Conducting Research on Biracial and Multiracial Children and Families with Dr. Sarah Gaither.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

A quarterly meeting for all employees of the Center for Child and Family Policy.

This event will celebrate the achievements of two distinguished scholars, Dr. Anna Gassman-Pines and Dr. Jennifer Lansford, who have been recognized with prestigious awards from the American Psychological Association’s Division 7 for their outstanding contributions to the field of developmental science. Both Gassman-Pines and Lansford have demonstrated an unwavering dedication to the field of developmental psychology, leveraging their research to drive positive change in society, particularly for the well-being of children and families.

Gassman-Pines received the highly acclaimed 2024 Mavis Hetherington Award for Excellence in Applied Developmental Science. This recognition honors her exceptional commitment to advancing the well-being of children, families, and organizations through her scholarly contributions and applied developmental science. She is a professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience and is a faculty affiliate at the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy.

Lansford was awarded the esteemed 2024 Mary Ainsworth Award for Excellence in Developmental Science. This honor acknowledges her exceptional scientific merit and groundbreaking work, which has opened new empirical and theoretical areas within developmental psychology and fostered interdisciplinary connections. Lansford is the director of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy and a research professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy.

During this event, Gassman-Pines will share her research on how work hours and income instability shaped families’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her talk will include some of the unconventional policy approaches that were tried during the pandemic which provide insight about ways to help stabilize families going forward.

Lansford will discuss child protection in the U.S. and internationally, showcasing data from the Parenting Across Cultures Project, a longitudinal study of families in nine countries which began in 2008. She will describe aspects of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals that are focused on child protection, how countries are trying to achieve child protection goals (e.g., legal bans of corporal punishment), No Hit Zones in the U.S., and parenting programs that have been implemented to improve children’s well-being by reducing violence against them.

Please join us for a reception after the talk.

Drawing from experiences of dozens of cash transfer programs in low- and middle-income countries, Dr. Paul Niehaus will summarize key findings and share his internationally informed perspective, covering challenges to designing and launching randomized controlled studies, interpreting evidence from diverse contexts, and highlighting features that translate across contexts, including the U.S.

Niehaus is an economist and entrepreneur working to accelerate the end of extreme poverty. He is Chancellor’s Associates Endowed Chair in Economics at UC San Diego and an affiliate of BREAD, the Center for Effective Global Action, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research examines the design, implementation, and impact of anti-poverty programs at large scales.

Niehaus is co-founder of a series of companies working to amplify capital flows to emerging markets. He is also co-founder, former president, and current director at GiveDirectly, the leading international NGO specialized in digital cash transfers and consistently rated one of the most impactful ways to give. Niehaus is a recipient of a Sloan Fellowship and has been named a “Top 100 Global Thinker” by Foreign Policy magazine. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

This lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Duke University Population Research Institute. Please join us for a reception after the talk, sponsored by the Duke Center for International Development.

New employees will learn about the Center’s work and culture and meet other new and current employees. Contact Berkeley Yorkery with any questions.

The Color of Education Summit brings together North Carolina educators, policymakers, researchers, students, parents, community members, and other key stakeholders focused on achieving racial equity and eliminating racial disparities in education. This year’s theme will focus on The Path Forward: Co-Creating Equitable Spaces.

Dr. Lisa Delpit, author and principal of the consulting firm, Delpit Learning, will deliver the keynote address. Previously, she was the executive director/eminent scholar for the Center for Urban Education & Innovation at Florida International University and the Benjamin E. Mays Chair of Urban Educational Excellence at Georgia State University.

Delpit is an internationally-known speaker and writer whose work has focused on the education of children of color and the perspectives, aspirations, and pedagogy of teachers of color. Her work on school-community relations and cross-cultural communication was cited as a contributor to her receiving a MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1990. Her books include Teaching When the World Is On Fire, “Multiplication is For White People”: Raising Standards for Other People’s Children, and Other People’s Children, which received the American Educational Studies Association’s Book Critic Award.

