Through a new initiative called Lender Global, each year one of the University’s abroad centers will be designated as the Lender Global Partner. In addition, three research fellowships will be awarded to students studying at that location.

Lender Global begins in Spring 2025 at with a focus on social and environmental justice. The student fellows will examine the themes of biodiversity and the rights of nature; climate justice for people of the global majority; and meaningful engagement with ethical travel.

Lender Center Director says the extension of the Lender Center’s social justice initiative via the Syracuse Abroad platform makes sense because most social justice issues exist beyond the United States. “This initiative aligns with the University’s goals of preparing students to be responsible global citizens and addressing the social and scientific issues that affect people everywhere. It helps raise awareness that social justice issues don’t begin and end at a country’s borders and that solutions can come from innovative thinkers and dedicated researchers anywhere in the world.”

Assistant Provost and Syracuse Abroad Executive Director says, “We are pleased to partner with the Lender Center on this innovative concept that enhances our current programming and supports experiential learning, innovative research and human thriving. It’s an excellent way for students to include unique research opportunities while they study abroad.” ��

Climate Research

Students will be mentored and guided in their research by , an environmental activist-academic who is Syracuse Abroad’s London-based community engagement specialist, and Maggie Sardino ’23, a graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and a Marshall Scholar. The fellows will be affiliated with Syracuse London’s Environment, Sustainability and Policy learning community, which allows students to take classes, live, intern, volunteer and engage in other activities alongside peers with similar interests.

In addition to working on their research and participating in the learning community, fellows will also collaboratively develop communication tools for future Syracuse Abroad students about how to be mindful of their ecological footprint and meaningfully engage with ethical travel, according to Farnum.

Spring 2024 students in the Syracuse Abroad London center program visit the Big Pit National Coal Museum in Wales as part of their examination of sustainable energy transitions and environmental heritage. (Photo by Syracuse London staff)

Farnum says London is an ideal location to study how major cities can creatively solve sustainability challenges. “London regularly ranks as one of the world’s Top 10 Sustainable Cities, is home to many of the world’s greenest buildings and is technically classified as a forest given its extensive green spaces, which comprise 47% of the city’s area. That’s why London makes a wonderful ‘living lab’ for this topic and why the London center provides a natural home for environmental, sustainability and policy studies.”

Troy Gordon, Syracuse Abroad director of global teaching and learning, says the social and environmental justice program is one of the Syracuse London center’s strengths. That focus comprises about 15% of the center’s curriculum—including a pre-semester traveling seminar on sustainability in Scandinavia, a course on climate change and environmental activism and a studio-based course on urban sustainability, in addition to its Learning Community for Environment, Sustainability and Policy. Students are also able to engage and learn in an exciting, green urban environment where social and environmental justice is a focal point and a true strength of the center, he says.

Students enrolled in the Spring 2025 London abroad program will be invited to apply for the fellowship.

Fall 2023 students from a geography course on environmental racism in the Syracuse London program volunteer at Calthorpe Community Garden. It is a green space in the heart of London supporting food security and cultural connection for migrant populations. (Photo by Syracuse London staff)

Lender Center Support

The Lender Center for Social Justice, made possible by a gift from , seeks to foster proactive, innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to social justice issues of equity and inclusion. The Lender Global program is designed to prompt development of novel approaches and creative solutions to global challenges while considering the needs and capacities of the partner program and its host community, Phillips says.

Syracuse Abroad shares many of the Lender Center’s values and commitments, according to Wilkens. Consistently ranked among top study abroad programs in the U.S., Syracuse Abroad has a long history of meaningful community engagement, experiential learning and cultural exchange around the world. Quality academic experiences across professional and liberal arts disciplines are offered at six overseas centers in Florence, London, Madrid, Santiago (Chile), Strasbourg (France) and through a program in Central Europe.

Phillips and Wilkens say Syracuse Santiago will likely be designated as the 2025-26 Lender Global Partner, which would enable students to do research in English, Spanish or both languages.

is one of three postdoctoral fellows who are involved in the center’s examination of the in America. That initiative explores the gap’s causes and consequences and aims to create effective solutions to counter it through social collaborations that help dismantle the root causes of racial wealth disparities.

Before coming to Syracuse University, Christophe was a research fellow focused on this area at the at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Before that, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in finance and business administration from Florida Memorial University and a Ph.D. in management from Morgan State University.

We sat down with Christophe to hear about her interest in understanding the critical stages of entrepreneurial journeys, the psychological factors and resource needs that drive entrepreneurial success and the dynamics between individual entrepreneurs and social institutions.

The event, “Lender Conversation in Los Angeles: Seeking Racial Equity in the Entertainment Industry,” was hosted by the and was held at the NeueHouse Hollywood. It was attended by about 100 Southern California-area alumni, entertainment industry leaders and other invited guests.

Moderating the panel was journalist and TV host ’99, an alumna of the (VPA) and its Communication and Rhetorical Studies program. Nottingham has worked as a reporter covering national and international breaking news, entertainment and politics. She was joined by four alumni panelists:

• ’88, president of domestic marketing at Universal Pictures and previous president of domestic theatrical marketing for Sony Pictures Entertainment. Caines is an alumnus of the Newhouse School of Public Communications and an instructor in the school’s Newhouse LA program
• ’85, an Emmy-nominated writer for film and television and a VPA alumnus
• ’07, an actress, writer and producer who graduated from VPA. She is known for her recent comedic role on the hit NBC sitcom “A.P. Bio”
• ’20, an associate attorney in the entertainment transactions group at Mitchell Silberberg & Krupp, LLP. She earned her undergraduate degree from VPA’s Bandier Program for Recording and Entertainment Industries.

, Lender Center director, says the conversation “provided valuable insights into how racial inequity continues to exist within the entertainment industry, as well as offering promising paths towards reducing these barriers. We hope to use what we’ve learned here to help craft new paths towards closing the racial wealth gap in other industries.”

The Los Angeles event was the fourth in a series of conversations hosted by the Lender Center to bring experts and thought leaders together to improve understanding of and present ideas to help mitigate the racial wealth gap’s community impacts. Those events and other research initiatives are made possible by a $2.7 million grant from MetLife Foundation. The funding has also supported three research symposia, three postdoctoral scholars and 15 faculty grants for research on the topic.

“Lender Center’s work with support from MetLife Foundation generated important new thought leadership, boosted awareness of racial wealth equity issues and created valuable new partnerships with key institutions and organizations,” says Phillips. “We have discovered many new possibilities for addressing how the wealth gap affects communities, and those ideas have provided worthwhile new understandings.”

These photos show highlights of the event.

Lender Center for Social Justice Director Kendall Phillips, far left, who is also a professor in the Communication and Rhetorical Studies program at VPA, introduces the conversation panelists, all entertainment industry executives and alumni of the University. From left are Danielle Nottingham ’99, Lyric Lewis ’97, Rob Edwards ’85, Bryse Thornwell ’20 and Dwight Caines ’88.

The event drew 100 guests, including numerous alumni and entertainment-�� industry guests. Panelist Dwight Caines ’88, at left, speaks with David Oh G ’00, ’07, now an associate professor of communications at the Newhouse School of Public Communications; and Joan Adler, G’76, assistant vice president of regional programs at the University’s Los Angeles center.

Jason Poles ’99, the University’s director of advancement for the Southwest region, speaks with fellow alumnus and basketball team player Antonio “Scoop” Jardine G’12.

Tari Wariebi ’10, enjoys a reception conversation. The alumnus graduated with dual majors in communication and rhetorical studies from the College of Visual and Performing Arts and writing and rhetoric in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The panel provided opportunities for attendees to hear directly from entertainment leaders about their experiences with the racial wealth gap in that industry. Rob Edwards ’85, left, an Emmy-nominated writer and an adjunct instructor for the Newhouse School of Public Communications, spoke with this guest.

Jason Poles, ’99, left, the University’s advancement director for the Southwest region, chats with alumni attendees Christina Ledo ’11, center, an international relations major at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs; and Tiffany Bender-Abdallah ’11, a communication and rhetorical studies major in the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

The Los Angeles event brought together faculty, staff, entertainment industry panelists and alumni. Kendall Phillips, Lender Center director, at left, and David Oh G’00, ’07, second from left, an associate professor for the Newhouse School of Public Communications, met with Anna Proulx, Visual and Performing Arts program director for the Syracuse University Los Angeles semester program, and right, Allison Gold ’15, a College of Visual and Performing Arts graduate.

Tyler Gentry ’25, a Syracuse University student in the ��Bandier Program for Recording and Entertainment Industries, spoke during the question segment of the evening’s event. Seated behind him is Tiffany Bender-Abdallah ’11.

Posing for a finale photo on the stage as the event concluded are, from left, Leonard Garner Jr., Kendall Phillips, panel moderator Danielle Nottingham and panel members Lyric Lewis, Rob Edwards, Bryse Thornwell and Dwight Caines.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Sachs will be joined by members of the feminist filmmaking
group The Abortion Clinic Film Collective and local reproductive justice advocates for
“Communities of Care: Documenting Reproductive Justice in a Post-Roe Country,” a film
screening and panel talk at Light Work (316 Waverly Ave., on the SU campus) on Thursday,
Oct. 17 at 5:30 p.m.

About “This Side of Salina”

Four Black women from Syracuse, New York, reflect on sexuality, youthful regret, emotional vulnerability, raising a daughter and working in reproductive health services. In a series of their own choreographed vignettes, each woman thoughtfully engages with the neighborhoods she’s known all of her life. Two performers flip through classic 1960s titles by Black authors in a bookstore. Others sit in a hat store finding time to pour into each other, as mentors and confidantes. These are businesses that are owned by local Black women, and they know it. In Brady Market, a community grocery, they playfully shop and chat with ease and confidence. They dance to their own rhythms in the outdoor plaza of the Everson Museum of Art. Together they look down at the city from its highest point and ponder how to battle the inequities of the place that they call home.

Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York.
Working from a feminist perspective, she has created cinematic works that defy genre through
the use of hybrid forms, incorporating elements of documentary, performance and collage into
self-reflexive explorations of broader historical experience. Her films have screened at the
Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Wexner Center for the Arts, and festivals such as New
York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short Film Festival, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Viennale
and Doclisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at Museum of the Moving
Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Cork Film Festival, Havana Film Festival, among others. In 2021,
both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary
Center gave her awards for her lifetime achievements in the experimental and documentary
fields. In 2014, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. In 2019, Tender
Buttons Press published her first book of poetry, “Year by Year Poems.”

Related Programming

All programs are free and open to the public.

“Living to Tell: Using Filmmaking as a Tool for Reproductive Justice”
Wednesday, Oct. 16 at 5:30 p.m.
Salt City Market Community Room, 484 S. Salina St.
484 S. Salina St.
Free,

“Communities of Care: Documenting Reproductive Justice in a Post-Roe Country”
Thursday, Oct. 17,�� 5:30 p.m.
Light Work, Watson Theater, 316 Waverly Ave.

Communities of Care is sponsored by the Syracuse University Humanities Center as part of
Syracuse Symposium 2024-25: Community and by the Lender Center for Social Justice.
at Syracuse University. This program is also partnered with the Department of Women’s and
Gender Studies and the CODE^SHIFT lab in the Newhouse School, both at Syracuse
University.

Living to Tell is co-presented with Engaged Humanities Network, an engaged scholarship
initiative of Syracuse University.

Five students will be selected to form an interdisciplinary research team. They will work with , the 2024-26 faculty fellow and an assistant professor of public health in the .��Her research project examines how Black adults who reside in historically redlined neighborhoods can experience a disadvantaged occupational life course and subsequent health consequences. She wants to raise awareness about the lasting effects of discriminatory practices as basic determinants of health and use those findings to inform policymakers and community leaders.

Miriam Mutzambudzi

Working with Mutambudzi, student fellows will conduct data analysis, gather literature on social and economic disparities and health outcomes for residents of those areas and synthesize findings. They will also engage with community residents and grassroots organizations that are examining the impact of redlining practices in Syracuse.

Students from any discipline and background who are interested in community advocacy and social justice are encouraged to . They will spend two years on the project and present their findings at the 2026 Lender Center for Social Justice symposium. Participants receive a��$2,000��stipend, with opportunities for additional funding. Program details are available on the��Lender Center’s .

Information Session Sept. 18

An information session is scheduled on Wednesday, Sept. 18 at 4 p.m. in Bowne Hall 207, when Mutambudzi will provide more details about the project and how the fellowship program works.

Applications Due Oct. 4

The deadline for applications is 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 4. Students can apply through the��.

The center fosters proactive, innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to issues related to social justice, equity and inclusion. It was established with a gift from Helaine and Marvin Lender as a research, teaching and action center and as a national hub for leadership and conversation on social justice issues. Phillips, who co-founded the center in 2017, will serve as director for three years.

“I have been honored to be part of the Lender Center since its founding and am excited to return to help the center move into its next phase,” Phillips says. “Over the past six years, the Lender Center has had a tremendous impact on students, faculty and our community and I look forward to working with all these groups to help keep social justice as the focus of all our activities.”

Kendall Phillips

“Since its founding, Syracuse University has been steadfast in its commitment to advancing social justice and equity and leveraging its intellectual resources to discover solutions to humanity’s most pressing challenges – locally, nationally and globally. The Lender Center for Social Justice is at the forefront of interdisciplinary scholarship exploring how individuals and communities can thrive,” says , vice president for research.��“As a co-founder, Kendall Phillips has been integral to the Center’s pursuit of research that takes our students and faculty out of the classroom and into our communities. I look forward to seeing the Lender Center’s work grow through his leadership.”

The center has hosted an annual symposium and a conversation series promoting dialogue on social justice issues among researchers, practitioners, activists and thought leaders. It supports a new faculty fellow each year for a two-year research project on social justice research and sponsors a team of student fellows to work alongside that faculty member. Over the past three years, as part of its racial wealth gap initiative, the center has hosted three symposia, convened community conversations in several U.S. cities, supported three faculty fellow and student teams and hired three postdoctoral scholars.

