Meet our Leaders

Laura Lein is the Katherine Reebel Collegiate Professor of Social Work and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is also an affiliate of the Poverty Solutions Initiative at the University of Michigan and the National Center for Institutional Diversity. Her work concentrates on the interface between families in poverty, and the program, policies and institutions that are supposed to serve them. She is a co-author of Community Lost: The State, Civil Society, and Displaced Survivors of Hurricane Katrina (Cambridge University Press), Life After Welfare: Unfinished Business (University of Texas Press, and Poor Families in America's Health Care Crisis (Cambridge University Press). Her current work includes an examination of the disenfranchisement from voting that faces many groups of impoverished citizens and the experiences and antecedents of panhandling in the United States.

https://ssw.umich.edu/faculty/profiles/tenure-track/leinl

Jennifer Romich is Associate Professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Washington. She is also a founding affiliate of the West Coast Poverty Center, and an active member of Center for Studies of Demography and Ecology. Her work concentrates on families' economic lives and resources, with an emphasis on low-income workers, household budgets, and families' interactions with public policy. Recent publications include "Local Mandate Improves Equity of Paid Sick Leave Coverage: Seattle's Experience" (BMC Public Health) and Dual-system Families: Cash Assistance Sequences of Households Involved with Child Welfare (Journal of Public Child Welfare). Her current work examines the implications of the tax system of low-income families and the financial services used by low-income consumers.

Trina Shanks is a Professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. She is an affiliate of the Poverty Solutions Initiative and Youth Policy Lab as well as a Faculty Associate of the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan; and a Faculty Director of Inclusion in Asset Building with the Center for Social Development at Washington University’s Brown School. Her research interests include the impact of poverty and wealth on child well-being; asset-building policy and practice across the life cycle; and community and economic development. She is co-editor of The Assets Perspective: The Rise of Asset Building and its Impact on Social Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and co-author of A Twenty-First Century Approach to Community Change: Partnering to Improve Life Outcomes for Youth and Families in Under-Served Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2017). Her recent work includes a long-term follow up of pre-school MI-SEED participants as they enter high school with 529 college savings accounts and evaluation of summer youth employment programming in Detroit, MI.

https://ssw.umich.edu/faculty/profiles/tenure-track/trwilli