This year’s summit will also include an address from Jerry Craft. He is the New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of the graphic novels New Kid and Class Act. New Kid is the only book in history to win the John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature (2020), the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature (2019), and the Coretta Scott King Author Award for the most outstanding work by an African American writer (2020).

Sponsored by the The Dudley Flood Center for Educational Equity and Opportunity at the Public School Forum of North Carolina, along with partners the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity and the Center for Child and Family Policy, both part of Duke University.

The cost to attend in person is $85; virtual attendance is $60. A limited number of free tickets are available.

Duke CTSI Equity in Research and Integrating Special Populations with Dr. Keisha Bentley-Edwards.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

Youth Participatory Action Research featuring Dr. Carmen Kealy.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

CCFP faculty affiliates, research scientists, and research staff are invited to participate in the CCFP retreat to create an environment where research and funding collaborations may be developed, tended and, ultimately, grown to success. We hope faculty and researchers will find common ground among research projects with the intention of increasing grant submissions and funding.  

The meeting will be a fast paced, half-day retreat that will coalesce around the many research projects housed at CCFP.

Available in person or via Zoom.

In 2019, researchers began conducting immersive interviews in Appalachia, Texas, and seven southern states in an attempt to determine the causes of “place-based disadvantage.” Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, they traced the legacies of the deepest poverty in America—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families.

“In place after place,” they write, “we discovered astonishing stories about the industries that fueled the rise of our nation, the workers who sustained them, and the histories of human suffering they wrought.”

Kathryn Edin, William Church Osborn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and Timothy Nelson, lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Princeton, will present findings featured in their new book, The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America.

Edin, one of the nation’s leading poverty researchers, has authored eight books and some 60 journal articles. Her book, $2 a Day: The Art of Living on Virtually Nothing in America, was met with wide critical acclaim and was included in The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2015, cited as “essential reporting about the rise in destitute families.”

She is PI of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation, was a founding member of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Network on Housing and Families with Young Children, and was a past member of the MacArthur Network on the Family and the Economy. In 2014, she was elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

Nelson is the author of numerous articles on low-income fathers and is the co-author, with Edin, of the book, Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City.

This talk will also feature Liv Mann, team ethnographer in Kentucky for the project. She is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in sociology and social policy at Princeton University. Her research focuses on violence and the reproduction of inequality.

This lecture is made possible through an endowment from the Arthur Sulzberger Family. Please join us for a reception immediately following the talk.

Click here for directions to the Sanford School. Visitor parking is available at the Science Drive visitor’s lot, a short walk from the Sanford School. The rate is $2 per hour.

ZOOM WEBINAR.

Please join us for a review of key findings from a recently completed statewide birth-to-five early childhood needs assessment. The needs assessment was developed by the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy and The Hunt Institute on behalf of the North Carolina Division of Child Development and Early Education.

The needs assessment was designed to provide state leaders with a greater understanding of the current strengths and challenges within North Carolina’s early childhood system. The needs assessment process incorporated diverse perspectives from across the state, including parents, childcare providers, advocates and state-level leaders, as well as an examination of available administrative data.

This webinar will share key findings from the needs assessment report across a number of topic areas, including the early childhood workforce, access to high-quality child care, school readiness, social-emotional health/resilience and family supports.

A quarterly meeting for all employees of the Center for Child and Family Policy.

Faculty and researchers are invited to learn more about the expansive longitudinal database maintained by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC), as well as a variety of ways that external administrative or survey data can be integrated with students’ education records. The NCERDC, housed in the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy, is a valuable resource for research on public school education across multiple disciplines.

NCERDC Director Kara Bonneau will present an overview of available data, the procedure for submitting a data request, and answer questions pertaining to data access or availability. Research Scientist Robert Carr of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Julie Edmunds, director of the Early College Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, will present examples of innovative research using NCERDC data linked to sources such as birth records and postsecondary data from the National Student Clearinghouse.