Community leaders and University faculty panelists speak at the Lender Center for Social Justice research symposium, “Interrogating the Racial Wealth Gap: Thinking Locally,” held in the spring in Syracuse. (Photo by Chuck Wainwright)

Phillips’ expertise is in the arena of American film, public discourse and memory, rhetoric and the rhetoric of popular culture. He earned a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University and previously taught at the University of Central Missouri. He is an honorary fellow in the School of Art Whiti o Rehua in the College of Creative Arts at Massey University in New Zealand. He also is an honorary director of the Center for Rhetorical Studies at Shanghai University and a fellow of the Rhetoric Society of America.

A public health professor whose research focuses on social determinants of health has been selected as the 2024-26 faculty fellow.

will explore how Black adults who reside in historically redlined neighborhoods can experience a disadvantaged occupational life course and subsequent health consequences. Redlining was a discriminatory practice of designating certain neighborhoods, especially predominantly Black ones, as being poor credit risks.

Mutambudzi is an assistant professor of public health at the She is also a faculty affiliate of three centers at the : the ; the ; and the .

In addition to Mutambudzi, an interdisciplinary team of will work on the project. Students from any discipline and background who are excited about community advocacy and social justice are for the two-year fellowships. Applications are accepted through early October and fellows are chosen before the end of the fall semester. The faculty-student group will present their findings at a community symposium in 2026.

We recently sat down with Mutambudzi to learn more about her project.

Why is this topic important?

This research tackles the ongoing challenges faced by Black communities from the legacy of historical discriminatory housing practices and the subsequent impact of those practices on community members’ employment and health.

While the was enacted as federal law, it failed to fully dismantle racial discrimination in housing resulting from the practice of redlining. Redlining is a discriminatory practice that began in 1930s America [where] banks and insurance companies refused or limited loans, mortgages and insurance to residents of specific geographic areas—primarily neighborhoods with predominantly Black residents. Residents of redlined areas had limited access to credit and other financial services and were hindered in their efforts to own homes, invest in property or improve their neighborhoods. The results were often urban decay and a perpetuation of poverty in those areas.

While redlining is a historical concept, its effects are very much present today. Its legacy continues to limit many life opportunities, and neighborhoods with predominantly Black residents where that occurred still face social and economic disadvantages.

How do limited employment prospects—or the lack of a good job—affect health issues?

Both employment and discriminatory policies are key factors contributing to racial��disparities in health outcomes. Job insecurity, precarity, lower wages and periods of unemployment—which occur more frequently among Black workers—all contribute to income gaps and limit access to good health insurance and quality healthcare.

Young adults from disadvantaged neighborhoods enter the workforce at a significant disadvantage. Job prospects within their communities are scarce, limiting their ability to find work that pays well, offers stability and provides a path for advancement.

This lack of good-quality jobs in their immediate surroundings creates a vicious cycle and the absence of good-quality, stable employment nearby creates a double-edged sword. Not only are opportunities limited, but these young adults also miss out on crucial skill-building and networking chances that come with these jobs. Those factors further restrict their potential, hindering their ability to compete for better opportunities.

In addition, involuntary employment interruptions are more frequent for these young adults and further disrupt their career trajectories. This disparity perpetuates a system where economic mobility becomes nearly impossible for those starting from behind. The cascading constraints imposed by limited job opportunities in disadvantaged neighborhoods have a profound impact on residents’ access to health-promoting resources, creating a cycle that undermines well-being.

For example, limited financial resources often translate to poor housing conditions, which may be overcrowded, poorly maintained and may lack essential amenities. Nutritious and organic foods are generally more expensive and less readily available in “food deserts,” leading to a reliance on cheaper, processed unhealthy foods. The jobs in which Black workers are disproportionately employed may contribute to these health issues, as their work is more likely to be physically and psychologically demanding. All of these factors also combine to contribute to increased risks of health conditions such as obesity, diabetes, respiratory illness and hypertension.

Miriam Mutambudzi, assistant professor of public health at the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, with a mural that depicts the College’s public health program history.

What questions are shaping your research?

There’s much we don’t know about how historically racist policies such as redlining��continued to affect the employment trajectories of Black Americans. People can work for 45 years or more in their lives, so it’s essential that we understand the factors that shape occupational trajectories and the subsequent impacts they have on a person’s health.

This project looks at three areas: developing an understanding of historically��redlined neighborhoods as predictors of racial disparities in long-term employment��trajectories: seeing how employment trajectories may be predictors of chronic health conditions and determining how education might moderate those relationships.

In what ways will the student fellows be involved?

They will contribute to data analysis and management and will conduct literature reviews to gather relevant reports on social and economic disparities and health outcomes. They’ll help synthesize findings to inform the study’s background and contextual understanding. Students will also have opportunities to engage with the local community since my goal is to work with grassroots organizations that are already addressing the adverse effects of redlining in Syracuse.

What do you hope to accomplish with this research?

My goal is to illustrate how the historical discriminatory redlining policy that systematically marginalized Black communities still adversely impacts work and health for those communities today, regardless of residents’ educational attainment.

Ultimately, we want to raise awareness regarding the lasting effects of discriminatory��practices as fundamental social determinants of health that require much attention, and inspire policymakers, community leaders and the public to drive meaningful action.

“Closing the Racial Wealth Gap: Public, Private and Philanthropic Collaborations” centered on how a plan of targeted, intentional philanthropy can help bridge racial wealth disparities and lead to the practical implementation of economic equity. Taking part in the discussion were Syracuse faculty members who have been studying the causes of and solutions to the racial wealth gap in America, Lender Center leaders and MetLife Foundation officials. Also involved were several local business leaders who have supported the Atlanta community by investing in innovation and startup businesses, neighborhood revitalization and historic preservation.

Villaneuva discussed the need for reparations to Black and Native American communities and efforts by his to create racial equity through education and “radical reparative giving.” The discussion was led by alumna ’78,��director of operations for the National Association of Black Journalists. ��

A roundtable discussion featuring community leaders followed. Participating were alumnus ’83 of ; , an Atlanta housing commissioner and founder of ��; , president and CEO of ; and , ombudsman for neighborhoods for the City of Atlanta. Additional participants were Syracuse University Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives and Lender Center Interim Director . Closing remarks were provided by , policy advisor for neighborhoods for the City of Atlanta and director of the Center for Urban Research at Georgia Tech University.

The event was part of an ongoing initiative of the Lender Center to examine the racial wealth gap in America and identify solutions to mitigate its impact. In nearly two years, the work has resulted in symposia and community conversations in Syracuse, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta; funding for nine faculty research projects; and the creation of three postdoctoral fellowships. The center also formed a racial wealth gap composed of 15 notable business and community leaders and scholars from universities across the U.S. Those steps have been made possible by a $2.7 million grant from MetLife Foundation that was awarded in fall 2022.��

Kira Reed, senior research associate at the Lender Center for Social Justice, left, greets guest speaker Edgar Villaneuva for the Atlanta convening of a conversation about the racial wealth gap in America. Villaneuva advocates for the use of intentional philanthropy to provide economic racial equity.

Kendall Phillips, far left, interim director of the Lender Center, hosts the group of roundtable panelists for a question-answer segment.

A large audience gathered for the third conversation hosted by the Lender Center for Social Justice and supported by MetLife Foundation to discuss causes of and potential solutions for the racial wealth gap in America. The event was held at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. Roundtable panelists (at left) were Brendan Doherty, an Atlanta housing commissioner and founder of The Same House; Jodi Merriday, ombudsman for neighborhoods for the City of Atlanta; Angela Y. Robinson ’78, of the National Association of Black Journalists; Cheneé Joseph, president and CEO of Historic District Development Corporation; and Thomas R. Boyle ’83 of Atlanta community group Fourth Ward Neighbors.

Robinson, left, hosts Villaneuva’s talk with the audience.

Roundtable panelists included Atlanta investors, business leaders and neighborhood advocates, from left, Brendan Doherty, Jodi Merriday, Cheneé Joseph, Thomas R. Boyle ’83 and David Edwards.

A number of alumni participated in and attended the racial wealth gap conversation. Thomas R. Boyle ’83, center, was a roundtable panelist. He is involved in the Atlanta historic preservation association Fourth Ward Neighbors.

Charlie Pettigrew, right, MetLife Foundation representative, chats with guests at the event reception. They include Vicki Brackens (left), president of Brackens Financial Solutions Network, LLC of Syracuse; and University staff members Peter Cronin (second from left) vice president in Advancement and External Affairs; Stephanie Walgamott (center), director of regional development/South; and Rachel Vassel (right), associate vice president, multicultural advancement. A MetLife Foundation grant supports the racial wealth gap community conversations and other research initiatives.

Alumnus Jonathan Olens ’15, center, was among the attendees.

Alumnus Jonathan Olens ’15, center, was among the attendees.

Faculty who have received Lender Center Racial Wealth Gap research grants also were present. At left is Willie Reddic, Whitman School of Management; and at right, Laverne Gray, School of Information Studies. At center is Kristen Barnes, of the College of Law, a member of the Racial Wealth Gap initiative’s thought leader advisory group.

Lender Center for Social Justice Thought Leader Advisory Group members Pablo Mitnik (left), of the University of Michigan Center for Inequality Dynamics, and Gregory Price (right), minority and emerging business faculty member in the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of New Orleans are joined by Hannibal Newsom (center), assistant professor in Syracuse University’s School of Architecture and Lender Center research project grantee.

The Lender Center Racial Wealth Gap initiative’s three postdoctoral associates also attended. From left are Yvonne Christophe, Mauricio Mercado and J Coley.

Now, Coley (they/them) studies how the policies and actions of local, state and federal governments and public officials, as well as those of private investors and property buyers, affect poor urban neighborhoods and residents in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, looking at all three as representative of midsize Rust Belt cities.��The researcher recently presented their early findings at the Lender Center Racial Wealth Gap Symposium.��

“, , , and have left Black Americans more likely to reside in neighborhoods that are under-developed and under-resourced,” Coley says. “Those conditions have direct impact on Black Americans’ ability to build wealth. Historically racist policies affect the life cycle of people and impact where they can live, their chances at opportunity and their quality of life.”������

J Coley, right, presents at the Racial Wealth Gap sympoisum. (Photo by Chuck Wainwright)

A sociologist, Coley spent the last two years conducting extensive interviews with current and former tenants and homeowners in the , where residents organized to gird against the impact of early gentrification. Coley wanted to determine how the process of gentrification in Black neighborhoods occurred, how residents resisted it and how they responded to being displaced, dislocated and/or isolated because of it. Coley also examined how residents described the levels of trust or mistrust they had for anchor institutions (such as banks, medical centers and big developers) that had begun to cause changes to their neighborhood. The interviews yielded four common reactions, Coley says: “nothing new,” frustration, resistance and “make it right.”������

Many of the residents Coley interviewed were longtime community members who had lived through urban renewal. Their experiences put them “in a constant state of preparing themselves for what they feel is inevitable: displacement,” Coley says.��

According to Coley, infrastructure also plays a part in the characteristics of a neighborhood and can restrict access to resources. For example, Buffalo’s main street “divides Black Buffalo and white Buffalo in that 80% of Black people live on the east side. It’s an area of concentrated poverty. People don’t think about how that impacts your ability to get to certain resources, but conditions like that impact everything.”����

A Highway Parallel

In Rochester, as in Syracuse, a dilapidated highway is being torn down, Coley notes. While that will make way for more green space and area revitalization, it will still disrupt neighborhoods and potentially lead to the displacement of existing residents. Rochester’s and Syracuse’s projects also illustrate why residents may resist change they don’t think benefits them or their neighborhoods, they say.��

“Institutions need to be better collaborators with communities and include them in the changes that are happening in their neighborhoods,” Coley says. “People don’t have to have a Ph.D. for you to listen to them. They’re the experts at what they’re experiencing. I’ve talked to some 90-year-old women who have 50 years of experience in their neighborhood. They’re there every day; they know what they need.”��

Further contributing to the racial wealth gap, the gentrification of poor urban neighborhoods threatens Black Americans’ ability to build wealth through home ownership, Coley says. That’s because as property values in those areas rise, residents may have more difficulty affording their homes.����

J Coley

“People don’t really understand how policies created decades ago are still having an effect on peoples’ ability to build wealth, have equity and see and be seen in our society. When institutions and developers come into neighborhoods, we need to do a better job of holding them accountable and making sure they are good community partners and neighbors. We need to make sure they are investing in and not taking away from the communities.”��

Institutional Support Essential

The support of institutions like Syracuse University is essential to changing and improving government actions and programs that address the deterioration of neighborhoods, Coley believes. They say enacting progressive policies, such as establishing community land trusts and payment-in-lieu-of-taxes programs, can also help.��

“It’s really important that the University and other institutions are acknowledging the situation and putting the topic at the forefront,” Coley says. “That’s especially so because so many regions and institutions in this country are not doing that.”����

When their fellowship ends in 2025, Coley will continue to study these issues. They plan to stay in academia and seek a tenure-track position as an assistant professor at a research university. Based on their experience with other scholars creating , a collection of images and writings that emerged after a targeted mass shooting in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, along with their current research, they also plan to write a book based on gentrification and the displacement that occurs in some poor, urban Black neighborhoods.

“Interrogating the Racial Wealth Gap: Thinking Locally,” featured presentations by five faculty teams whose research is supported by 2023 grants. Projects focused on how demographics, situations and policies may create conditions that contribute to—or can help resolve—the existence of a .

The term “” refers to disparities in levels of accumulated wealth for individuals, families and groups and the ability of different racial and ethnic populations to access and accumulate opportunities, means of support and resources.

The symposium’s local focus is especially pertinent because has one of the highest poverty rates () in the U.S. and a child poverty level of close to 50%, according to and . Poverty rates impact such as accessibility to health care, housing, employment and educational opportunities, as well as economic well-being and racial and social equity.

At the symposium, researchers presented their findings and local community leaders spoke about how their organizations are addressing wealth gap issues.

Five Research Teams

“Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Through Environmental Justice and Participatory Design” findings from research of and of the and Daniel Cronan of the were presented.

The researchers reported on how air quality, heat islands, recreational facilities, public infrastructure, shelter and outdoor activity spaces affect the well-being and livelihood of neighborhoods in marginalized communities. Working with community partners and city agencies, they planned a new community space on Syracuse’s south side that features structures, landscaping and programming, with construction to begin this spring. Lender Center postdoctoral researcher J Coley also spoke on “Gentrification and Displacement in the American Rust Belt.” That presentation examined the impact of federal housing policy and gentrification on Black Americans’ ability to build wealth.

