Weekly Content

Presenter: Washieka Torres

Presenter: Dr. David Stovall

David Stovall, Ph.D. is a professor in the department of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).  His scholarship investigates three areas 1) Critical Race Theory, 2) the relationship between housing and education, and 3) the intersection of race, place and school. In the attempt to bring theory to action, he works with community organizations and schools to address issues of equity, justice and abolishing the school/prison nexus.  His work led him to become a member of the design team for the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice (SOJO), which opened in the Fall of 2005. Furthering his work with communities, students, and teachers, his work manifests itself in his involvement with the Peoples Education Movement, a collection of classroom teachers, community members, students and university professors in Chicago, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area who engage in collaborative community projects centered in creating relevant curriculum.  In addition to his duties and responsibilities as a professor at UIC, he also served as a volunteer social studies teacher at the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice from 2005-2018.  

Presenter: huu nguyen, Ph.D. 

huu nguyen is a community organizer, cultural worker, social architect, and a Restorative Justice facilitator who was born in central Vietnam, grew up in Salisbury, NC, and politicized in Chicago. After receiving three B.S. degrees in Botany, Biological Sciences and Biochemistry from North Carolina State University in 2000, she relocated to CHicago in 2001 as a doctoral student in the Department of Pharmacognosy (concentrating in medical ethnobotany) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she received her Ph.D in 2008.

Her passion is ideating and co-creating systems that are life-affirming, while simultaneously addressing and reducing harm in the predominant systems. As one among a few handfuls of women in the U.S. who is a contra mestra in Capoeira Angola, a cultural practice that emerged in response to the violence of the slave system in Brazil, she is devoted to sharing its liberatory practice as a pathway towards both individual and collective healing, as well as mutual liberation. 

In order to be fully present for her teenage daughters and extended family, she recently stepped down as the director of youth development at Palenque LSNA (formerly known as Logan Square Neighborhood Association), where she organized around healing-centered engagement and restorative justice practices in Chicago Public Schools. She lives on the south side of Chicago, with her two teens and husband, and enjoys walking on her hands and singing to her plants. 

Presenter: Dr. Julie Maslowsky

Julie Maslowsky, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences. Dr. Maslowsky is a developmental psychologist and population health scientist who studies the development of adolescent health and health behaviors, with a focus on sexual and reproductive health, contraception, and abortion. She applies her findings to develop interventions to promote health and reduce health disparities in adolescence and beyond. She centers reproductive justice in her approach to sexual and reproductive health promotion. Her work includes projects in the United States, Ecuador, and Mexico. Dr. Maslowsky's research has been funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, and Society for Family Planning. She is a former member of the Executive Board of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science, C0-Director of the Special Interest Group on Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health at the Society for Family Planning, and a leader of Youth Reproductive Equity, a national collaborative of researchers, physicians, advocates, and youth. 

Presenter: Nicholas Metheny, Ph.D., MPH, RN

Nick Metheny is a tenure-track Assistant Professor and early-career nurse-scientist  at University of Miami whose work focuses on preventing and mitigating intimate partner violence (IPV) in women and sexual and gender minorities globally. He obtained a PhD in Nursing Science from the University of Michigan in 2019 before completing a postdoctoral fellowship in Population Health at the St. Michael’s Hospital-University of Toronto funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He also holds a Master of Public Health in Global Health Policy from the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Arts from The College of William and Mary.

Dr. Metheny’s research aims to understand and mitigate the harms of IPV in women and sexual and gender minorities, especially HIV risk, while simultaneously working toward building primary prevention interventions that alter the underlying, structural forces that lead to IPV and other gendered forms of violence. Much of his work concentrates on multiply marginalized populations in South Florida and Southern Africa and has been funded by Canadian and US federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Metheny currently teaches in the undergraduate public health program. He regularly teaches Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and Introduction to Health Policy. He also provides seminars and guest lectures on community-partnered research, health disparities, and violence and health. 

Presenter: Alejandra Oliva

Alejandra Oliva is the Community Engagement Manager at the National Immigrant Justice Center. In her spare time, she is a writer and translator. Her book, Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration is forthcoming in June from Astra House Books.

Link to NICJ website for more information: https://immigrantjustice.org/ 

Presenter: Elena Grossman, MPH

Presenters speaking on the Evanston Guaranteed Income Program from Northwestern

Sheridan Fuller

Sheridan's (he/him) research addresses U.S. social infrastructure’s potential to promote families’ well-being while acknowledging its pitfalls. He studies children’s and families’ interactions with income support programs, focusing on the effect of these programs on children’s long-term outcomes. Sheridan's prior work as a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) informs his research agenda and goal of troubling the narrow foci of income support programs, specifically cash assistance programs, only impacting individual's employment and earnings. Thus, building on literature that expands our understanding of these programs' effectiveness while also addressing an important driver of inequity and the consequences of historical and racially linked income support policies. 