The workshop, co-sponsored by the Center for Child and Family Policy and the Duke University Population Research Institute, will be held at the Sanford Building, Rhodes Conference Room, 201 Science Drive on Duke’s West Campus and via Zoom.

Please register to attend in person or via Zoom. A light breakfast will be served for those who attend in person.

Join us for Locopops on the lawn to welcome the CCFP employees who recently joined us in the Sanford building and Rubenstein Hall. All Sanford faculty and staff are welcome!

A “Better Together” celebration for all CCFP employees and core faculty.

The Triangle Economics of Education Workshop brought together scholars to present and discuss empirical research on the economics of education. Dr. Thomas S. Dee, Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, gave the keynote address.

Dee is the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the faculty director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. His research focuses largely on the use of quantitative methods to inform contemporary issues of public policy and practice. The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management awarded his collaborative research the Raymond Vernon Memorial Award in 2015 and again in 2019. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the American Educational Research Journal, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Education Finance and Policy.

Congratulations to our graduating Child Policy Certificate program students and their families! We celebrate you!

It is well understood that, if a person comes to see a situation as dangerous, that person will interpret information differently, behave differently, make different choices, and change physiologically. But what if a person sees the whole world as, essentially, one big dangerous place?

Though it’s a truism that everyone sees the world differently, people’s most basic world beliefs-sometimes referred to as primal world beliefs-were only recently mapped empirically. This involved, for example, analyzing thousands of tweets and hundreds of historical texts to identify all primal world beliefs subjects could hold, then analyzing data from a few thousand subjects to determine statistically what beliefs subjects actually hold. This revealed 26 dimensions-many new to psychologists-with most clustering into the beliefs that the world is Safe (vs. dangerous), Enticing (vs. dull), and Alive (vs. mechanistic). Now, over 40 psychology labs worldwide are exploring the origins and diverse potential implications of primal world beliefs.
After introducing the research space, Dr. Jeremy Clifton will discuss some of the more surprising recent findings about connections to wellbeing, privilege, parenting, and politics.

Clifton is a senior research scientist at the Penn Positive Psychology Center and director of the Primals Project. Last year his research was featured in Forbes, The Atlantic, Fox News, Elle, and Psychology Today. received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania studying with Dr. Martin Seligman, Dr. Angela Duckworth, and Dr. Robert DeRubeis.

Optional learning enrichment opportunity:

Before learning about primal world belief research, people often value the chance to take the Primals Inventory themselves, learn about their own primal world beliefs, and get a personalized report comparing their beliefs to a national average. That opportunity is free and publicly available here.

This 5-minute video summary of Dr. Clifton’s research provides an introduction to the topic.

What role do we have in closing racial disparities and reducing bias as we create infant and early childhood mental health career pathways? The very first Diversity-Informed Tenet for Work with Infants, Young Children and Families is: “self-awareness leads to better services for families.” In the spirit of Tenet #1, we will come together for a conversation about a promising approach to reduce racial bias in Early Care and Education settings – Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (IECMHC). In this session we will explore recent research findings and policy trends happening around the country that highlight the importance of advocating for a racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse workforce in IECMHC and how it is connected to teacher and child outcomes. We will also explore approaches from several states and communities in building, supporting, and promoting a diverse IECMHC workforce.

Eva Marie Shivers, J.D., Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of Indigo Cultural Center, a non-profit action research firm located in Phoenix, Arizona. Her work at Indigo Cultural Center focuses on the developmental niche of infant and early childhood to explore the evolution of frameworks for understanding families’ culturally adaptive responses to poverty, systemic racism, and historical marginalization. Indigo Cultural Center is part of the international Healing Justice movement, and they apply liberatory consciousness principles in their IMH racial healing work around the country.

For the past 19 years, Shivers has provided racial equity and research policy consultation to federal, state and local government agencies and administrators. Shivers and her team at Indigo are currently leading national racial equity efforts to transform the infrastructure for the IECMH workforce.