“Do Underserved and Underrepresented Communities Pay a Higher Premium in Employer-Sponsored Healthcare Coverage?” was presented by and of the and Patricia Crawford of the University of Rhode Island. They discovered significant socioeconomic disparities in healthcare coverage costs for underserved and underrepresented communities, especially for employer-sponsored health insurance at the state level. They reported that underserved populations, particularly those identifying as Black, allocate a higher percentage of income to employer-sponsored healthcare premiums than white and Hispanic individuals.

University Trustee Gisele Marcus ’89, a Whitman alumna, chaired that discussion session. Marcus is vice dean for the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and a professor of practice for diversity, equity and inclusion at Washington University in St. Louis.

Food Policy, Mental Health Response

“Food Policy Councils as a Vehicle to Address the Racial Wealth Gap in Food System Labor” was presented by of the and of the .

Data from 2016-2022 surveys by The Food Policy Network at the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future, and labor questions from its 2023 survey, were analyzed to assess tensions between small-scale food business owners and worker advocates. The pair found that while food business owners may be reticent to discuss labor policy, worker advocates want to see improvements in wages and labor conditions. Though both groups have worked with American food policy councils, the researchers said progress toward racial justice for food system workers may be limited due to these divided viewpoints and differing priorities. The researchers are continuing to conduct interviews and focus groups with some of the food policy councils.

“Advancing Mental and Behavioral Health Equity through the Promotion of an Equitable Crisis Response System” was presented by of the Maxwell School. She created two surveys—one for Syracuse University students, the other for the general public—to measure attitudes and perceptions about the national 988 suicide and crisis lifeline, particularly among communities of color. The surveys gauge attitudes toward mental health help-seeking; barriers to help-seeking behavior; perceptions and concerns about the service; and experiences of unfair treatment based on race and other identities.

Lender Center Senior Research Associate Kira Reed (right) introduces Maxwell School researcher Michiko Ueda-Ballmer (to her left) and community panelists Ann Rooney (far left) of Onondaga County and Carrie Brown of the University’s Barnes Center at The Arch for a discussion on a 988 suicide and crisis lifeline and community resources.

“K-12 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Policies and Plans” was presented by and of the . They discovered a spotty approach to the development and adoption of DEI policies and program integration in the New York State school districts they studied. While many had a DEI plan or have integrated DEI into their strategic goals, they found that support for the DEI work leaders are doing, and the speed and quality of those program implementations are highly varied. They also noted that several districts experienced community resistance to adopting DEI initiatives, especially around practices concerning LGBTQIA students.

Land and Wealth Loss

Thomas Shapiro, research professor of law and social policy at Brandeis University, also spoke about how the dispossession of lands from Black farmers has contributed to the racial wealth gap in the U.S. Though they collectively owned 16 million acres of land by 1910, Black farmers were dispossessed of 90% of that land over 70 years, extracting $326 billion in wealth (in today’s dollars) from that group, he said. Shapiro cited Pigford v. Glickman, a lawsuit the farmers brought against the U.S. Department of Agriculture alleging systemic racism in the allocation of farm loans and assistance. He called it “an important story…of racialized structures, policies and institutions that might be important to the work…of reparation frameworks and reparative justice.”

Community Participation

The event concluded with a community roundtable featuring local government and organizational leaders and moderated by , associate provost for strategic initiatives. Reporting on how their groups are addressing the racial wealth gap locally were Sharon Owens, Syracuse deputy mayor; Melanie Littlejohn, president and CEO of the Central New York Community Foundation; and Robert Simmons, director of Micron Gives North America at the Micron Foundation.

This was the second annual symposium supported by MetLife Foundation’s $2.7 million award sponsoring three years of inquiry regarding racial wealth gap causes. The funds have also permitted the Lender Center to host community conversations and form new partnerships with leading national civic and academic institutions.

The next conversation, “Closing the Racial Wealth Gap: Public, Private and Philanthropic Collaborations,” takes place June 4 at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta.

ParKer Bryant

and found the existence of AI technologies in communities affects people in many ways. They were part of a five-student research team working with , professor of anthropology in the , who was chosen as the 2022-24 Lender Center faculty fellow to study how artificial intelligence impacts weapons systems, communities and issues of social justice.

Bryant has worked in education since 2008. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in education leadership and moved to Syracuse from Georgia to pursue her doctorate in literacy education in the . Now in her third year, she wants to work as a faculty member or education researcher after graduation to stay involved with students but use data to ensure that educational policies are structured to benefit them.

Aren Burnside

Burnside is a third-year Ph.D. student in anthropology at the Maxwell School. He grew up in the Syracuse area and obtained dual bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and philosophy from Syracuse University in 2020. He wants to become a professor because he especially enjoys teaching.

Here, Bryant and Burnside discuss how their thinking about AI evolved after investigating its social intricacies. Together with Bahn and other student fellows, they will present their findings at the Lender Fellows Symposium on Friday, .

On , Bhan and her student fellows present their findings at the Lender Center symposium, “DeCoded Vision: Land, Bodies and AI in Syracuse,” from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel & Conference Center’s Comstock Room. The event is open to the campus community; is required.

The researchers will define AI and show how the technology transfers to industry, workforce training, community development policies and such everyday activities as police presence and the use of technology in social contexts. They will discuss how AI technologies are fueling the “Syracuse Surge,” a city- and regionwide initiative boosting technology education, tech-job training and new industries, and offer insights about their exploration.

Student fellows are ParKer Bryant, a Ph.D. student in literacy education, ; Aren Burnside, a Ph.D. student in anthropology, Maxwell School; Nadia Lyngdoh-Sommer ’25, a sociology major in the ; Cheryl Olanga ’25, a computer science major in the ; and Anna Terzaghi ’24, an international relations and anthropology major and a member of the in the College of Arts and Sciences.

In this SU News Q&A, Bhan previews key findings.

The awards are funded by a 2022 grant that supports research and community programming over three years to examine the racial wealth gap’s root causes and ideas that may resolve its economic and social inequalities, says , Lender Center interim director. The awards are part of the Lender Center for Social Justice initiative led by the

The racial wealth gap is an ongoing issue that undermines potential economic and social progress and opportunities for members of underserved and underrepresented communities, according to , Lender Center senior research associate and associate professor in the Whitman School of Management.

“These research projects are noteworthy because of their unique courses of inquiry, their highly inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional nature and their close engagements with Syracuse community members and organizations,” says Phillips.

Projects receiving the one-year grants and involved faculty are:

“Addressing the Racial Wealth Gap Through Increasing Decennial Census Self-Response Rates in Marginalized Communities”

Leonard Lopoo

This project will test mechanisms to try to increase self-response rates for the 2030 federal census in undercounted communities in New York State. Successful efforts could offset census undercounts that might otherwise reduce federal funding for education, health care, housing, infrastructure and other vital services.

• , , principal investigator
• ,

Brice Nordquist

“Syracuse Futures”

This study looks at Syracuse’s arts and humanities infrastructure and how universities and community organizations can partner in offering arts and humanities programming and college and career support to historically marginalized communities.�� Led by the ’ , the effort involves multiple South Side organizations.

• , College of Arts and Sciences, principal investigator.
• ,
• ,

“Does Military Service Mitigate the U.S. Racial Wealth Gap? Overlooked Pathways for��Underrepresented Minorities in Public Service”

Arielle Newman

Corri Zoli

This project explores how military service intersects with racial wealth disparities. Researchers will look at military service as a means of economic advancement and a way to overcome social barriers that may hinder underrepresented minorities who are pursuing post-service career advancement and entrepreneurship.

• , , and , Whitman School, principal investigators
• , (IVMF)
• ,
• , Maxwell School
• , IVMF
• , Lender Center for Social Justice
• , University of Pittsburgh

“From Highways to High-Speed Internet: Leveraging Equitable Infrastructure for the Data Economy”��

LaVerne Gray

Researchers are determining whether access to first-class digital information, services, assets and increased technology training can reduce the racial wealth gap by lessening barriers to digital networks, critical information and data literacy skills. Skills-training workshops are planned with community members.����

• and , (iSchool), principal investigators
• , iSchool
• , iSchool
  

  Beth Patin

• iSchool
• , College of Arts and Sciences/
• , , Whitman School

“Opportunity Design: Engaging Public Health in Low-Income Communities”

Hannibal Newsom

This study leverages interest in ongoing energy retrofit work at 418 Fabius Street in the James Geddes Housing development in Syracuse to generate a more comprehensive examination of social determinants of health through the process of opportunity mapping.

• , , principal investigator
• , College of Visual and Performing Arts, co-principal investigator
• , School of Architecture, co-investigator

“Nourishing Families: Parents as Partners in the Alignment of a Mindful Eating Intervention to Meet the Needs of Low-Income and Marginalized Families With Young Children”

Lynn Brann

Parent and teacher workshops that include mindful yoga and mindful eating lessons for children are planned to address the nutrition needs of low-income, underrepresented families in Syracuse. Research will explore if better nutrition for vulnerable populations can mean better health for families and more opportunities for their gainful employment, lessening the racial wealth gap.

• , , principal investigator
• , Falk College
• , Falk College

“Addressing Obesity and Hypertension in Refugees through Culturally Relevant Meal Interventions”��

Miriam Mutambudzi

This project looks at obesity and hypertension in diaspora populations and works with African immigrants on post-immigration diets to introduce healthy adaptations while preserving culinary heritage. The goal is to assess whether healthier eating can reduce health issues and boost labor force participation, generating improved socioeconomic status.

• , Falk College, principal investigator
• , Falk College

“Disability as a Critical Element in Exploring the Racial Wealth Gap”

Nannette Goodman

Researchers will identify challenges faced by Black, Indigenous and People of Color individuals with��disabilities and will examine the role of disability in the racial wealth gap. They plan to develop recommendations regarding policies and practices that limit economic inclusion and trap people with disabilities into poverty.

• , College of Law, principal investigator
• , College of Law

“Optimizing Corporate Supplier Diversity Programs and Corporate-Facing Regulations for Addressing the Racial Wealth Gap”��

Karca Aral

This initiative examines diversity interactions and legislative interventions in business-to-business aspects of wealth distribution and corporate supplier diversity programs. Researchers will develop guidance on diversity programs and diversity initiatives while enhancing those programs’ potential to level the racial wealth gap.

• , Whitman School, faculty lead
• , Whitman School
• ., Whitman School

Fellows receive research support for both years along with summer stipends and resources to implement the project and publicize findings. They work with an interdisciplinary team of student fellows and present the team’s work at the annual Lender Center Symposium.

Applications are due by Friday, April 12, at 5 p.m. Details about and the submission process are available on the . Questions can be directed to lendercenter@syr.edu.

Kendall Phillips

“We look forward to seeing new proposals that address pressing social issues,” says Kendall Phillips, interim director of the Lender Center. “Our faculty fellows and their student teams have taken up a wide variety of research questions and their work has generated interesting answers and valuable interventions.”

Last year, , assistant professor of magazine, news and digital journalism in the��, was named the 2023-25 faculty fellow. Her project examines media coverage of Muslim people and communities and the impact of that reporting. The 2022-24 faculty fellow, , associate professor of anthropology and Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies in the�� has been investigating how artificial intelligence weapons systems transform war and surveillance and how they affect social and political vulnerabilities to violence. , the 2021-23 fellow, led a project examining whether a building planned as a women’s wellness center in the City of Syracuse’s North Side neighborhood fulfilled its intended purpose. Two other fellowships have been awarded since the Lender Center Faculty Fellowship program began.

The panel discussion, workshop presentations and discussions on communicating recommendations to different community stakeholders and policymakers were part of a research initiative funded by a grant from . Guest presenters included , chief economist at the ; , professor of economics and director of the at Howard University; the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; , deputy commissioner of the at��the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; , ’07, an alumnus of the and executive vice president of the DC Health Practice at Edelman; and , president and CEO of Community Housing Associates Inc.

, Syracuse University’s associate provost for strategic initiatives and co-founder of the Lender Center, says the grant from MetLife Foundation has allowed the center to involve more external partners and stakeholders in the wealth gap conversation and broaden the base of people and institutions able to contribute to possible solutions. Haddix says the center is planning additional conversations on the racial wealth gap in other cities.

These images capture moments from the event.

Phaedra Rice Stewart ’91, left, an alumna of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, poses a question. Next to her is Kira Reed, Lender Center senior research associate and associate professor at the Martin J. Whitman School of Management.

Jim (Davis) Hull II ’13 (left) talks with Whitman School Associate Professor Willie Reddic.

Kristen Barnes, left, College of Law professor and event panelist, chats with Charlie Pettigrew, center, director, corporate giving and employee engagement at of MetLife Foundation. Barnes researches how the factors of property history and ownership and real estate practices contribute to the racial wealth gap in the U.S.

Coordinators and panelists (from left): Kendall Phillips, Lender Center interim director; Jhacova Williams, American University assistant professor of public administration and policy; Kristen Barnes, Syracuse University College of Law professor and associate dean for research; Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics associate professor of food studies; J Coley, Lender Center postdoctoral fellow; Daniel Cronan, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry assistant professor of landscape architecture; Marcelle Haddix, Syracuse University associate provost for strategic initiatives; and Kira Reed, Whitman School of Management associate professor and Lender Center senior research associate.

The group will work with , assistant professor of magazine, news and digital journalism (MND) in the , who last spring was��named

Student fellows will conduct research, analyze data and present findings related to how American media coverage of the war on terror affected U.S. policymaking and later impacted Muslim individuals and communities. They will also learn oral history methods to conduct trauma-informed interviews with individuals and in communities affected by war-on-terror policies; examine resistance projects and movements contributing to U.S. policymaking; and collaborate with Husain’s research partner, , associate professor of criminality, law and justice at the University of Illinois – Chicago College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to publish findings.

Kendall Phillips, Lender Center interim director, announced the following as 2023-25 student fellows:

Mohammad Ebad Athar

Mohammad Ebad Athar

Athar is a Ph.D. candidate in history and a graduate research associate in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs South Asia Center in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Athar’s dissertation examines the global impact of the post-9/11 period for the South Asian diaspora in the United States and the Persian Gulf. In drawing connections between those regions, Athar hopes to illustrate how South Asian identity has been securitized across transnational borders and how South Asian political activism has resisted that framework.

