs nationally in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings. During that time, UCLA Luskin Social Welfare also hired more than a dozen new faculty and graduated hundreds of skilled practitioners and scholars.

“It has been an honor to serve as the department chair in social welfare for the past seven years … and it is now time to pass the baton,” Abrams said. “I am thrilled that Dr. Kernsmith, an alumnus of our PhD program, will be joining us in the fall as our next chair.”

Social Welfare Rises to Top 8 in U.S. News Rankings Luskin School also continues to rank among the nation’s top graduate schools overall in public affairs

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UCLA Luskin’s overall ranking this year remains among the top public affairs graduate schools in the nation based on the latest U.S. News & World Report ratings released today, including a boost in ranking among social work programs to No. 8.

The School’s Social Welfare program moved up a notch nationwide, sharing its No. 8 position with Boston University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas, Austin. Among public universities, the UCLA Luskin Social Welfare program is now one of the top 5 nationwide and remains among the top 2 in California.

“It is an honor to be rated so highly by our peer institutions for our master’s in social welfare program, and that our ranking continues to climb,” said UCLA Luskin Social Welfare Professor Laura Abrams, who has served as chair for the past seven years. “Our program’s mixture of pedagogy, cutting-edge research and opportunities for leadership continue to attract an amazing group of motivated MSW students. I am very proud to see our program acknowledged on the national stage.”

The School — with graduate departments in Public Policy, Social Welfare and Urban Planning, and a Public Affairs undergraduate program — also received high marks for subcategories that include urban policy (No. 7), social policy (No. 6) and public policy analysis (No. 14).

“Our rank among top Public Affairs schools in the nation is a reflection of our commitment to excellence in research, teaching, and service to the community,” said UCLA Luskin Interim Dean Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris.

These latest rankings are calculated from qualitative ratings on academic quality submitted by top officials at colleges and universities. U.S. News surveyed deans, directors and department chairs representing 271 master’s programs in public affairs and administration, and more than 300 social work programs accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of the Council on Social Work Education. The National Association of Deans and Directors of Schools of Social Work supplied U.S. News with the lists of accredited social work schools and programs, plus the respondents’ names.

See the full list of the 2024 U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Schools. Read more about the public affairs ranking methodology.

A Push to Plant Trees in L.A.’s Hottest Places

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Edith de Guzman of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation authored a blog post on a new step-by-step framework to help residents, advocates, city leaders and planners work together on real cooling solutions in the hottest neighborhoods. “Beneath the reputation of Los Angeles as a land of cars, palms and sunshine lies a reality of stark inequalities — including access to trees and shade,” de Guzman wrote for The Equation, the blog of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Nearly 20% of L.A.’s urban forest is concentrated where only 1% of the city’s population lives, endangering lower-income communities and people of color with hotter-feeling summers and poor environmental quality.” de Guzman, a University of California Cooperative Extension specialist on water equity and adaptation policy, stressed the importance of partnering with community members to cool their neighborhoods and combat shade inequity.

Read the article

 

Abrams, 2 Emeriti Professors on List of Top 100 Social Work Scholars

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Three current and former UCLA Luskin professors are among the 100 most influential social work scholars, according to an updated ranking published in the journal Research on Social Work Practice. The list, based on citations in peer-reviewed journals that have been analyzed using several metrics, identifies “those individuals who have made substantial contributions to social work discourse over the course of their academic careers,” according to the study’s authors, David R. Hodge and Patricia R. Turner of Arizona State University. Laura Abrams, chair of UCLA Luskin Social Welfare, is ranked No. 30 on the global list of scholars. Abrams’ research focuses on improving the well-being of youth and adults with histories of incarceration. She is joined by Professors Emeriti Duncan Lindsey (No. 68), who taught at UCLA from 1996 to 2009, and the late Yeheskel “Zeke” Hasenfeld (No. 90), who taught from 1987 to 2014. “We are deeply honored by this recognition of UCLA scholars and change makers whose research and robust discourse have helped shape the field of social welfare,” said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, interim dean of the Luskin School. Social work periodicals are “a crucial repository of the profession’s knowledge … [where] ideas are proposed, interrogated, tested and refined,” Hodge and Turner wrote. “In this update, we identify the top 100 scholars whose efforts across their careers have singled them out as leading contributors to the social work profession’s knowledge base.”