She received her Ph.D. from UCLA’s Department of Education, Psychological Studies in Education. She also holds a law degree from Howard University School of Law, and a BA in English Literature from Arizona State University.

The Early Childhood Initiative seeks to bring together scholars to address early childhood challenges and produce world-class scholarship that will help maximize the potential of all children during their early years.

Wondering what comes after graduation? Join us to talk to young alums Victoria Prince PPS`18 and Lucy Wooldridge PPS`18 about their paths since leaving Duke. We will cover finding fulfilling jobs, moving to new cities, early adulting (e.g. finding apartments, insurance, 401Ks), decisions about graduate school, and how to lay the groundwork for finding your second job.

From Teach for America to non-profit policy work (Prince) and from maternal health policy to business school (Wooldridge), they will join us to share how they’ve progressed in their careers and lessons learned along the way.

Victoria Prince is a research associate for the The Aspen Insitute’s Economic Opportunities Program‘s Workforce Strategies Initiative. She is interested in public impact research related to increasing economic stability and mobility, particularly among youth and disadvantaged communities. In addition to work on education policy and charter school networks, her prior research experience includes studying how employee benefits, occupational licensing requirements, caregiving responsibilities, and community college programs may impact economic stability and mobility. After attaining a BA in public policy from Duke University in 2018, she taught eighth grade for two years as a Teach for America corps member. She is currently pursuing an MA in theology at the University of St. Thomas in her hometown of Houston, Texas.

Lucy Wooldridge is currently living in the Bay Area pursuing her MBA and Master’s of Public Health concurrently in a dual degree program at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and the Haas School of Business. Prior to graduate school, Wooldridge worked at American Institutes for Research as an analyst and project manager for health program improvement projects. She specialized in reproductive and maternal health projects, including efforts to expand abortion access, improve postpartum maternal home visiting programs, and understand policy impacts on racial disparities in maternal mortality rates. Her interest in maternal health started at Duke, where she majored in public policy, minored in gender sexuality and feminist studies, and was a work study student at the Center for Child and Family Policy.

This speaker series is for Duke students who want to learn more about careers in child and family policy. Meetings are designed to help students explore the wide range of job opportunities and careers available in the field of child and family policy while creating a network of students who share their professional interests.

Representatives from NCDPI’s Office of Learning Recovery & Acceleration, the North Carolina Office of Strategic Partnerships, the NC Ed Futures Initiative at UNC, and the NC Longitudinal Data System (NCLDS) at NCDIT will share details about opportunities for helping North Carolina answer programmatic and policy questions.

Presenters will be:
– Jeni Corn, Director of Research & Evaluation, Office of Learning Recovery & Acceleration, NCDPI
– Jenni Owen, Director, North Carolina Office of Strategic Partnerships
– Matt Springer, NC Education Futures Initiative
– Trip Stallings, Executive Director, NC Longitudinal Data System, NCDIT

Shantel Meek, a professor of practice and the founding director of the Children’s Equity Project (CEP) at Arizona State University, will join us via Zoom to talk about her career in both research and the federal government. The Children’s Equity Project works to close opportunity gaps and dismantle systemic racism in learning settings to ensure that children reach their full potential.

Meek previously served as a consultant in early childhood policy and strategy at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington D.C., where she advised senior staff on a range of federal and state equity and early childhood policy issues. She also served in the Obama Administration as a senior policy advisor for Early Childhood Development at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and as a senior policy advisor for education in the Domestic Policy Council at the White House.

During her time in the Obama Administration, Meek advised senior officials at DHHS and The White House on a wide array of policy issues including Head Start, child care, public Pre-K expansion, and promoting equity and reducing disparities across the early care and education system. She also worked on drafting official guidance related to Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant and worked closely with states, communities, and stakeholders on implementation. Meek also played a key role in President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative, leading the early childhood policy component of the initiative.