Olivia Boyer

Olivia Boyer

Boyer is a second-year MND major in the Newhouse School with a minor in South Asian studies in A&S.

Boyer has been involved in several on-campus publications, including The Daily Orange and University Girl. She has served since January as a research assistant for Husain, analyzing news media coverage of the war on terror and its impact. The Akron, Ohio, native’s interests include civic engagement, social justice, storytelling and fashion.

Azadeh Ghanizadeh

Azadeh Ghanizadeh

Ghanizadeh is a Ph.D. candidate in writing studies, rhetoric and composition in A&S. Her dissertation focuses on media representations of refugees in the United States through film, public service announcements and United Nations celebrity endorsements. Her work challenges prevailing assumptions about multiculturalism and migration by examining how American media portray forced migration and how those portrayals affect public policy.

Ghanizadeh holds degrees from the University of Oregon and Oregon State University. She has taught courses in critical thinking and composition, introductory and intermediate college writing and Middle East studies at Oregon State, Syracuse and Colgate Universities.

Mary Hanrahan

Mary Hanrahan

Hanrahan is a communication and rhetorical studies master’s student in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. She researches how structures of power are articulated through cultural texts and how texts mutate, enforce or disrupt systems of privilege and oppression.

She is interested in narrative reclamation and communications from communities experiencing surveillance and containment. She also investigates Islamophobic biases in the news media, their impact on marginalized groups and how affected communities work around the consequences of those biases.

Tia Poquette

Tia Poquette

Poquette is a third-year policy studies major in the Maxwell School and College of Arts and Sciences with double minors in architecture in the School of Architecture and sociology in the Maxwell School. Poquette is interested in urban policy, sustainability, social justice and criminal justice. She has interned with the nonprofit Hudson Yards Hell’s Kitchen Alliance and Youth Public History Institute. Her work there focused on community building and the history of prisons and policing, as well as their contemporary connections. She serves as a teaching assistant for Introduction to Public Policy Analysis.

Lender Center student fellows work on projects for two years, receive a $2,000 fellowship and will present their work at the 2025 Lender Symposium.

The Lender Center will soon issue a call for proposals for faculty fellowships for the 2024-26 term, according to Phillips. The announcement is timed for early December, and the expected deadline for applications to be submitted is April 18, 2024. Established in 2018, the Lender Center for Social Justice hosts research projects, activities and programming, including multidisciplinary conversations related to issues of social justice and collaborations with other University units, to promote a robust dialogue about issues of justice, equity and inclusion.

“The Lender Conversation: Interrogating the Racial Wealth Gap,” is planned for Monday, Oct. 30, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at the , with a reception to follow. Guests are asked to the public event, which is sponsored by the and .

Panelists include researchers from and other academic institutions who will discuss how housing availability and costs, transportation and labor issues exacerbate the . They will also offer solutions to help offset its negative economic effects.

The event is among several community-based academic gatherings and interdisciplinary research initiatives supported by a three-year, $2.7 million grant from MetLife Foundation, allowing Lender Center researchers to examine the racial wealth gap’s various dimensions.

The Lender Center for Social Justice held its first symposium on the topic of “Addressing the Racial Wealth Gap” in spring 2022.

Syracuse University panelists include , associate dean for faculty research and professor in the ; associate professor of food studies in the ; , associate provost for strategic initiatives and Lender Center for Social Justice co-founder; and Lender Center postdoctoral fellow.

Kendall Phillips (left) and Kira Reed

Joining them are�� assistant professor of public administration and policy at American University, and , assistant professor of landscape architecture at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Lender Center interim director and co-founder and , the center’s senior faculty research associate, are coordinating roundtable arrangements.

We spoke with Haddix to learn more about the event and how Lender Center research efforts and community-building activities are generating new ideas about the economic and opportunity gap.

Organizers of the community photographic project, “,” want to visualize just that and are asking Syracuse families to share their family photos and stories on camera to create a living photo archive. Community members—particularly those whose histories have been marginalized—are invited to talk about their family histories at a recorded interview station, digitize their family photos for later exhibition and have new portraits taken with their family photographs.

Thomas Allen Harris

The project is designed to build a more inclusive history of the city. It takes place Oct. 13-15 through a��series of activities and events with Yale University artist and filmmaker and his . The initiative is being coordinated by students and faculty in the University’s Turning the Lens Collective. The group is composed of , associate professor of English; , a Ph.D. candidate in English; , a Ph.D. candidate in history; Sarhia Rahim ’26, a policy studies major and Aniyah Jones ’25, an English and textual studies and psychology major.

Three Weekend Events

Events include a film screening and discussion of “: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People,” with Harris (, from 6 to 8 p.m.). The with community members takes place , from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. A to celebrate the archived images and oral storytelling is planned on , from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m., and includes music, poetry and special guests. All events take place at the Everson Museum at 401 Harrison St. in downtown Syracuse.

Hallas says the project will build a testament to marginalized families from across the city, cultivate a more inclusive archival history of Syracuse and recognize the people suppressed, forgotten or lost to a highway (the I-81 viaduct) that created a decadeslong economic and racial barrier in Syracuse.

“Syracuse is experiencing significant transformation and renewed hope for economic progress spurred by Micron’s multi-billion-dollar investment in a semiconductor megafacility, the city’s decades of commitment to refugee resettlement and the redevelopment of housing, transportation and industry when a community grid replaces the I-81 viaduct,” Hallas says. “Yet, in moving forward equitably, it’s necessary to remember and document the past. Syracuse remains one of the most impoverished and segregated cities in the nation, specifically for its Black and Latinx communities. In its redevelopment of housing, transportation and industry, the city must not repeat the systemic violence of the past.”

Community members shared treasured photos with Jessica Terry-Elliot, right center, along with their memories of family.

Jessica Terry-Elliott, a project co-organizer, researches the application of various methodologies that comprise what scholars call “Black archival practices.”��She says Family Pictures Syracuse will use oral history methods��coupled with the captured moments of Black life in photographs that are��often held in domestic��repositories.

“Using these methods to develop this project��is an actual application of Black archival practices,” Terry-Elliot says. “It will reveal the complexities of how Black life in Syracuse was and is documented and remembered,��while at the same time constructing pathways to engage with memory for��the future.”

Collective member Charles is writing a dissertation on the Black visual archive in film. “I’ve discovered that family photographs play a tremendous role in shaping our identity and history beyond the purview of our institutional archives,” Charles says. “The photographs we all keep in our homes—hanging on walls or tucked inside family albums—contribute to a larger story. Yet, those items are not always seen as important historical knowledge. This project affirms our photographs are themselves invaluable archives that should be studied and celebrated as such.”

Collective member and undergraduate student Aniyah Jones ’25 looks over a collection of family photos.

Undergraduate students Jones and Rahim have supported the initiative through their Syracuse Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Engagement (SOURCE) appointments as research assistants on the project. A team of undergraduate students from the department of film and media arts and the Orange Television Network will staff the photo-sharing event and students in Hallas’ upcoming “Everyday Media and Social Justice” and Jessica Terry-Elliott’s “Public History” courses in spring 2024 will further the project after its launch.

��The collective is also coordinating with the Network’s WriteOut Syracuse, a youth afterschool program designed to get students Interested In writing and storytelling, and Black and Arab Relationalities, a Mellon Foundation-funded research project led by College of Arts and Sciences faculty members and .

Wide Community Connections

Organizers are working with the Community Folk Art Center, Onondaga Historical Association and the North Side Learning Center and are collaborating with several other Syracuse community organizations for future programming.

Many sources of funding have made the project possible, including the University’s departments of African American Studies; anthropology; communication and rhetorical studies; English; film and media arts; history; Jewish studies; Latino/Latin American studies; LGBTQ studies; policy studies; religion; sociology; television, radio and film; visual communications; women’s and gender studies; and writing. External funding has been provided by Humanities NY and the Allyn Family Foundation.

Also sponsoring the project are the Democratizing Knowledge project; Engaged Humanities Network; SOURCE; Special Collections Research Center; Syracuse Humanities Center; The Alexa; Lender Center for Social Justice; Light Work and Orange Television Network.

In November, the Special Collections Research Center at Bird Library will host “Family Pictures in the Archive” (, 5 to 7 p.m.). The exhibition displays Black photographs from the University’s collections along with community photos archived during the Family Pictures Syracuse events.

Gretchen Purser

is an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She is co-director of the and coordinates the Labor Studies Working Group for the

When the New York State Nurses Association went on strike in January, Professor Purser provided these comments and spoke with several media outlets about the labor efforts.

Professor Purser provides written comments below that can be quoted directly. She is also available for interviews.

Purser says:

“This is an exciting time for labor, as workers across a wide range of industries continue to go out on strike to demand that their employers compensate them adequately given both rising profits and escalating costs of living.

“Workers at Kaiser Permanente, who made extraordinary sacrifices throughout the global pandemic, are overworked and are – similar to the strikes by healthcare workers we’ve seen in recent years – demanding increased staffing. Sufficient staffing is not only crucial to workers’ day-to-day lives, but it’s also crucial for patients and their loved ones, who rely upon health workers for care.”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Associate Director of Media Relations
Division of Communications
M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |
news.syr.edu |

Syracuse University

Kendall Phillips

, founding co-director of the Lender Center and professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Sciences in the , will serve��as interim director. The appointment was announced by , associate provost for strategic initiatives. Haddix also named a search committee to reprise the search for a permanent director.

Committee co-chairs are:

, associate dean for research and professor of inclusive education and disability studies in the School of Education, and , professor of women’s and gender studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Additional members are:

, teaching professor in the College of Law and faculty fellow in the Office of Strategic Initiatives and Office of Diversity and Inclusion;

, interim chair of citizenship and civic engagement, Daicoff Faculty Scholar and professor of history in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs;

, professor of educational leadership and inclusive elementary/early education in the School of Education; and

, vice president of advancement/academic affairs.

Marcelle Haddix

“We are seeking a nationally recognized scholar in social justice research, teaching and action to lead the Lender Center’s charge to promote the pursuit of equity, justice and transformative change,”��Haddix says.

For more information about , visit the .

The Lender Center, established in 2017 by a gift from Helaine and Marvin Lender, is a multidisciplinary research, teaching and action center and national hub for leadership and conversation on social justice issues. Its initiatives include innovative faculty and student fellowship programs, an annual symposium and a conversation series encouraging dialogue among researchers, practitioners, activists and thought leaders. Phillips and Haddix were co-founders of the Center.

“We are very pleased to advance these efforts to more closely examine the root causes of the racial wealth gap in the U.S.,” says Kendall Phillips, Lender Center interim director. “These thoughtful initiatives should produce exceptional insights and have practical impact. We look forward to learning about their findings.”

The following projects received grants:

“Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Through Environmental Justice and Participatory Design”

, associate dean for research; , assistant professor, ; and , assistant professor of landscape architecture,

Researchers will explore how built environments can positively impact basic life��needs that may be neglected in underprivileged communities. The project looks at the health and wellness benefits of installing shade structures and public recreational infrastructure; the economic and social stability impact of infrastructure that promotes business opportunities and wealth generation; and community empowerment created by citizen involvement in the design and construction of public spaces.

“K12 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Policies and Plans”

, professor of educational leadership and inclusive elementary education, and , associate teaching professor in educational leadership,

Researchers are examining how school policy is implemented. Key areas of exploration are the elements school districts include in DEI policies to create more equitable schools in an increasingly diverse society and the steps and interventions school districts use to move those policies forward.

“Advancing Mental and Behavioral Health Equity Among Historically Marginalized��Populations Through the Promotion of an Equitable Crisis Response System”

, associate professor of public administration and international affairs,

Ueda is exploring effective strategies to increase the use of the “988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline” (988 Lifeline), a phone, text and online chat service, among Black, Indigenous and people of color populations to advance health equity. The project focuses on people experiencing mental health emergencies and potentially suicidal ideation and the factors affecting their use or non-use of the hotline. The project also examines promotion opportunities to build greater awareness of the service since it transitioned to 988 Lifeline.

“Food Policy Councils as a Vehicle to Address the Racial Wealth Gap in Food System Labor”

, associate professor of food studies, , with , associate professor of geography and the environment, Maxwell School

This project examines whether the policy work and grassroots advocacy efforts of national food policy councils can address racialized wage and wealth injustice. It looks at organizational tensions between labor advocates and small food and farming business interests regarding racialized labor and wage disparities.

The researchers want to��develop best practices to reduce inequalities for food chain workers of color in stagnant tipped and minimum-wage positions and identify barriers for beginning farmers and other food business owners of color.

“Do Underserved and Underrepresented Communities Pay a Higher Premium in Employer-Sponsored Healthcare Coverage?”

, associate professor of accounting; , professor of accounting; and Patricia Crawford, doctoral candidate in finance, Whitman School

This project studies the potential economic inequities and health insurance coverage disparities faced by underserved and underrepresented communities. Researchers will analyze and compare insurance payment levels and coverage provisions.

The program will be led by , assistant professor of magazine, news and digital journalism in the��. She will direct five students in a public-facing research and writing project that analyzes American news coverage of U.S. war on terror policies, how those policies have affected communities, and the various ways individuals and organizations have resisted and responded to those policies and growth of the supporting government infrastructure.

Collaborators will include Nicole Nguyen, associate professor of criminology at University of Illinois Chicago, Muslim community-focused advocacy organizations and media analysis groups.

Selected fellows will spend two years on the project, receive a��$2,000��stipend and have opportunities for additional funding. Research activities will include:

• Working with Husain and collaborators to design academic research on news coverage.
• Learning how to use oral history methods to conduct trauma-informed interviews with members of communities affected by war on terror policies.
• Researching and writing about resistance projects and movements that have developed during the past three decades of war on terror policies.
• Presenting research at the 2025 Lender Center for Social Justice Symposium.

Information Session Sept. 13

An information session will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 13, to provide student applicants with more details about the project’s components. It is scheduled for 1 p.m. in 207 Bowne Hall.

Applications Due Oct. 2

Program information is available on the . Students can apply through the . The application deadline is Monday, Oct. 2.

“We are looking for students from all academic disciplines who are passionate about news media, public messaging, community advocacy and social justice to apply for these fellowships,” Husain says. “This is an important and fascinating topic to study because it concerns some stark realities in American society. The war on terror is often framed as something that is over, but it’s not. The government infrastructure to keep it relevant to the public remains intact and its reach continues to expand, particularly globally.

