Funded faculty research

The aim of this project was to pilot and assess the feasibility of a "community tech workers" model that equips Detroit residents to provide digital support to community members experiencing digital poverty.

For more than three years, U-M researchers teamed with a Detroit Low Income Housing Tax Credit task force to analyze the financing and ownership to preserve decent affordable housing.

The project seeks to understand whether educating a community about factors outside of personal choices helps change attitudes toward inequality and anti-poverty programs in the Philippines.

In the fall of 2015, Alternatives for Girls successfully piloted a new "asset building" model to encourage middle school girls and their families to academically prepare for high school, career and college, and to save for future post‐secondary education and training expenses.

In the United States, nearly half of pregnancies are unintended, and unintended pregnancies occur five times more often among poor compared to affluent women.

This project assesses Michigan's Unemployment Insurance system compared to the rest of the nation.

This project developed and fielded a survey of federal Continuums of Care from March 2020 to January 2021 to better understand: how they are organized; strengths and weaknesses they face in their task to end homelessness in their jurisdictions; and how they responded to and were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This project aimed to examine the potential for inequity resulting from variation in the actual care provided by clinicians and hospital personnel to children and their families.

Poverty Solutions is partnering with the Washtenaw County Prosecutor's Office on a data-driven project focused on uncovering potential racial disparities within the prosecutorial system and increasing the transparency and accountability of the system generally.

This project uses police body camera footage as a window onto police-citizen interactions to examine 1) racial disparities in officer communication and 2) the consequences of these differences for physiological stress and institutional trust.

The Young Black Men, Masculinities, and Mental Health (YBMen) Project is a global movement that centers the voices, experiences, and realities of Black men and boys.

This study examined how best to connect underserved job seekers with available work in the gig economy that could increase their employability and help them re-enter the job market.

A new randomized controlled trial will work with 1,500 low-wage workers across select metropolitan areas to layer job-quality signals on an AI-assisted job matching platform.

This project evaluated the impact of the Lower Eastside Economic Mobility program, which connects residents with low incomes with mentors from the community, with the goal of addressing barriers to stable employment.

The researchers found undocumented clients encounter three phases of delay: delay in the decision to seek care, delay in identifying and traveling to healthcare facilities, and delay in receiving adequate and appropriate care at healthcare facilities.

Researchers asked young people to discuss issues they observe or experience in their everyday lives and then produce videos sharing their perspective on the issues.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been especially damaging to communities of color in the United States.

This project designed and developed an intervention to assist people who are unemployed and homeless in Detroit who also are experiencing anxiety and/or depression-related barriers to employment.

While approximately 12,000 Detroit homeowners living in poverty qualify for the Poverty Tax Exemption, the policy remains underutilized by residents in need. This project evaluated the effectiveness of the policy and studied potential factors that may hinder or facilitate its access.

This project will compare the diverse ways in which previous experiences with Conditional Cash Transfers determined how COVID-19 cash assistance were envisioned and operationalized in Brazil and Colombia.

The Transportation Security Index provides a comprehensive measure of whether people can travel where they need to go, regardless of mode of travel or neighborhood context.

Researchers interviewed 23 retirees about the types and frequency of help provided to their adult children and extended kin.

Partnered with one of the world's largest garment manufacturers in India, researchers planned to run a randomized controlled trial that aimed to facilitate Indian women's rural-urban migration and assess impacts on the well-being of workers and their families.

The goal of this project is to assess the feasibility of using grocery delivery to strengthen services related to the special supplemental nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) by improving access to and use of food benefits during pregnancy.

This grant allowed Sara Heller to expand on three research projects that can provide evidence to guide the development of effective interventions aimed at youth whose families have low incomes.

The research investigates the impact of offering home visiting universally to all women, regardless of insurance status, on participation rates and the health outcomes of mothers and babies.

The goals of this project are to better understand the state of first-time homebuyer education in Detroit and to analyze public data sources that represent the state of sales and homeownership in Detroit.

The U-M Online Court Project (OCP) developed and tested an objective digital method of evaluating litigants' ability to pay.

Housing Solutions for Health Equity (HSHE) at U-M was launched in 2021 with the mission of addressing the critical intersection between housing and health equity.