Meek has published pieces in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She serves on the boards of Child Trends and the Pyramid Model Consortium and is a member of the Ideal Learning Roundtable. She holds a B.A. in psychology and an M.S. and Ph.D. in family and human development from Arizona State University.

We will ask Meek how she got started, the twists and turns her career has taken, and her advice for students just starting their careers.

This speaker series is for Duke students who want to learn more about careers in child and family policy. Meetings are designed to help students explore the wide range of job opportunities and careers available in the field of child and family policy while creating a network of students who share their professional interests.

Derek Rhodes, PPS ’15, founder and executive director of Durham Success Summit, will join us to discuss why he quit corporate America, after leadership positions at Google, Microsoft, and the Miami Heat, to start his own nonprofit. In his own words, “I wanted to improve the lives of local, young, black men. Men just like me. Thus, the Durham Success Summit (DSS) was born.” We are going to hear what drove Derek to pursue a different path than the one he had set out on, the values that have guided him, and how he is building a career based on moral purpose.

As the founder and executive director of Durham Success Summit, Rhodes works to “increase access to business education, mentorship, and professional networking opportunities for young Black men between 16 and 24 years old in Durham.” The organization hosts both a business incubator program, which provides entrepreneurial training, mentorship, and seed funding to aspiring full-time entrepreneurs with an idea, and a 12-week accelerator program, which builds practical networking skills and provides scholars access to employers, professional mentors, and opportunities. Prior to founding Durham Success Summit, in addition to corporate experience, Rhodes worked at The Obama Foundation and interned at The White House and the Department of Justice. He holds a B.A. in public policy studies from Duke University and a certificate in disruptive strategy from Harvard Business School Online.

This speaker series is for Duke students who want to learn more about careers in child and family policy. Meetings are designed to help students explore the wide range of job opportunities and careers available in the field of child and family policy while creating a network of students who share their professional interests.

This week we will talk about what advocacy work looks like with Morgan Forrester Ray, director of the EarlyWell Initiative at NC Child, and Morgan Wittman Gramann, executive director at North Carolina Alliance for Health. They work to improve the health and well-being of children and families in North Carolina through advocating for early childhood mental health and policies that reduce health disparities, prevent chronic disease, and promote health, respectively.

As the director of NC Child’s EarlyWell Initiative, Morgan Forrester Ray works to build a robust, evidence-based, and accessible early childhood mental health system in North Carolina. Prior to her work at NC Child, Ray worked at NCCARE360, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, the N.C. Partnership for Children, and as a case manager/service coordinator for Early Intervention Services. She earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BA in social work from the University of Louisville. She recently completed a fellowship with Zero to Three.

Morgan Wittman Gramann leads the North Carolina Alliance for Health (NCAH), which convenes, mobilizes, supports and empowers partners to advance equitable policies that reduce health disparities, prevent chronic disease, and promote health. In addition to her role as executive director, she also serves as one of NCAH’s registered lobbyists. Passionate about healthy equity and policy change, Gramann has been an advocate for public health since 2006, when she began advocating for commercial tobacco use prevention and cessation policies. She earned her JD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law and her BA in anthropology from American University in Washington, DC. She is an active member of the North Carolina State Bar.

This speaker series is for Duke students who want to learn more about careers in child and family policy. Meetings are designed to help students explore the wide range of job opportunities and careers available in the field of child and family policy while creating a network of students who share their professional interests.

Calvin Allen, Trinity ’92, Vice President of Programs and Partnerships at MDC, and Cate Elander, Durham County Early Childhood Coordinator, will join us to talk about their careers in community development. They have focused on economic development and strategies for breaking intergenerational poverty. We will hear how they got started, the twists and turns their careers have taken, and what they enjoy most about the work they do.

As the Vice President of Programs and Partnerships at MDC, Allen and his team work to identify, strengthen, and network rural N.C. leaders toward healthier and more thriving communities. In this role, he also works to connect leaders across rural county lines on specific issues, advance employment equity in rural N.C., investigate barriers to EITC uptake, and improve health access for the most vulnerable North Carolinians. Prior to Rural Forward, Allen worked at the Golden LEAF Foundation, the National Community Forestry Service Center, the Southern Rural Development Initiative, Public Allies North Carolina and the Dispute Settlement Center. Calvin holds a B.A. in English/literature and a certificate in nonprofit management, both from Duke University.