“There has been resistance to these policies for decades; I think a huge and hopeful part of this project will be documenting those movements. We hope this project will shed some additional light on what is actually occurring in the war on terror arena today, how various segments of America are responding to it, and the value of added information and increased awareness regarding it.”

George Theoharis

and note that among data-informed disparate outcomes, school discipline disproportionally targets students of color, students with disabilities and transgender students; students with disabilities make up 58% of students placed in seclusion or involuntary confinement; and LGBTQ+ students are targeted in school at alarming rates: 76% are verbally harassed, 31% are physically harassed and 13% are assaulted.

The project recognizes that local, state and federal educational policies have played a role in fostering these disparate outcomes but that contemporary DEI policies are designed to help dismantle such educational and social injustice.

However, “[s]chool policy does not implement itself. There is local ‘sense making’ that happens to put the policy into action,” write Theoharis and George. “This ‘sense making’ leads to policies implemented in a range of ways, including with enthusiasm and in the spirit intended, or only for compliance but nothing in practice changing, or with unintended consequences.”

Leela George

As experts in educational leadership and directors of the School of Education’s —a educational services partnership with Central New York school districts—Theoharis and George often hear from school leaders looking for support, especially with DEI policy “sense-making.” Their experiences have led them to pose the following research questions that will drive data collection:

• How are school districts planning to create more equitable schools in an increasingly diverse society?
• What interventions have school districts chosen to move DEI forward?
• In what ways, have school districts changed disparate outcomes by race and other intersectional identities?

The researchers seek participation from CNY districts, to gather and analyze their DEI policies and plans, to interview school leaders and ultimately to learn the extent to which they are working to disrupt disparate realities and what data they have that indicates impact.

“We see this work as potentially contributing to two of the for Social Justice grant proposal’s requested accomplishments: ‘Identify and capture factors leading to or minimizing the racial wealth gap’ and ‘offer solutions to minimizing the racial wealth gap that are data-driven and evidence-based,’” say Theoharis and George.

As part of several new research initiatives by the Lender Center to accelerate efforts to address the racial wealth gap and help dismantle the root causes of wealth disparity, the funded proposals—supported by the —provide support to scholars with new or ongoing research projects that relate to the causes, consequences and solutions on the problem of ever-expanding economic and social inequality.

The architecture team’s research project, “Closing the Racial Wealth Gap through Environmental Justice and Participatory Design,” intends to identify ways that the built environment can have a positive impact on basic life needs that are typically neglected in underprivileged communities, which include communities of color, low-income, disability, the elderly and immigrant populations. Through three phases—data analysis and design research, curricular implementation and impact and transferability—the team hopes to better understand the entrenched systems (policy, municipal, zoning, etc.) that have created and exacerbated racial wealth gaps.

CloudHouse Shade Structure, a temporary pavilion designed by Iman Fayyad in collaboration with the City of Cambridge in 2021, provided a space for respite in a park frequented by nearby daycare and school children as well as public housing residents in a low-income neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Photo by Iman Fayyad)

With this knowledge, their project intends to engage communities through design technologies using Building Information Modeling (BIM) and other participatory tools to create opportunities for exchange, participation and co-production of knowledge to empower communities to have a voice into what is modeled and built within their local environments.

“The highlight of this project is its focus on participatory planning, a challenge that we will address through both technology and design, merging disciplines and expertise,” says Abu-Hamdi, principal investigator (PI) for the project. “The Lender Center is supporting our growing roster of faculty engaged in community-facing research, allowing us to become further recognized as a reliable partner to local communities, demonstrating the value of design in relation to ongoing economic, infrastructural, social and spatial challenges.”

In phase one of the team’s project, design strategies centered around environmental justice concerns such as urban heat islands and shade, accessibility/universal design and building construction technologies, will be developed to address how inadequate physical infrastructure, specifically with regard to design and construction, has historically excluded members of minority communities from participating in the construction, selection and design of community facilities, municipal resources and public recreation.��In this way, communities, policymakers and planners can better understand the conditions that generated current developmental problems and the potential interventions that could reverse detrimental effects through design.

“There is a lot of opportunity to push our own disciplines in service of climate justice, sustainable building practices and community involvement,” says Fayyad, co-PI for the project. “Through our combined efforts with research, practice and teaching, we can consider how to make public spaces healthier, more accessible and equitable, and importantly, explore how design can empower communities by providing aesthetic value as well as functional, efficient and necessary infrastructure to improve the livelihoods of marginalized populations.”

Tree Canopy Score in Syracuse, New York (Rendering by Daniel Cronan)

Site-specific implementation is another primary goal of the first year of funding and phase two of the project. The team plans to create and prepare content for curricular development of a studio course jointly led by faculty at the Syracuse University School of Architecture and SUNY-ESF in which students will research, design, develop and build proposals for public infrastructure for select communities in the City of Syracuse. To propose the curriculum, the team will develop design research over the next year as “products” (tools and techniques) that students will use as part of the course.

“We see this endeavor as a great challenge and hope to expand the scope of this year’s research focus to provide transferrable skills, frameworks and expanded resources to build awareness and resilience within these communities,” says Cronan, co-PI for the project.

In the third phase of the project, the team will assess the applicability of their research and development of the BIM platform, as a digital twin, for broader purposes and for a variety of sites—rural, urban, large or small. This interface, and the site-specific design interventions that can be realized, are key to community empowerment in any location, to serve any variety of community needs. Through the BIM application and design proposals (both in the form of a built prototype and further speculative variations), the team’s co-production framework of analysis and design will allow for transferability to future research applied to communities with similar concerns and further research beyond the applied case study for Syracuse.

“We are grateful to the Lender Center for providing this opportunity for us to evolve our research and for supporting efforts on campus to connect with our immediate communities in Syracuse as well as address greater systemic issues across the United States,” says the team.

The team will present their collected data, built proposal and speculative future proposals at the annual , jointly hosted by SUNY-ESF and Syracuse faculty and students, in March 2024 and March 2025. For more information about the Lender Center for Social Justice’s programmatic initiative to explore the racial wealth gap in the United States, visit .

Husain is an assistant professor of magazine, news and digital journalism in the , where she teaches data and documents journalism. Before joining the University in 2021, she did data reporting and wrote for the on state surveillance of Muslim Americans, carceral units targeting Muslims, the 2017 “Muslim Ban,” refugee communities and the government’s historical disinvestment in Chicago’s communities of color. She also helped build back-end infrastructure for election reporting and contributed to visual journalism projects.

Nausheen Husain

, associate provost for strategic initiatives, whose office oversees the Lender Center for Social Justice, says determining how news coverage can both inadvertently and knowingly impact everyday life as well as perspectives about specific individuals and communities “is an engaging and significant investigation. We look forward to Professor Husain’s findings and the opportunities she presents to engage our students regarding how journalism and journalists may be exacerbating complex community and individual situations.”

Student Fellow Selection

Each year, several students are selected as Lender Center student fellows to work with the faculty fellow for the two years of their project. Students from all academic disciplines who are passionate about finding solutions to complex problems are invited to apply. More information about the application process and deadlines will be announced early this fall.

Q&A with Husain

We recently sat down with Husain to discuss her project, “The Stories We Told Ourselves: The American ‘War on Terror.’”

That was the outgrowth of scholarship presented by more than 40 University faculty, students, alumni and guest presenters at the recent Symposium supported by MetLife Foundation. The two-day forum held provided close examinations of structural and systemic social, economic and government factors that have contributed to an ongoing and widening wealth gap for Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other communities of color.

The event, led by , associate provost for strategic initiatives; , interim director of the Lender Center for Social Justice; and , senior research associate of the Lender Center for Social Justice and co-lead of the , also provided for discussion on ways to mitigate those factors.

The overview of wealth disparities covered the areas of law, sports, satire, humanities, the criminal legal system, writing as healing, educational systems, health care, food insecurity, access to capital and business opportunity. The research, case studies and statistics offered drew compelling pictures of the wealth gap’s impact.

More than 40 University faculty, staff, students and alumni presented over two days at the Racial Wealth Gap symposium. (Photo by Angela Ryan)

Presentations cited how:

• The average white family has more than seven times the wealth of the average Black family and five times more wealth than the average Hispanic family.
• White families are more likely to receive inheritances and other family support, such as help paying for college and down payments on homes, than are Black or Hispanic families.
• Black and Hispanic students face more stressors at home that may affect classroom behavior and the learning environment than white students do. Classrooms are also affected by the concentration of students from impoverished families.
• Black Americans still face obstructed access to education and disparities in educational quality because schools are funded based on the wealth of residential home values in a district.
• Families of incarcerated individuals often go deeply into debt to support imprisoned loved ones so the family member has enough food and can afford phone calls and other essentials the system doesn’t provide.
• Incarceration impacts family earnings and future economic security long after a sentence is served. Aside from being deprived of typical earnings, a family can’t build wealth when there are no retirement account contributions, Social Security payments, or savings deposits being made.
• The ability to access information is a strategy to develop wealth. For instance, becoming proficient at a sport—even pickleball, for instance—can provide the leverage to be admitted to a university and obtain a college education without typical out-of-pocket costs. That setting creates entrée that can produce important networking and other life opportunities.

Marvin Lender, center, who with his wife presented a gift to launch the Lender Center for Social Justice, attended the symposium and offered remarks. (Photo by Angela Ryan)

, a University Life Trustee who with his wife provided the gift that helped establish the Lender Center for Social Justice, said he was impressed with the information presented and pleased with the center’s work and the University’s initiatives on social justice. “This issue is not an easy one; it is complicated and challenging. You are courageous people doing what you do to help our children and help the world,” Lender said during his remarks at the event.

Haddix said while it is very important that historical narratives are corrected, “We also need to make sure we’re documenting and bearing witness to what’s happening in contemporary times.” She asked attendees to continue their cross-disciplinary work and collaborative projects, citing the good work that faculty, staff, students and others have already done across campus.

Purser concluded, “What’s been presented today should push us to think differently. How do we create interventions to address wealth concentration? Two concepts come to mind: political will and imagination. Then the questions are: Where are we going to find the political will to address the structural inequality in our society? How can we develop the imagination to imagine a different world?”

MetLife Foundation provided the Lender Center a $2.7 million grant last fall to fund a variety of research and scholarship, community-building initiative and dialogues on the racial wealth gap.

Syracuse University junior Iona Volynets has been named as a 2023 recipient of the Truman Scholarship.

Volynets, of Washington, D.C., is a history and international relations major in the and with a museum studies minor in the , a Coronat Scholar and a member of the . In October 2022, Volynets was named as one of three Syracuse recipients of the Voyager Scholarship: the Obama-Chesky Scholarship for Public Service, a new award for juniors committed to public service funded by the Obama Foundation.

The Truman Scholarship was awarded this year to 62 exceptional college juniors in recognition of their community service, academic accomplishment and commitment to a career of public service.��Volynets was among 199 finalists selected from more than 705 candidates nominated by schools and colleges from around the country.

The was created by Congress in 1975 to be the nation’s living memorial to President Harry S. Truman. Since its creation, the Truman award has become the premier graduate scholarship for aspiring public service leaders in the United States. The scholarship seeks to fund students who possess the leadership skills, intellect and passion that will make them “change agents” for the public good in any field. Recipients receive $30,000 to fund up to three years of graduate education leading to a career in public service. Truman Scholars also benefit from a network of other scholars and the opportunity to participate in professional development programming to help prepare them for careers in public service leadership.

Volynets is the 14^th Truman Scholar from Syracuse University since the program’s inception in 1975, and the first named since 2018. They worked with the����(CFSA) on their application and in preparing for their interview.

“Iona’s outstanding academic record, thoughtful community engagement, and leadership skills made them an excellent candidate for the Truman Scholarship,” says Jolynn Parker, director of the Center for Fellowship and Scholarship Advising. “They are poised to become exactly the kind of change agent the Truman Foundation seeks to recognize. I can’t wait to see what they do with this award.”

Volynets plans to work at the intersection between the arts and public service in the field of cultural preservation. “This is a field that requires a high degree of skills, knowledge and expertise. I would like to be the best possible public servant, and gaining a graduate degree will allow me to be a more informed, better prepared leader.”

They would like to change the field, making it more diverse, participatory and accessible. They also hope to dedicate their career to specifically focus on former Soviet, and especially Ukrainian, heritages.

“The skills, connections, experience and knowledge I will gain not only from a graduate degree, but from the support, guidance and opportunities offered by the Truman Scholarship will help me enter this field,” they say. “I can’t express how grateful I am for the opportunity. I hope to spend many years expanding my knowledge, so that I may one day be a truly impactful, humble and informed leader in the field. The Truman Scholarship provides opportunities to pursue this path, and I am so fortunate to have been given this incredible opportunity.”

Volynets is a current Lender Center Fellow, working under the guidance of Lender Faculty Fellow Seyeon Lee and with fellow students Ana Aponte González, Aaishanni Agny and Rose Hodg, and researcher Yash Shimpi. The group’s overarching project was focused on migrant women’s wellness in the Northside neighborhood. Volynets chose to work on access to culturally appropriate fresh produce, based both on past focus groups with women in the area and inspiration from organizations doing great work in their hometown of Washington, D.C. They spoke with nonprofits, farmers, gardeners and food security experts in the Syracuse area and secured a partnership with the Central New York Food Bank, who provided culturally sensitive produce to the YMCA throughout the Fall 2023 season.

In addition, they conducted surveys at the nearby Northside Vineyard Church food pantry and surveyed the female refugee participants. Through these surveys, they determined which produce these women took and used, which produce they desired and whether they wanted access to feminine hygiene products. In addition, they collected information about their nationality and family size.

“From our data collection, we were able to learn more about how to provide culturally appropriate produce to the diverse Northside community,” they say. Volynets will continue this work in the fall to better determine which produce should be provided in specific neighborhoods of Syracuse.

“My work as a Lender Center Fellow has been an exceptional and life-changing opportunity,” Volynets says.

Volynets has also served as a Service Learning Intern at the Shaw Center, as an intern with Save the Children and as a Teen Council member for the Smithsonian Galleries of Asian Art.

