The 2026 Kohn Social Policy Conference brings together scholars, practitioners, policymakers, students, and community partners to examine pressing social policy challenges and explore how social policy can advance equity and promote human thriving.
Joan and Sanford Weill Hall
Annenberg Auditorium (1120)
This session will examine innovative policies that promote direct cash transfers and tax credits to low-income families, new mothers, and other sectors of society.
Join for a conversation with the co-authors of The Injustice of Place alongside Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan COO Nicole Sherard-Freeman. Released in August 2023, The Injustice of Place sheds light on America’s most disadvantaged communities, tracing the legacies of our nation’s places of deepest need—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families.
Join the Ford School for a two-day virtual symposium on June 16-17 on the future of our unemployment insurance (UI) system. Chaired by the Honorable Sandy Levin in partnership with Poverty Solutions Director Luke Shaefer, the symposium will consist of four panels featuring some of our nation's leading experts on UI.
In conversation with Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Professor Roberts will share more on her new book Torn Apart, and her belief that the only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities.
Reginald M. Turner (JD '87) will visit the Ford School to share more on his leadership at the ABA, and his work on some of its most pressing issues like access to legal services, judicial reform, election integrity, and the eviction crisis.
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Dean Barr will discuss Senator Warren's distinguished career as a public servant, perspectives on poverty and inequality in the United States, and her work to create a more just and equitable economic system.
Indivar Dutta-Gupta, co-executive director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty & Inequality in conversation with H. Luke Shaefer about approaches to economic redistribution.
Join Reuben J. Miller as he examines the afterlife of mass incarceration, attending to how U.S. criminal justice policy has changed the social life of the city and altered the contours of American democracy one family at a time.
For almost two decades, The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has traveled the globe to put human faces on the devastating problems plaguing the planet — from disease and poverty to violence and exploitation — and on the efforts of individuals and organizations to repair it.
Luke Shaefer, Alford A. Young Jr., and Michael S. Barr will discuss some of the ways that policymakers and communities are attempting to combat poverty during the COVID-19 crisis.
Greg Landsman, a Cincinnati city council member, will give a talk titled "Beyond School: Where to Focus Collective Action to Support Children in Poverty" as part of the 2019 Real-World Perspectives on Poverty Solutions speaker series.
In his new book, The Once and Future Worker, Manhattan Institute scholar Oren Cass challenges our basic assumptions about what prosperity means and where it comes from.
Please join Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy for a discussion with Brookings Institution Senior Fellow, Ron Haskins.
Through money bail systems, fees and fines, strictly enforced laws and regulations against behavior including trespassing and public urination that largely affect the homeless, and the substitution of prisons and jails for the mental hospitals that have traditionally served the impoverished, in one of the richest countries on Earth we have effectively made it a crime to be poor.
Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation Lecture Series
When interventions target cognitive skills or behaviors, capacities or beliefs, promising impacts at the end of the programs often disappear quickly. This paper seeks to identify the key features of interventions, as well as the characteristics and environments of the children and adolescents who participate in them, that can be expected to sustain persistently beneficial program impacts.
Authors Kathy Edin and Luke Shaefer discuss the majorn themes of their revelatory research on income inequality and extreme poverty in the United States.
Please join the National Poverty Center in welcoming Daniel Geary for panel discussion about his latest book Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and its Legacy.
Free and open to the public. Registration required. The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy will host this conference as one of the highlights of the school's year-long centennial celebrations.