Phoebe Lin

Phoebe (she/they) thinks about intersectionality and policy feedback, in particular how policies construct target populations and how these constructions unevenly shape distributions of benefits and burdens according to race, gender, sexuality, and class hierarchies which in turn shape political engagement and collective action. As a child of immigrants from Taiwan, she is passionate about the policy experiences of (im)migrant women of color and the ways they engage politically. They hope their work can help build just, inclusive, and caring communities and move toward systems structured around relationality and care rather than extraction. 

Claire Mackevicius

Claire (she/her) thinks about how power & policy influence hidden sources of funds especially in educational spaces, and how this entrenches socially constructed hierarchies. In dissertation projects, she studies private money at public K-12 schools (including Parent Teacher Organizations and "Friends Of" groups) and how that can reinforce economic and racial hierarchies. She has ongoing collaborations also focused on consequential distribution decisions, from school boards allocating public resources to large foundations granting private dollars to an evaluation of Evanston's Guaranteed Income pilot program. Through these projects, Claire aims to uncover how unofficial and often unseen resources reinforce particular agendas and entrench inequities. She also works to surface serious possibilities and pathways toward challenging those inequities. She is proud to be one of the six-person organizing team of the Quant for What? collective planting and nourishing seeds as we dream and build quantitative paradigms for antiracist transformation, bringing power awareness and a humanizing approach to the burgeoning critical quantitative education subfield. 

Jeffrey Thomas

Jeff (he/him) thinks about poverty and its downstream effects on both a micro and societal level. He is interested in how policy decisions impact poverty and is passionate about solutions that both reduce poverty and provide agency to those most marginalized. He believes equitable economic rights are as vital as civil rights, and that without them, we subject our own citizens to dehumanization and exploitation. He believes Guaranteed Income can be a tool to address existing economic inequities. and is proud to be involved in the growing number of pilot programs nationwide. Additionally, Jeff is passionate about community building. He is part of Leadership Evanston, a program centered around civic engagement, and coaches youth basketball. 

Presenter: A'Keisha Lee, MPH

A'Keisha (she/her) is Soul's South Suburban Community & Congregational Organizer. A'Keisha is from the south suburbs of Chicago. A'Keisha credits her early passion for mutual aid and human dignity to her upbringing in  Church. The church exposed A'Keisha to the power of community and the importance of caring for our neighbors.

She comes to this work after earning a Master's in Public Health from Saint Louis University. While completing her studies, A'Keisha engaged in student and community efforts to expand Medicaid in Missouri and address racial health disparities in Saint Louis City.

At Soul, A'Keisha plans to create campaigns that challenge us to imagine a society where we are all safe, housed, supported, and treated with dignity.

Outside of work, A'Keisha enjoys creative activities like theatre, singing, and writing. 

Presenter: Arturo Carrillo, Ph.D., LCSW

Arturo Carrillo, Ph.D., LCSW is a licensed clinical social worker and Director of Health and Violence Prevention at Brighton Park Neighborhood Council. He has led the Collaborative for Community Wellness to research and document the inequity of access to quality mental health services throughout low-income communities throughout the city and advocates for the creation of a city-wide non-police crisis response program grounded in an expanded publicly-operated mental health system in Chicago through the Treatment Not Trauma campaign. 

Action Lab Facilitator: Dolores Castañeda, MPH

Dolores is a long-time Little Village community member and a faith-based organizer.  She is a tireless advocate for homeless people and can be regularly found feeding and clothing the homeless in her community.  She is the co-founder of Padres Angeles, an organization that supports families who have lost their children to gun violence. Dolores is also a fierce advocate for street vendors.  She recently graduated from the Master of Public Health program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Her capstone project titled “Promoting Healthy Work in the Informal Work Sector: A Health Assessment of Street Vendors in Little Village” explores the health needs and assets of street vendors and identifies effective, sustainable health promotion strategies. 

Action Lab Facilitator: Jennifer Plascencia Lopez

Jennifer Plascencia is a graduate research assistant pursuing her Masters in Public Health with a focus on Community Health Sciences. She received her Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan in 2019. As a Chicago native, Jennifer recognized the health and social inequities impacting her community, and her interest in learning about public health ensued. In addition to her interest in learning about community health, Jennifer is passionate about supporting youth in pursuing higher education, as level of education has significant implications on health. Jennifer aims to utilize her knowledge in public health to serve her community in bringing health equity and social justice. 

Presenter: Tiffany N. Ford, MPH, PhD

Tiffany N. Ford, MPH, PhD is a mixed methods public health and policy researcher and advocate who grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago. She works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Brookings Institution and is an incoming (Fall 2023) Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. Tiffany’s research agenda explores how racism shapes subjective well-being for Black people in the United States and considers how racism operates via policy, governance, and social norms to unequally distribute the things we need to be well. Ongoing relationships with community-based organizations, community-led coalitions, and people navigating structural oppression inform her advocacy aimed at policy interventions to advance health equity at institutional, systems, local, and state levels. Tiffany earned her PhD in Policy Studies from the University of Maryland College Park, her Master of Public Health from the University of Illinois at Chicago (where she served as a Radical Public Health facilitator), and bachelors at the University of Miami.