Volynets is currently spending the semester in Strasbourg, France, through Syracuse Abroad. “I hope to one day be a polyglot, and practicing my French is one important step on that path,” they say. “In addition, being able to intern at the Council of Europe is an incredible and unique opportunity. I am so grateful to be able to work there, and have learned much from my time there. In addition, Strasbourg has a lot of fascinating history and art, making it a wonderful place for me to be.”

This summer, Volynets will travel to six former Soviet countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan). They will visit historic art museums and analyze the different ways these countries and regions portray their histories with the Russian empire, the USSR and the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. “I am interested in national memory and the diverse and varied experiences in the USSR. I hope to turn this research into a distinction thesis in history, as well as an honors thesis,” they say.

Those questions will be addressed by more than 40 expert presenters—including faculty, doctoral students and alumni from schools and colleges across the University—during the Lender Center for Social Justice Symposium. The event, supported by MetLife Foundation, takes place Thursday, March 30, and Friday, March 31, in 130 Dineen Hall.

On March 30, Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs Jamie Winders will offer opening remarks, followed by a keynote address by College of Law Professor Kristen Barnes, speaking on “Dispossession and Restoration.” Closing remarks will be given by Jasmine Bellamy ’92, vice president of merchandising, planning and allocation and leader of Reebok Culture at Reebok.

The March 31 keynote address will be given by dt ogilvie, professor of urban entrepreneurship and economic development, former distinguished professor of urban entrepreneurship and former dean of the Saunders College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Welcoming remarks will be offered by Marvin Lender, chairman of Baldwin Street Management LLC, Syracuse University Life Trustee and Investment and Endowment Committee member, and Charlie Pettigrew, director, corporate giving and employee engagement at MetLife Foundation. Remarks by Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives Marcelle Haddix will close the day’s program.

Speakers and guests attend the 2022 Lender Center Social Differences – Social Justice symposium held at the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. (Photo by Evan Whitney)

Five panels will convene during the two-day event. The topics are:

• “Integrating a Humanities Perspective in Understanding and Addressing the Racial Wealth Gap”
• “Structural and Systemic Impact of Educational and Criminal Justice Systems on the Racial Wealth Gap”
• “Racial Wealth Disparities in the Military and Among Veterans”
• “Exploration of Factors Within Organizations That Impact the Racial Wealth Gap in the U.S.”
• “Converting Research to Policy Change and Action”

Presenters represent multiple Syracuse University schools and colleges, including the College of Arts and Sciences, College of Law, College of Professional Studies, Martin J. Whitman School of Management, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, School of Information Studies, School of Architecture, School of Education and S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, as well as the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families.

In 2022, MetLife Foundation awarded a three-year, $2.7 million grant to the Lender Center for new initiatives to explore the racial wealth gap in the U.S., looking at its causes and consequences and elevating effective solutions.

Initiatives include hosting conversations among academic and social justice leaders in city centers across the nation to gain deeper insights on the topic; hiring postdoctoral researchers to develop new data-collection and evidence-gathering research tools; and other efforts to assess and resolve the wealth gap’s impact on members of Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other communities of color. Projects are being managed by leaders of the Lender Center and the .

Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives Marcelle Haddix speaks at 2022’s Lender Center Symposium on Social Differences – Social Justice. (Photo by Evan Whitney)

Haddix says the innovative partnership between the Lender Center for Social Justice and MetLife Foundation “is intended not only to help uncover the systemic issues contributing to the racial wealth gap, but also to discover and develop scalable solutions to reduce inequities, provide access to opportunity and enable historically marginalized communities to ultimately build better economic futures.”

The was founded by Syracuse University Life Trustee (Marvin) Lender and is named for him, his wife, Helaine, and their family.

and are available.

For more information about the event or to request accommodations, contact Kira Reed at 315.443.3391 or kireed@syr.edu.

“Access to Wellness for Women in a Diverse Socio-Economic Neighborhood” takes place Wednesday, March 29. The in-person panel discussion will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. in the Schine Student Center, Room 304 ABC. It will also be available for viewing on Zoom. .

The symposium is an annual event and an outgrowth of the Lender Center faculty and student fellowship program that supports two-year research projects exploring existing social issues and developing problem-solving approaches to community concerns.

Seyeon Lee

is the 2022-2023 Lender Center for Social Justice Faculty Fellow. Lee is an associate��professor of environmental and interior design and George Miller Quasi Endowed Professor in the School of Design in the .

The 2022-2023 student fellows are Aaishanni Agny G’23 (clinical mental health counseling); Roselynne Hodges ’24 (environmental and interior design); Iona Volynets ’24 (international relations/history); and Ana Aponte González��’24 (communications and rhetorical studies/women’s and gender studies).

Also part of the panel discussion will be community partners who were involved with helping provide wellness programming: Johnathan Logan, director of NorthUP; Amalia Swan, chief community impact officer of Food Bank of Central New York; Mike Van Epps, co-leader of the Vineyard North Side Food Pantry; Maxine Burgin, North Side site pastor of Vineyard Church; and Munira Aziz and Emilia Jerez, residents of the Syracuse community.

Complex Issues Involved

Initially, the research project was meant to assess whether a well-equipped fitness center, which was designed to accommodate a broad range of wellness supports and programs for women in Syracuse’s North Side community, was meeting planned objectives. The researchers discovered that while the idea of a neighborhood wellness center had merit, the neighborhood environment and the women’s personal situations presented obstacles to achieving the intended goals. Cultural, child care, transportation and “comfort zone” barriers—along with social distancing during COVID-19—resulted in the facility being virtually unused by those it was created to serve.

Among their research team’s discoveries was that the diverse mix of nationalities, household sizes and languages among North Side neighborhood residents presented challenges for program delivery. Cultural differences and unequal distribution of environmental resources, such as transportation and childcare availability, were additional barriers to program participation, according to Lee. Other factors were concerns about safety and the availability of culturally appropriate fresh produce in the community.

“We studied the social determinants of health and their conditions in the community, not just the issues of the building and its use, and we saw how complex it was to bring the community together to improve wellness resources,” Lee says.

Lender Center student fellows and program staff, from left, students Ana Aponte González, Iona Volynets and Roselynne Hodges; Rabia Razzaq and Meg Lowe; and student Aaishanni Agny discuss aspects of wellness program delivery for women in Syracuse’s North Side neighborhood.

Tailored to Needs

Research team members separately and together examined the issues and concerns they found. They also inquired about the cultural perception of self-worth as a value that contributed to willingness to participate in wellness activities.

As the project progressed, the fellows tweaked nearly all program aspects to devise a work-around. They arranged pick-up and transportation. Mothers could bring all their children along because child care services, child equipment and snacks were provided. A less imposing, more personalized space was developed. Health counselors and fitness coaches offered nutrition and mindfulness information in a more intimate, small-group setting and provided instruction on exercises that could be done at home.

Those accommodations allowed nine women to participate in six weeks of wellness programming. By the end of that time, Lee says the research team noticed participants’ mindsets starting to change. Participants became more comfortable and recognized that spending time on personal wellness care was acceptable and positive. ����

Student Experience

As a student, Hodges loved being able to fully immerse herself in the community. “Meeting people from all over the world opened my eyes to a variety of cultures and experiences,” she says. “Working with real people and real problems was a challenge because one cannot predict how human subjects are going to behave. But the outcome made me feel like I was making a positive difference.”

Aponte says the project helped her discover a passion for research. “Through this community participatory approach, I was able to bridge what I’ve learned from connecting with the community at La Casita Cultural Center with research efforts that seek to make visible the problems in underrepresented communities,” she says.

Agny says the project was fulfilling because the research was intentionally applicable, and scalable, and created larger dialogue about access to wellness. “Often, research remains in academic circles and does not reach the intended audiences. Working with various organizations helped me understand the scope of research in social work and mental health outreach,” she says.

Volynets says she has loved being able to engage with the North Side community through her own and her peers’ projects. “Getting to interact with people from Syracuse outside of the University is a very rewarding and eye-opening experience. I’ve learned so much about public service, research and community engagement from this project.”

Lee says she also learned how complex social elements can affect spatial design and use. “It turned out that a lot of social issues, political issues and social justice and equity issues were all addressed in this project. Community-based projects such as ours are difficult to deliver because they are so complex and are related to particular socioeconomic demographics,” Lee says. “The research helped us really understand what is happening in our backyard.”

David Crane L’80

The 2023 Atrocity Studies annual lecture—presented by the —will address how war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities are documented across the globe and the implications of this evidence for international courts and justice. The lecture features Ewa Schaller, senior program officer, , and David M. Crane L’80, Syracuse University College of Law Distinguished Scholar in Residence.

“” takes place in person on Thursday, March 23, at 5:30 p.m. in 107 Hall of Languages. The lecture also will be live-streamed. For those participating via Zoom, .

Ewa Schaller

Ewa Schaller has participated in Yahad-In Unum’s investigative work in Ukraine, Poland, and Latvia. She holds a Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Torun, Poland. Deeply interested in the Holocaust history that has marked so much of her country’s history and identity, she joined American Friends of Yahad-In Unum in 2015.

David Crane L’80 was the founding chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone and former director of the Office of Intelligence Review and assistant general counsel of the Defense Intelligence Agency. As a College of Law faculty member, he founded , an online student-run review and public service blog, and the , which documents war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Syrian Civil War and other conflicts, including Ukraine.

“I am happy that this lecture will set out the methodologies through which Yahad-In Unum documents atrocities,” says Professor Julia M. White, director of the School of Education’s . “We often hear about the causes of, responses to, and aftermaths of atrocities, but we don’t often get insight into what happens on the ground to build cases for prosecuting perpetrators of atrocities and how to use the documentation to understand how genocides and other atrocities are committed in order to prevent future crimes.”

Supported by Lauri ’77 and Jeffrey Zell ’77, the annual spring atrocity studies lectures convene speakers from disciplines at the intersection of history, memory, and international human rights. The lectures fundamentally ask how we can use the lessons of the past to inform and improve our world.

The 2023 lecture is co-sponsored by the following Syracuse University schools, colleges, departments, and programs: College of Law , ; ; ; Maxwell School , , , , , , , ; and .

The Lender Center Faculty Fellowship supports a two-year research project that examines contemporary social issues and develops innovative approaches to address them. The selected fellow will work with a team of student fellows to create an interdisciplinary research team. The fellowship term culminates with the Lender Center Symposium, where the team presents results of its research project, alongside invited speakers.

Only Syracuse University full-time faculty (either tenure- or non-tenure-track) are eligible for the fellowship. Faculty applying for the Lender fellowship should be dynamic and accomplished scholar/teachers who are committed to an agenda of advancing social justice. They will be expected to foster an interdisciplinary team that will simultaneously encourage student learning and growth and the pursuit of concrete engagement with real-world problems.

The faculty fellow will receive research support for both years of the project, a summer stipend and additional resources to facilitate the development and execution of their project and publicize the results.

For more information on����and to��, visit the��.

The Lender faculty fellow for 2022-24 is , associate professor of anthropology and Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies in the��. She studies artificial intelligence (AI) weaponry through the lens of a cultural anthropologist, believing that those systems can transform the realities of autonomy, accountability, human rights and justice.

, assistant professor in the , was the 2021-23 faculty fellow. She and her team of students studied whether the space opened as a women’s wellness center on the City of Syracuse’s North Side has been functioning as intended. They assessed its uses, accessibility and lessons drawn from the building’s development, opening and usage that can be applied to other public spaces.

Predictive text offers to finish our web searches and our text messages. AI learning-based software can produce everything from research papers to poetry, solving complex math equations to writing computer code. AI can be used to write algorithms, collect data on which areas experience the most gun violence and dictate which neighborhoods receive access to vital resources.

This year, five students who make up the 2022-24 will set out to investigate how AI weapons systems transform war and surveillance, and they will also analyze how AI accentuates our social and political vulnerabilities to violence.

The research team will use collaborative documentation, GIS-enabled mapping and immersive media techniques to study precisely how artificial intelligence weapons and systems may bring about social and political changes.

These research-based advocacy projects will be directed by , associate professor of anthropology in . Last fall, Bhan was selected as the center’s 2022-24 faculty fellow.

Bhan will conduct the project along with other University faculty, University centers such as the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute and this new cohort of student fellows to analyze and disseminate findings on the social justice implications of AI weaponry. The project is part of a larger research and advocacy project Bhan is carrying out with her longtime collaborator, Haley Duschinski, of Ohio University.

Get to know ParKer Bryant, Aren Burnside, Nadia Larissa Lyngdoh-Sommer, Cheryl Olanga and Anna Terzaghi, the 2022-24 Lender Center student fellows. These students will be provided with a $2,000 stipend between 2022-24 and will have opportunities for additional funding.

ParKer Bryant, Ph.D. student

ParKer Bryant

A dedicated teacher and learner, when COVID struck in the spring of 2020, Bryant started researching where to obtain her doctoral degree. That’s when Bryant came across the research being done on literacy and teacher preparation by Marcelle Haddix, associate provost for strategic initiatives and Distinguished Dean’s Professor of Literacy, Race and Justice.

Bryant applied for the student fellowship in part because she wants to study how to achieve balance between AI and education, specifically focusing on the implications that stem from releasing much of our memory and cognition to technology. The end goal? Learning how to make peace with this new technology while striving for a balanced relationship between AI and education.

“I’m interested in future thought, not necessarily being present in the right now, but in where we’re going. I applied because I wanted to do more with AI and education, focusing on the implications when we release so much of our cognition to technology, and what impact that has on us as a society and those of us who are educators,” says Bryant, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in literacy education from the School of Education.

Aren Burnside ’20, Ph.D student

Aren Burnside ’20

Growing up in Syracuse, Burnside is very familiar with the issues affecting the city, which include one of the highest child poverty rates in the country. He’s committed to using his fellowship and his time at the University—Burnside earned dual bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and philosophy from the Maxwell School and is currently in his third year of Maxwell’s anthropology doctoral program—to bring about change in the city.

By studying how residents interact with the city’s spaces—both physical spaces like buildings and roads and interpersonal space created through relationships—Burnside wants to know more about how space is created, produced and maintained in the city, and why some segments of the population flourish while others struggle to make ends meet.