In her current role, Cate Elander works to improve coordination and alignment between county and community partners to strengthen Durham’s early childhood systems. Prior to this role, Elander worked at MDC, an organization focused on fostering equity and opportunity in communities throughout the South, and at the Durham Children’s Initiative. She also has experience working as a community organizer in Durham, Delaware, and Queens, and had a stint as the founder of an organization promoting socially-responsible volunteer tourism. Elander holds a B.A. in American studies and creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a master’s degree in urban affairs and public policy with a focus in community development from the University of Delaware.

This speaker series is for Duke students who want to learn more about careers in child and family policy. Meetings are designed to help students explore the wide range of job opportunities and careers available in the field of child and family policy while creating a network of students who share their professional interests.

A quarterly meeting for all employees of the Center for Child and Family Policy.

During this lecture, Dr. Shantel Meek will discuss the founding and evolution of the Children’s Equity Project (CEP), a multi-university initiative at Arizona State University that focuses on closing opportunity gaps and dismantling systemic racism in learning settings to ensure that children reach their full potential. She will discuss the model and approach of the CEP, as well as how it collaborates with scholars across the country to address equity issues in early childhood through research, policy, and practice. Meek is a professor of practice and the founding director of the Children’s Equity Project  at Arizona State University. She sets the strategic direction of the CEP and manages strategic partnerships with partners at 16 universities, non-profit and national organizations, and with policymakers.

Meek previously served as a consultant in early childhood policy and strategy at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington D.C., where she advised senior staff on a range of federal and state equity and early childhood policy issues. She also served in the Obama Administration as a senior policy advisor for Early Childhood Development at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and as a senior policy advisor for education in the Domestic Policy Council at the White House.

During her time in the Obama Administration, Meek advised senior officials at DHHS and The White House on a wide array of policy issues including Head Start, child care, public Pre-K expansion, and promoting equity and reducing disparities across the early care and education system. She also worked on drafting official guidance related to Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant and worked closely with states, communities, and stakeholders on implementation. She also played a key role in President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative, leading the early childhood policy component of the initiative.

Meek has published pieces in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She serves on the boards of Child Trends and the Pyramid Model Consortium and is a member of the Ideal Learning Roundtable. She holds a B.A. in psychology and an M.S. and Ph.D. in family and human development from Arizona State University.

The Early Childhood Initiative seeks to bring together scholars to address early childhood challenges and produce world-class scholarship that will help maximize the potential of all children during their early years.

A Case Study of the Pathways for African American Success Program

Behavioral health disparities and health care access are of serious concern for underserved populations. Telehealth options are increasingly available but vary in their effectiveness. Families may not be able to seek out services on their own or be able to determine which services are effective but can benefit from referrals made by individuals they trust. Embedding prevention programs in primary care can improve contact with families over time, increase families’ trust in health care providers, and enhance sustainability. This presentation will summarize findings from a study of barriers to health care and the promise of a program that has demonstrated efficacy and effectiveness in averting numerous behavioral health problems.

Dr. Velma McBride Murry is associate provost in the Office of Research and Innovation at Vanderbilt University, holds the Lois Autrey Betts Endowed Chair, and is a University Distinguished Professor in the departments of Health Policy (Vanderbilt School of Medicine) and Human and Organizational Development (Peabody College). Her research examines the significance of context to everyday life experiences of African American families and youth, focusing on processes through which racism and other social structural stressors cascade through families to influence parenting and family functioning, developmental outcomes, and adjustment among youth during critical developmental periods from middle childhood through young adulthood.

