Hear Us, See Us! : How Mothers of Color Transform Family and Community Relationships Through Grassroots Collective Action

This dissertation illuminates the local grassroots collective action of women of color and the transformative effects their community organizing efforts have on community and family relationships. Prior research highlights the reciprocal relationship between identity formation and collective action (Moore 2008; Gravante and Poma 2016; Polletta 2001; Whittier 2013; White 1999). Analysts have studied how the intersecting identities of participants motivate and contour collective action (Crenshaw 1991; Law 2012; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981, 2015) and how collective action processes influence participants’ gendered lives and biographies (McAdam 1999; Perry 2013; Warren, Mapp and Kuttner 2015). Less understood however, are how participation in local collective action shapes and is shaped by family relationships. The current study addresses this research gap by examining the intersection of grassroots community organizing and family life among primarily African American and Latina mothers and grandmothers who live in materially poor neighborhoods in Chicago. The study focuses on a “family-focused” model of community organizing led by women of color, whose intersecting gender, race, class, and immigrant identities are seldom supported by traditional, stereotypically masculine models of contestation that often ignore or devalue their family lives. Findings are based on 15 months of participant observations of family-focused collective action and 47 in-depth interviews with “motherleaders” (Cossyleon 2018) from Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI), a Chicago-based community organizing institution with a statewide reach. The central sociological finding is that collective action has the propensity to transform cross-community and family relationships among hyper marginalized women of color. These social transformations were achieved, in part, through COFI guided race-conscious nudges, meaningful organizing symbols, and the practice of what I call restorative kinship. Findings indicate how institutions can help to bridge racial and cultural differences, the importance of organizing symbols in shaping collective participant meanings and family lives, and how community organizing leaders used collective action techniques and experiences to transform intimate family relationships. Research, practice, and policy all need to uplift and take seriously the family lives and intersecting identities of participants of collective action. Scholarship must continue to explore how the collective action participation of marginalized groups produces intimate social effects that are often deemed separate from the organization and development of participants and their families

Family in Context: (Re)entry Narratives of Formerly Incarcerated Individuals

The current study is informed by narrative accounts of 39 released prisoners, who provide day-to-day understandings of how they have experienced and continue to experience community reintegration. This study digs deeper into the intricacies of returning to free society, one that often disenfranchises and labels ex-offenders, and attempts to reveal how released prisoners themselves see family as pertinent in their reentry experiences. Respondents\u27 stories are telling of the resources they draw upon, and in particular how their families are involved in that process. Findings suggest that families at times provide material and emotional support, but may also facilitate drug use for ex-offenders. Family was also found to exert reintegrative shame and disintegrative stigmatization, which was both motivational and detrimental to our respondents\u27 hopes for rehabilitation. The present study suggests that regardless of whether family helps or impedes the rehabilitation of ex-offenders, their presence, or lack thereof greatly shapes reentry experiences. The academic literature on prisoner reentry should thus place a greater focus on the family

The Impact of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office Deferred Prosecution Program

This paper analyzes the impact of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office Deferred Prosecution Program (DPP) on participation outcome patterns and compares recidivism rates between a sample of DPP participants (695) and a comparison group (991) of defendants found guilty through traditional adjudication from February 28, 2011 and December 5, 2012 with recidivism rates through June 6, 2014. Binary logistic and cox proportional regressions were utilized to evaluate the program. No statistically significant difference in re-arrest rates was found for a sample of DPP participants and a comparison group of defendants found guilty through traditional adjudication. However, DPP did have a statistically significant effect on re-arrest rates for women charged with theft; in such cases, DPP reduced the likelihood of re-arrest by roughly 76%

Take a Chance on Me: A Review of the Milwaukee County Security Deposit Assistance Program

This report examined a security deposit assistance program in Milwaukee that uses the incentive to encourage low-income residents to move to higher opportunity, lower poverty neighborhoods. Funded by the Washington DC-based Poverty Race Research Action Council, CURL partnered with the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council in completing this project.In January 2015, the report was published in the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) Civil Rights Research journal. The report provides evidence that security deposit incentives do help in encouraging low-income families to move to new mixed-income communities providing greater educational, employment, and quality of life opportunities

An Evaluation of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office Deferred Prosecution Program

This project funded by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA) was a process and outcome evaluation of the Cook County State's Attorney's Deferred Prosecution Program.The topics of evidence-based programming and diversion programming are areas of continued interest with the criminal justice system in Illinois. This evaluation assisted in guiding ICJIA policy and practices and was conducted by an interdisciplinary team from CURL, Criminology and Social Work at Loyola University Chicago