Livier Gutiérrez

Prior to entering the doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles, Livier worked on applied research and direct-service work to make community violence prevention services more responsive to girls. She served as the director of programs at Alliance for Girls, the nation’s largest alliance of girl-serving organizations, as the director of violence prevention at Enlace Chicago, a community-based organization serving La Villita (a.k.a., Chicago’s Little Village community); and a researcher at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a national applied research non-profit and policy organization.  

Livier earned her master’s degree in social work with a concentration in violence prevention from the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration and bachelor’s degree in sociology and social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Livier’s undergraduate research explored the ideology, structure, and recruitment strategies of The Minutemen, a militant xenophobic organization (a.k.a., a gang). As a master’s student, Livier’s thesis was an applied research project that explored girls’ involvement and association with youth-led street organizations (a.k.a., gangs) and resulted in a violence-prevention program for girls. Through community work, Livier has seen how school, family, and other systems take key aspects of a girls’ identity—like race, immigration status, sexual orientation, and gender identity—to impose social and economic constraints on them. Despite the constraints placed on them, Livier has also seen how girls use their power to make systems safer for themselves and others. Livier is interested in leveraging mixed methods, with a focus on action research, and theory to highlight the experiences and stories of girls, especially their ability to change their ecology and improve safety for themselves and others. In doing so, Livier hopes to advance social work’s violence prevention theory, methods, and practice.