
Midwest Mobility from Poverty Network
The Midwest Mobility from Poverty Network is focused on providing rapid response data and analysis to community stakeholders and policymakers who want to enhance economic mobility and decrease poverty.
Senior Strategic Projects Manager
Karen Otzen Kling is a strategic projects manager for Poverty Solutions. She previously worked as an affordable housing policy fellow within the City of Detroit’s Housing and Revitalization Department on the Policy and Implementation Team, supporting its efforts to develop plans and strategies for lasting housing affordability and single-family housing stabilization in Detroit. The fellow position is a unique partnership between the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions initiative and the city, meant to facilitate the implementation of action-oriented research. Prior to joining Poverty Solutions, Karen worked as a marketing research analyst for a consulting firm in Cincinnati and recently completed her master’s degree in urban and regional planning at U-M’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in business economics from Miami University, with a minor in international business.
The Midwest Mobility from Poverty Network is focused on providing rapid response data and analysis to community stakeholders and policymakers who want to enhance economic mobility and decrease poverty.
A partnership between researchers at Poverty Solutions and Princeton University’s Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, Understanding Deep Disadvantage seeks to unpack poverty beyond income-based measures to other dimensions of disadvantage, including health and social mobility.
Poverty Solutions and its partners have explored supportive land contracts as a path to homeownership and the policies needed to reduce abuse of predatory land contracts.