She is past president of the Society for Research on Adolescence and incoming president of The International Consortium of Developmental Science Societies. McBride Murry is one of the 100 elected members to the 2020 class of the National Academy of Medicine. She was recently appointed to the National Institutes of Health’s National Advisory Mental Health Research Council.

This lecture is made possible through an endowment from the Arthur Sulzberger Family. Please join us for a reception immediately following the talk.

Click here for directions to the Sanford School. Visitor parking is available at the Science Drive visitor’s lot, a short walk from the Sanford School. The rate is $2 per hour.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

This session will feature a discussion with Dr. Velma McBride Murry, associate provost in the Office of Research and Innovation at Vanderbilt University, Lois Autrey Betts Endowed Chair, and University Distinguished Professor in the departments of Health Policy (Vanderbilt School of Medicine) and Human and Organizational Development (Peabody College). Her research examines the significance of context to everyday life experiences of African American families and youth, focusing on processes through which racism and other social structural stressors cascade through families to influence parenting and family functioning, developmental outcomes, and adjustment among youth during critical developmental periods from middle childhood through young adulthood.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

During this virtual panel discussion, local school district research administrators will describe the process for applying for approval to conduct research in school settings and that involves students, teachers, and administrators as well as research priorities for their districts.

Participants include Cherry Johnson of Johnston County Schools, Colleen Paeplow of Wake County Public Schools, Albert Royster of Durham Public Schools, Diane Villwock of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and Holly Williams of Duke University’s Institutional Review Board.

Leslie Babinski, director of the School Research Partnership at Duke, will lead the discussion.

During this Sulzberger Distinguished Lecture, Dr. Dudley Flood, former educator and champion of school integration, will share his personal insights on the long road to school desegregation in North Carolina, today’s challenges and opportunities, and the future of N.C. public schools as resegregation increases.

Dr. Keisha Bentley-Edwards, associate professor and associate director of research at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, will facilitate the discussion.

In 1969, many schools in the South were still segregated, although more than 15 years had passed since the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Some school districts actively blocked desegregation while the N.C. legislature authorized tuition grants to white private schools, which became known as “segregation academies.” Dr. Flood joined the N.C. Department of Public Instruction in 1970, tasked with helping communities desegregate schools by meeting with elected officials, community activists, and parents. His work in Hyde County, where Black parents had been boycotting the schools for nearly a year in protest of a plan that would have closed two historically Black schools, is illustrative of the challenges he faced and his successful collaborative strategy for change.

Dr. Flood has received more than 350 awards for civic service. He has been presented the Order of the Longleaf Pine Award (North Carolina’s highest civic award) by three different Governors: Governor James G. Martin; Governor James B. Hunt, Jr.; and Governor Mike Easley. He also received the Outstanding Alumni Award from both North Carolina Central University and East Carolina University.

He served for 12 years on the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina. He currently serves on the N.C. Minority Cancer Awareness Action Team, the Public School Forum of North Carolina Board, the Wake Education Partnership Leadership Council, the UNC Press Advancement Council, and on several other boards and committees. The Dudley Flood Center for Educational Equity & Opportunity is named in his honor.

Dr. Flood earned a bachelor’s degree from North Carolina Central University, a master’s degree in educational administration from East Carolina University and a doctorate degree in the same field from Duke University.

This lecture is made possible through an endowment from the Arthur Sulzberger Family. Please join us for a reception immediately following the talk.

Click here for directions to the Sanford School. Visitor parking is available at the Science Drive visitor’s lot, a short walk from the Sanford School. The rate is $2 per hour.

Please join us at the Duke Majors Fair where The Center for Child and Family Policy will provide information on the Child Policy Research Certificate. This informative event is for undeclared students to meet representatives from all majors, minors and certificate programs to learn more about their programs.

Dr. Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, writing on race, history, justice, politics, and democracy will kick off the October 22, 2022 Color of Education Summit. The summit will be delivered in an hybrid format to bring together people from all over North Carolina to exchange ideas and strategies that address systemic racial inequities in our education system.

