» History

In 1964, the U.S. was about two decades out of the Great Depression, the national poverty rate hovered around 19 percent, and President Lyndon Johnson was seeking ideas for a radical domestic program to inspire American voters — many of whom were still grieving the death of John F. Kennedy.
At U-M’s Spring Commencement that year, President Johnson — the first sitting president to address commencement at the university — outlined a loose plan to declare “war” on poverty and create a “Great Society.” He was elected in a landslide that fall and set about making good on his promise.
Congress responded by forming the Office of Economic Opportunity, developing policies designed to help the nation’s poor.

In 1966 and 1967, in an effort to track whether its programs actually worked, the government targeted some 30,000 American households and embarked on interviews. Understanding the value of continuing to track people in poverty, the government researchers approached Jim Morgan, an economist with the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). This eventually led to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the longest-running and most complete portrait of the economics of the American family.

As the 7th United States Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Wilbur J. Cohen was instrumental in developing both the New Deal and Great Society programs during the Johnson Administration. In December 1968, he wrote A Ten-Point Program to Abolish Poverty that future leaders used a blueprint for later legislation.
After successfully helping to create the Social Security System, he came to U-M as a professor of social work. Wilbur returned to the university as Dean of the School of Education after his service in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

A pioneer in interdisciplinary study, Max Heirich taught one of the university’s first courses specifically focused on poverty. The 1971 course, Perspectives on Poverty, used a “variety of methods to explore the phenomenon of poverty in an affluent society.”

Sheldon H. Danziger launches the Research and Training Program in Poverty and Public Policy, which is the foundation for U-M’s National Poverty Center. The program provided mentorship and support for over 50 postdoctoral fellows and doctoral students on the causes and consequences of urban poverty.

The National Institute of Mental Health, the Center on Poverty, Risk, and Mental Health operated for seven years expanding knowledge for research and practice on the relationship between poverty and mental health. The Center’s mission was to facilitate scholarship concerning the linkages between poverty and mental health; to develop a core faculty of social work researchers in this area; and to contribute to knowledge relevant for practice and policy.

The Women’s Employment Study combines the insights of poverty researchers, epidemiologists, and social workers by analyzing the ways in which a broad range of labor market, mental health, physical health, and family problems affect a welfare recipient’s ability to obtain and retain employment overtime.
Led by the National Poverty Center, the study examined women who resided in one urban county and received cash welfare in February 1997 through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
The study resulted in dozens of widely-cited journal articles, dissertation chapters and books. And results were replicated by other welfare policy researchers and influenced policy thinking about welfare mothers whose health and mental health problems kept them from working even when the unemployment rate was low.

The National Poverty Center (NPC) at U-M’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy was established in the fall of 2002 as a university-based, nonpartisan research center. NPC conducted and promoted multidisciplinary, policy-relevant research, mentored and trained emerging scholars, and informed public discourse on the causes and consequences of poverty.
The NPC encouraged and enabled younger scholars to develop interests, skills, and expertise in poverty research, many of whom have gone on to leadership positions across the country.
Sheldon Danziger, currently the President of the Russell Sage Foundation, led the evolution of the National Poverty Center as the Henry J. Meyer Distinguished University Professor of Public Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Research Professor at the Population Studies Center, and Director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan.

Supported by the Rackham Graduate School, the Interdisciplinary Group on Poverty and Inequality provided a forum for graduate and professional students from all disciplines to discuss literature and to present original research on issues of poverty, inequality and disparity.

Led by the School of Social Work, Learning Community on Poverty & Inequality promotes opportunities to link the research, policy and service, and teaching interests of faculty for whom poverty and inequality are some of the compelling core roots of their scholarship.
Michigan Recession and Recovery Study (MRRS) panel study to better understand how the Great Recession that officially lasted from December 2007 through January 2009, and the collapse of stock and housing prices during this period have affected the wellbeing of workers and families.