“You can’t really understand how citizens interact with their spaces until you do a deep dive into questions like how certain communities that are targeted by the police and similar militarized forces are left out of these new investments in the community. I’m especially interested in the ways that the military funding and wealth produce uneven space in the city and how certain groups get better access to resources and jobs based on the infrastructure in the city,” Burnside says.

Nadia Lyngdoh-Sommer ’25

Nadia Lyngdoh-Sommer ’25

Much like Burnside, Lyngdoh-Sommer is quite familiar with the societal issues Syracuse residents face on a daily basis as a tutor for students on the north side of the city through the Shaw Center, the University’s hub for academic community engagement.

Unlike her fellow cohort members, Lyngdoh-Sommer comes in without any previous research experience. But growing up in Singapore, Lyngdoh-Sommer witnessed how the country uses AI technology to police and surveil its citizens.

This fellowship represents the perfect introduction to the field of how AI weapons systems transform war and surveillance activities and accentuate the social and political vulnerabilities of humans to violence.

“My sociology major was really helpful because I was already familiar with a lot of the background on the inequalities and criminal justice issues in Syracuse. We are researching how AI adds to the militarization and disproportionate policing efforts in certain communities in Syracuse. Certain areas are affected much more by this over-policing, and AI plays a large role in that,” Lyngdoh-Sommer says.

Cheryl Olanga ’25

Cheryl Olanga ’25

Whenever Olanga logs into her social media channels, she notices a problem. The AI systems used display embedded patterns of bias, discrimination, racism, ableism and sexism. And that doesn’t sit well with Olanga, a sophomore studying computer science in the College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Since coming to the University, Olanga says she’s become more aware of the ways AI is inherently biased against people of color and plans to use her student fellowship and her academic pursuits to devise a framework and a blueprint for devising solutions to the implicit biases found in AI.

“My classes focus on writing and analyzing algorithms, and I want to use my computer science degree to help solve the social issues we’re facing. We will come up with solutions to combat the issues I want to change when I graduate,” Olanga says. “I’m living my dream and the Lender Student Fellowship has provided me this platform to actualize my dreams and my passion for changing these systems that have been normalized in today’s world.

Anna Terzaghi ’24

Anna Terzaghi ’24

Studying social justice issues piqued Terzaghi’s interest from a young age. When she was in high school in Sydney, Australia, Terzaghi became involved in community problem-solving, devising strategies for addressing the issues that plague society.

For Terzaghi, one of the biggest issues she’s encountered has been drone surveillance, drone technology and the humanitarian issues related to AI, specifically how drones and AI track people who are trying to escape persecution.

She plans on working with the Upstate Drone Coalition—a dedicated group of Syracuse residents who often protest the ways drones are utilized in and around the area—to both better understand the why behind their work and to become inspired to get more involved in her own social justice causes.

“The ability to surveil people using drones, technology and AI, to track them as they are fleeing a situation, is problematic and comes with a lot of ethical questions. What is right when it comes to the use of drones? How are these humanitarian issues playing out on the world stage today?” says Terzaghi, a junior majoring in international relations and anthropology in the Maxwell School.

The awards are part of a new social justice initiative and one of the projects funded by a $2.7 million MetLife Foundation grant presented to the University’s last fall. That work is being conducted in collaboration with the University’s faculty and in concert with the Academic Affairs Office of Strategic Initiatives.

Deadline April 3

The deadline for applications is April 3. The opportunity applies to projects over the period of July 2023 to June 2024.

Total funding of approximately $300,000 will be awarded to multiple projects depending on the needs, scope, and anticipated impact of the project. The funds are meant to provide support to scholars with new or ongoing research projects that relate to the causes, consequences, and solutions to the racial wealth gap.

, associate professor of management and a co-lead for the Social Differences, Social Justice research cluster at the University, describes the racial wealth gap as a continuous issue that undermines potential economic and social progress and opportunities able to be pursued by members of underserved and underrepresented communities in the United States.

The grant funding provides welcome new opportunities to center attention on the problem of ever-expanding economic and social inequality and to find ways to work toward solutions that address it, says , interim director of the Lender Center for Social Justice and associate professor of sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

How to Apply

All submissions should be submitted to the at Syracuse University at .

The Lender Center for Social Justice welcomes applications from those with scholarly projects that address subjects along one or more of these tracks:

• structural and systemic factors positively or negatively impacting the building of generational wealth like slavery, settler colonialism, and historic legacies of racialized violence, racial capitalism, mass incarceration and inheritance laws;
• policies and practices that generate or minimize racial wealth disparities such as redlining, urban renewal schemes, tax policy, predatory financing, healthcare burdens and racially disparate housing appraisals;
• individual and organizational-level factors influencing educational attainment, skills acquisition, and career development, such as educational inequities, hiring queues and corporate programs.

More details about the specific orientations and the kinds of research being sought and the requirements of the submission process are available

The will be held online from 4 to 5 p.m. Details will be provided about the types of research presentations being sought, the presenter selection process and timeline and submission requirements.

Proposals are due by Friday, Jan. 27, according to , associate professor of management in the Whitman School and co-lead for the University’s .

Those interested can sign up to attend via this

The Lender Center for Social Justice hosted a community conversation on workforce organizing and economic justice issues in the fall.

Symposium March 30-31

The inaugural MetLife Foundation-Lender Center for Social Justice is being held on campus March 30-31. It is among several initiatives the is leading to examine the racial wealth gap in America. The MetLife Foundation awarded Syracuse University and the Lender Center $2.7 million in the fall to promote new research that can help dismantle the root causes of racial wealth disparity.

Reed says the issue is an important one to address, understand and bring to wider public awareness. “The wealth gap is a continuous issue that undermines progress and opportunities that can be pursued by members of underserved and underrepresented communities. This symposium seeks to share research projects and exchange ideas among faculty, graduate students and leaders across the academy, industry and government on how to understand and respond to this crisis,” she says.

Presentation Topics

Faculty, postdoctoral fellows and doctoral students are invited to submit proposals for presentations on their collaborative and/or interdisciplinary projects and those based on humanistic, theoretical, empirical, case study or applied research. Reed says symposium organizers are looking for research presentations aligned to three tracks:

• Structural and systemic factors positively or negatively impacting the building of generational wealth (i.e., slavery, settler colonialism and historic legacies of racialized violence, racial capitalism, mass incarceration, inheritance laws)
• Policies and practices that generate or minimize racial wealth disparities (i.e., redlining, urban renewal schemes, tax policy, predatory financing, health care burdens, racially disparate housing appraisals)
• Individual and organizational-level factors that influence educational attainment, skills acquisition and career development (i.e., educational inequities, hiring queues, corporate programs)

More information about submissions and topics of interest is available .

, interim director of the Lender Center for Social Justice and associate professor of sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, says she welcomes the opportunities this grant provides to center attention on the problem of ever-expanding inequality.

In addition to the symposium, the MetLife Foundation grant provides for the University’s coordination of discussions among social justice leaders to gain insights on the wealth gap issue, the hiring of postdoctoral researchers at the University, and conducting of new data-collection and evidence-gathering activities to pinpoint impacts of the wealth gap.

The Lender Center will use the three-year grant to address what the foundation calls a persistent crisis that continues to undermine social and economic opportunities for underserved and underrepresented communities throughout the United States. The projects will include new research on the topic, discussions among social justice leaders to gain added insights on the issue, and new data-collection and evidence-gathering activities to illustrate the racial wealth gap’s impacts.

The grant includes four key focus areas:

• The Lender Center will coordinate an “Addressing the Racial Wealth Gap Working Group” that partners with the University’s to organize thought leadership discussions. The panel discussions will promote collaboration between Syracuse University faculty and national social justice leaders. Discussions are planned to be held in New York City, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Los Angeles.
• The University will hire diverse postdoctoral researchers having pertinent and lived experience with the issue to examine fundamental questions regarding the gap and its impact on diverse communities, families and individuals.
• Annual research grants will be available for faculty fellows selected in coordination with the University’s Office of Research to conduct research investigations related to the gap.
• The Lender Center will partner with other leading voices on the subject to increase awareness of and amplify discussions around planned actions and potential solutions.

The work will include mapping the social dynamics of racial wealth disparity, charting perceptions of social justice and uncovering patterns that can serve as a foundation for ongoing work. Projects will be managed by leadership from the Lender Center and the Social Differences, Social Justice research cluster, which will include Kira Reed, associate professor of management in the Whitman School of Management, who also co-leads the Social Differences/Social Justice research cluster, and Gretchen Purser, associate professor of sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and Lender Center co-director, alongside James Rolling, professor of arts education in the School of Education. They will support researchers, coordinate convening activities and manage the release of scholarly publications, articles, reports and presentations.

“The Lender Center is grateful for the partnership with ��MetLife Foundation as we work together to further uncover systemic issues contributing to the racial wealth gap in the United States,” says , associate provost for strategic initiatives in the Office of Academic Affairs, who oversees the work of the Lender Center. “Together, we aim to find scalable solutions that reduce inequities, provide access to opportunity and enable historically marginalized communities to ultimately build better economic futures.”

Mike Zarcone, head of Corporate Affairs for MetLife and chairman of MetLife Foundation, says, “Transforming our diversity, equity and inclusion commitments into meaningful action is a top priority for both MetLife and MetLife Foundation. MetLife Foundation’s partnership with the University and Lender Center is directly aligned with our strategy to help drive economic mobility by addressing the needs of underserved and underrepresented communities. There’s strength in numbers, and by working together with the University and other national leaders, we have an even greater opportunity to further reduce the racial wealth gap.”

Community conversations, like this one on labor and economic impact in October, are regularly held by the Lender Center for Social Justice. (Photo by Angela Ryan)

Vice Chancellor, Provost and Chief Academic Officer views the existing cooperation between the University and the surrounding community as a perfect backdrop for the projects.

“Our research resources, our connection to the community, and the strong University and Lender Center commitments to social justice, as well as diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, provide an excellent foundation for this work,” Ritter says. “The MetLife Foundation’s generous funding of these projects will help propel the University forward as an evidence-based, field-focused research leader with the goal of finding additional ways to address the racial wealth gap across the country.”

Research materials produced, including scholarly articles and presentations, plus results of data collection and evidence-gathering activities, will be shared through the MetLife Foundation and Lender Center annual events. The information will also be posted on the and circulated by both the University and the MetLife Foundation.

Highest Poverty

Haddix believes that the University is ideally suited to lead new scholarly examinations and to initiate both local community and national leadership engagement in the social justice space. She points out that the City of Syracuse has one of the in the United States and that new data shows Syracuse has the highest child poverty rate in the nation among cities of more than 100,000 people. In addition, individual researchers in the arts and humanities from several University schools have already been studying the impact of economic disparities of those from historically marginalized communities through social, economic and public health lenses and via the University’s Social Differences/Social Justice research cluster.

The Lender Center aspires to foster proactive, innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to issues related to social justice, equity and inclusion. MetLife Foundation is committed to driving inclusive economic mobility for underserved and underrepresented communities around the world through collaboration with nonprofit organizations and grants aligned to three strategic focus areas: economic inclusion, financial health and resilient communities. Since 1976, MetLife Foundation has contributed more than $900 million to strengthen communities where MetLife has a presence.

After introductory remarks from current and former leadership of the Lender Center for Social Justice and a video welcome message from Marvin ’63 and Helaine ’65 Lender, who founded the center and continue to fund its work, a panel discussion commenced.

Sitting on that panel were Jaz Brisack, an organizer with Starbucks Workers United; Chris Smalls, president and founder of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU); and Johnnie Kallas, a former labor organizer and current Ph.D. candidate in Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) and director of the . Jenny Breen, associate professor in the College of Law, moderated the discussion.

From left: Katie Mott, Ph.D. candidate in sociology; Professor Gretchen Purser; Jaz Brisack; Chris Smalls and Johnnie Kallas (Photo by Angela Ryan)

A Pivotal Moment for Labor: Recent Starbucks, Amazon Victories

Brisack, who led the campaign that resulted in the first unionized Starbucks store in the country, told the audience of her journey as an organizer and the momentum Starbucks Workers United has built since Buffalo’s Elmwood Avenue store voted for a union in December 2021. Since then, workers at more than 240 corporate-owned Starbucks locations have voted to unionize.

“There’s no such thing as an unorganized workplace—there’s only workplaces that haven’t been organized yet,” Brisack said. She spoke about the importance of community-based action and the need to “make it socially unacceptable to be a union-buster.”

She also hypothesized that one of the factors that has benefited the success of Starbucks employees who have chosen to organize is that the company does not live up to the corporate values they espouse.

“Starbucks [employees] are 70% women and overwhelmingly LGTBQ. … There is a kind of culture at Starbucks that they create and say that they believe in, which is, ‘We’re a safe space for queer people,’ ‘We’re in support of Black Lives Matter,’ ‘We believe in the planet and the environment,’ and people came to work at Starbucks because they believed in those things,” Brisack said.

Partners (Starbucks’ term for its employees) are then disappointed to find out that the company’s actions behind closed doors don’t match the values it claims to hold. “But they are motivated to try to make it that, instead of just leaving—which I think is really conducive to organizing,” Brisack said.

Former five-year Amazon employee Smalls described the poor working conditions that led to his new job as labor union leader, saying, “What goes on behind the scenes is pretty much intolerable. It’s really inhumane. Work is work. 10 to 12 hours. For example, in Staten Island, they commute two and a half hours each way. They’re on their feet. I used to tell my new hires, ‘if you have a gym membership, you might want to cancel it.’

“Amazon warehouses are the size of nearly 14 NFL football fields, over a million square feet long. You don’t have time to go to the restroom because every restroom is about 10 minutes away. You’re tracked from the moment you clock in until the time you clock out. You have to have a rate, an hourly rate in my department alone was 400 items an hour—meaning by the end of the day you’re touching over 4,000 packages. If you don’t make that rate, you are replaced. They will fire you.”

In addition to sharing his experience as an Amazon warehouse employee, Smalls discussed his journey since he was fired in March 2020 after organizing a walkout to protest lack of proper safety protocols early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

He went on to found his first activist organization, the Congress of Essential Workers, and then the ALU in April of 2021. A year later, in April 2022, Amazon employees at its Staten Island warehouse became the first unionized Amazon employees in the country.

“We still have a long way to go. This is very much still the beginning,” Smalls said in regard to the ALU victory earlier this year. “It’s going to take a lot more than unionizing and winning campaigns. We’re going to need political support, we’re going to need community support, we’re going to need the support of consumers.”