Color of Education is a partnership between the Dudley Flood Center for Educational Equity & Opportunity, the Public School Forum of North Carolina, the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, and the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. The partnership seeks to build bridges across the fields of research, policy, and practice and bring together the knowledge and perspectives of communities, educators, policymakers, experts and other key stakeholders focused on achieving racial equity and dismantling systemic racism in education across the state of North Carolina.

The 2022 summit, “A Walk Through History: How the Past Informs the Present,” will allow participants to see the connection between the past and the present to develop a deeper understanding on current educational policies which ultimately impact outcomes.

A quarterly meeting for all CCFP employees and affiliates.

The Sanford School of Public Policy and the Center for Child and Family Policy invite you to attend a reception celebrating the launch of Family Connects International. This event will celebrate the individuals who have been instrumental in the research, implementation, and management of this successful nurse home visiting program.

The Family Connects model was established in Durham in 2008 through a partnership with the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy, the Center for Child & Family Health, and the Durham County Health Department. It was designed to support whole-person, integrated health for all families of newborns. FCI nurses visit families at their home to assess newborns, mothers, and other household family members to discuss concrete next steps to address opportunities and concerns, including seeking immediate medical care when necessary. The model is in various stages of exploring, planning, implementation, and certification in communities across 18 states, where it aims to connect with at least 80 percent of the newborn families.

According to Executive Director Sherika Hill, “FCI is unique from other nurse-home visiting programs for newborns, including those that are universal, because we are willing to tailor our evidence-based program, implementation guidance, and policy support to the different contexts of our community partners. In doing so, we hope to have a bigger impact for families of newborns as we scale with quality assurance and community accountability.”

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

This session will continue our focus on Developing Instrumentation Methods to Reduce Bias. We will discuss our development of demographic surveys and examine biases in other instruments that we utilize in our research with children and families.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

Developing Instrumentation Methods to Reduce Bias

We will discuss how we can improve our demographic surveys and what instruments we select to assess and measure outcomes of children and families. By discussing best practices in relation to race, gender, and other forms of diversity within research, we hope to expand and improve our current methodological practices.

These workshops provide an opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

An opportunity for our staff to learn how to make CCFP research more equitable with respect to race, ethnicity, and other forms of diversity at all stages from conceptualization to recruitment to data collection to analysis and reporting of findings.

This session will feature Jessica Au, senior policy analyst with The Hunt Institute and former Fulbright English Teacher in Taiwan, and Maria Castrillon, currently a dual degree student, MPP/MBA at Duke and former health volunteer with the Peace Corps. We will learn about opportunities to work in child and family policy in other countries, what it’s like to live and work abroad, and how their experiences have influenced their career paths.

This speaker series is for Duke students who want to learn more about careers in child and family policy. Meetings are designed to help students explore the wide range of job opportunities and careers available in the field of child and family policy while creating a network of students who share their professional interests.

Jessica Au leads the COVID Constituency initiative and conducts research and analysis on K-12 education policy issues at The Hunt Institute. Prior to joining The Hunt Institute, Au attended Duke University, where she earned a master’s degree in public policy. At Duke, she centered her work on education policy issues, including college access and affordability and dual enrollment equity. Au also served as a board member of Girls on the Run of the Triangle, helping to advance their DEI initiatives by conducting qualitative research on participant diversity and retention. Prior to Duke, Au was as a Fulbright English Teacher in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, working with local Taiwanese teachers to implement project-based teaching strategies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international studies and Chinese language and literature from Vassar College.

Maria Castrillon is a dual degree student, MPP/MBA at Duke. She is a proud first-generation graduate, earning her BA in public policy at UNC-Chapel Hill. After college, she joined the Peace Corps as a health volunteer in Senegal where she worked with community leaders to facilitate maternal and child health education programs. Upon her return, she worked at charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, managing student data, testing, and special education services. Most recently, Castrillon worked at a foundation where she oversaw a new initiative to enhance fundraising and development strategy for over 60 schools.