Smalls said the key to ALU’s victory in Staten Island was building up relationships with workers and connecting with one another on a human-to-human level. “We weren’t going to defeat Amazon by money. It’s a trillion-dollar company. So the only thing we had was love and respect for one another and care for one another,” he said. “[Our victory] showed and proved that no amount of money in the world can stop the power of people when they come together.”

Labor Action Tracker Director Offers Historical Context, Data

The third panelist, Kallas, who worked as a labor organizer prior to undertaking his current work at Cornell, brought an academic lens to the conversation and provided an overview of the history behind the decline of the labor movement in the U.S. since the 1980s.

He also brought the data, sharing statistics from the ILR Labor Action Tracker, which aims to document the full scope of strikes, work stoppages and labor protests across the country while amplifying the voices of striking workers. Kallas said his comprehensive database of strike activity shows a more detailed view than labor data tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

He juxtaposed the current labor movement against earlier points in history, saying, “We’re not in the same situation we were in in the 1970s. It’s much harder to organize, it’s much harder to go out on strike. Workers face considerably more obstacles to engaging and organizing activities and strikes. … But we are very much in a transformative moment for the labor movement.”

Protecting Commerce or Protecting Workers?

The evening culminated with a book talk with keynote speaker Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice and co-author of the recently released “The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century,” with Sarita Gupta. Smiley (and all three panelists) noted the flaws in current U.S. labor law; the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which is rife with exclusions and loopholes; and how its oversight agency, the National Labor Relations Board, is understaffed and underfunded.

Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice and co-author of “The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century” (Photo by Angela Ryan)

Early in her presentation, Smiley showed a slide with the preamble to the NLRA, positioning it as “an act to diminish the causes of labor disputes burdening or obstructing interstate and foreign commerce, to create a National Labor Relations Board, and for other purposes.”

“The goal is protecting commerce, to keep commerce moving. Labor peace. Does that sound like workers’ rights to you?” she asked the crowd.

Smiley centers the labor movement in the fight for racial justice and gender equality, which she says is a winning strategy over centering the movement on political party lines or a red-state/blue-state dichotomy. Her belief is that workers’ rights are much more firmly rooted in the Reconstruction (13th, 14th and 15th) amendments than in the NLRA.

“If we think about labor law from this context, we can understand a lot better that it’s actually something that should be foundational to democracy. And that we need to reshape it in a way that is actually about democracy—not just keeping commerce going,” Smiley said.

Gretchen Purser, associate professor of sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and co-director of the Lender Center, who organized this year’s Lender Center Conversation, said that nearly 300 people registered for the event, a clear indication of the surging interest in dialogue and action around labor and workers’ rights, with unions currently at their highest approval rating in over 50 years.

During the event’s intermission, local groups tabled in Dineen Hall and participants were encouraged to create signs in solidarity with the labor movement. (Photo by Angela Ryan)

As an academic, Purser’s research focuses on work and labor disparities, urban poverty, law and punishment, housing and homelessness and community-based action. She also chairs the board of the Workers’ Center of Central New York, grounding her in the day-to-day work to further labor rights and economic justice.

Purser kicked off the event with a labor acknowledgment, stating, “We must acknowledge that all wealth is created by labor. Our country’s economic growth and development was made possible by the forced labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants, as well as the exploited labor of immigrants. Our institutions rely upon and are organized around the unrecognized and unpaid labor of caregivers. We must acknowledge that we are indebted to the labor and sacrifice of all those who came before us and who, across time and space, in however horrific of circumstances, have organized to improve conditions for workers and secure dignity at work.”

To learn more about upcoming events at the Lender Center for Social Justice, . Members of the University community can also email lendercenter@syr.edu to join the center’s email list.

The event, “,” is hosted by and will be led by the center’s co-director , associate professor of sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Clockwise from top left: Jaz Brisack, Chris Smalls, Erica Smiley, Johnnie Kallas

The dialogue begins at 4 p.m. with a panel discussion in Dineen’s Melanie Gray Ceremonial Courtroom featuring some of the most well-known names in the revitalized labor movement, including Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls, Starbucks Workers United Organizer Jaz Brisack, and Johnnie Kallas, director of the Labor Action Tracker at Cornell University’s .

Following the panel, a reception with refreshments and tabling by local organizations will be held in Dineen’s atrium. At 6:45 p.m., a keynote speech will be delivered by Erica Smiley, executive director of and co-author, with Sarita Gupta, of “The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century.” Smiley is a long-time organizer and movement leader who has been spearheading strategic organizing and policy interventions for nearly 15 years.

Lender Center Co-Director and Associate Professor of Sociology Gretchen Purser

“We’re at a critical juncture in history and in the midst of a striking revival of worker power,” says Purser, whose areas of expertise include the sociology of work and labor, urban poverty, law and punishment, and housing and homelessness. “What is fueling the surge of interest in unions? What challenges are workers facing as they endeavor to organize the workplace? What are the opportunities within, and limitations of, our existing labor law?”

She says this year’s Lender Center Conversation will seek to answer those questions and more, exploring the present and future of the labor movement as well as the centrality of collective bargaining for a functioning democracy.

“As a faculty member whose research and teaching centers around work and labor, I am thrilled to see an event like this take place on campus,” Purser says. “I am especially excited for the opportunity it presents to bring together diverse constituencies from the campus and the broader Syracuse community.”

About the Lender Center for Social Justice

Marvin Lender ’63 and his wife, Helaine Gold Lender ’65, created the interdisciplinary Lender Center for Social Justice to fulfill their enduring mission to develop ethical and courageous citizens who are committed to practices of social justice. The center aspires to foster proactive, innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to issues related to social justice, equity and inclusion. It is co-led by James Haywood Rolling Jr., dual professor of art education and teaching and leadership in the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the School of Education, and Purser.

The center welcomes students who are passionate about finding solutions to complex problems and want to sustain and encourage diversity and inclusion at Syracuse University.

The fellowships will allow students to engage in collaborative research led by , investigating how artificial intelligence weapons systems transform war and surveillance and accentuate people’s social and political vulnerabilities to violence.

Five Lender Student Fellows will work on the research-based advocacy project for two years and receive a annual stipend.

The selected fellows will:

• Work closely with the faculty fellow in developing the collaborative research project
• Work with students from various disciplines in a dynamic research environment
• Participate in public discussions and presentations of the research project

An information session to provide an overview of the 2022-24 Lender Student Fellowship and Professor Bhan’s research will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 11, from 11 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. in 151 Eggers Hall. Lunch will be provided.

The deadline for applications is Nov.1. For more information on how to apply and to submit an application, visit the��Lender Center .

That is the question , associate professor of anthropology in the , will explore with an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty in her project. Bhan was recently chosen as the center’s 2022-24 .

Mona Bhan

Bhan studies artificial intelligence (AI) weaponry through the lens of a cultural anthropologist, believing that those systems can transform the realities of autonomy, accountability, human rights and justice.

While proponents of AI weapons emphasize the humanitarian benefits of autonomous systems in wars, opponents adopt a human rights-centered approach focused on the importance of maintaining human control over the use of force, she says.

“This project challenges the unquestioned assumptions in claims of humanitarianism and human rights and examines how technologies are reconfiguring what it means to be human and transforming global negotiations over free will, autonomy, accountability, societal harm, citizenship and sovereignty,” Bhan says.

The research team will use collaborative documentation, GIS-enabled mapping and immersive media techniques to study precisely how artificial intelligence weapons and systems may bring about social and political changes. Bhan will conduct the project along with other University faculty, University centers such as the and a new group of Lender Center student fellows to analyze and disseminate findings on the social justice implications of AI weaponry. The project is part of a larger research and advocacy project Bhan is carrying out with her longtime collaborator, Haley Duschinski, of Ohio University.

Problem/Solution

The Lender Center for Social Justice promotes multi-disciplinary and dynamic collaborations supporting development of courageous and ethical scholars and citizens at the University to foster proactive, innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to issues related to social justice, equity and inclusion. Faculty and student fellows are supported for one year of research activity working to identify a problem and a second year addressing solutions or shifting conversations about the issues they have identified.

Pertinent to Syracuse

Center Co-Director , associate professor of sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, says Bhan’s project is especially pertinent to the University’s past and present.

“Mona is an exemplary scholar-activist with a deep commitment to engaged, collaborative research on matters pertaining to human rights,” says Purser. “What is especially compelling about her project is its focus on the global scale, but with clear connections to the local Syracuse community, both as a site of innovation in AI weaponry and as a longstanding incubator of anti-war activism.”

Gretchen Purser

“The Lender Center’s selection of Dr. Bhan as our next faculty fellow supports her work as she and her thought partners both here on campus and outside of the University work to expand the public dialogue on a number of vital issues that social justice scholars must address whenever human rights are at stake,” says Center Co-Director ., professor of arts education in the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

James H. Rollings Jr.

In the Maxwell School, Bhan serves as Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies; director of the and senior research associate and advisory board member of the . Her research explores economic and infrastructural development in counterinsurgency operations and resistance movements in protracted wartime and conflict. Other interests include border wars and counterinsurgency; militarism and humanitarianism; race, gender and religion; environmentalism and climate change; occupation and human rights;��space and place; and water and infrastructure in Kashmir.

Before coming to Syracuse in 2019, Bhan taught at DePauw University as the Otto L. Sonder Jr. Chair of Anthropology. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Rutgers University in 2006, a M.Sc. in anthropology from Delhi University, India, in 1999 and a B.Sc. in zoology from Delhi University in 1997.

Student Fellow Applications

The Lender Center is now accepting applications for student fellows for the 2022-24 term. Fellowships are open to all Syracuse University students who can commit two years to the project. Five students will be selected and will receive a yearly stipend.

The application deadline for student fellows is Tuesday, Nov. 1. An in-person information session will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 11 from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in 151 Eggers Hall. and a link to the is on the Lender Center website.

2021-2023 Lender Project

The 2021-2023 fellowship project is being led by Associate Professor of the College of Visual and Performing Arts School of Design and focuses on access to health and wellness for women. She and student fellows are examining and informing local efforts to create a more equitable, sustainable, and inclusive health system in Central New York. Their work explores the social determinants of health and wellness and how those issues impact women living in Syracuse’s diverse Northside neighborhood.

Gretchen Purser

To fulfill their enduring mission to develop ethical and courageous citizens, Marvin and Helaine Lender provided a generous $5 million gift to create a multidisciplinary center that would include research support, symposia, and faculty and student fellowships. The Lender Center for Social Justice launched in September 2018. Marcelle Haddix, associate provost for strategic initiatives and Distinguished Dean’s Professor of Literacy, Race and Justice in the School of Education, and Kendall Phillips, professor of communication and rhetorical studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, were named inaugural co-directors.

“Professor Purser’s perspective on social justice is rooted in her experience using qualitative and multi-method research approaches to better understand the root causes of work and labor disparities and a constellation of related issues,” says Ritter. “Her work on urban poverty, precarity, community-based action, law and punishment, and housing and homelessness will bring a fresh new perspective to the Lender Center’s work with students and faculty to address pressing social justice concerns.”

Purser’s research focuses on work and labor disparities, urban poverty, precarity, social theory, ethnography, community-based action, law and punishment, and housing and homelessness. Purser is also a member of the Maxwell School’s Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration Labor Studies working group, where she is the research director of the program’s Advocacy and Activism working group. In the community, Purser chairs the board of the Workers’ Center of Central New York. Known for her courses that connect scholarly knowledge with real-world experience, Purser received the Excellence in Graduate Education Faculty Recognition Award in 2020 and the Meredith Teaching Recognition Award in 2013. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Purser’s appointment will begin on July 1. She will serve alongside co-director James Haywood Rolling, Jr., professor of arts education in the College of Visual and Performing Arts and teaching and leadership in the School of Education, who was appointed co-director in September 2021. Purser succeeds Phillips, whose term ends on June 30.

“Professor Phillips’ enthusiasm for the Lender Center and its mission has resulted in a four-year track record of quality research and programming, which expanded its reach through virtual symposia and presentations during the pandemic,” said Ritter. “I am grateful for his leadership and the continuity he has provided during these transitions.”

When founded, the Lender Center was administered by the School of Education. When Haddix was named associate provost for strategic initiatives, the administration of the Lender Center moved to Academic Affairs. “In talking to faculty and students across Syracuse University, it quickly became clear that there are vibrant social justice initiatives in almost every college, school and program,” says Ritter. “Given the breadth of these efforts, it makes sense to place the Lender Center under the umbrella of Academic Affairs, where it complements the social difference, social justice research cluster. As part of a portfolio of academic community outreach, the center’s student and faculty-driven programming will be an important way for the University to connect with the community.”

“Working with Kendall Phillips to imagine and set up the center’s initial programs was a great experience, as we each brought our own disciplinary perspectives to the work. Each new co-director brings their life experience and disciplinary lens to the position, resulting in a rich research environment for student and faculty fellows,” says Haddix.

“I am delighted to have the opportunity for continued collaboration with the Lender Center,” she added. “Professors Purser and Rollings offer rich perspectives and I am excited to see what their collaboration brings.”

Austin Lewter, a graduate student in Pan African studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, presents at the inaugural Social Differences, Social Justice Research Symposium March 31.

On March 31, the hosted its inaugural symposium, crossing interdisciplinary boundaries to showcase student and faculty research related to equity, social justice and global transformation.

Co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Center, Lender Center for Social Justice, Renée Crown University Honors Program and Whitman School of Management, the symposium featured a keynote address from Gisele Marcus ’89, a Syracuse University Trustee and professor of practice in diversity, equity and inclusion at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

“Today is a day of celebration, valuing and honoring,” said , associate professor of management in the Whitman School and member of the Social Differences, Social Justice cluster, addressing scholars during her introductory remarks. “We are excited that we now have a cohort of cluster hires and that the University recognizes the value in convening scholars of different disciplines to bring forth issues of justice and equity and ideas about how we can make improvements. We are here to value you and your contributions. Your work is meaningful and impactful.”

, professor and chair of management in the Whitman School, and , co-director of the Lender Center for Social Justice and professor of arts education in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, welcomed symposium attendees before the panel discussions commenced.

The first panel on African Diasporic Studies showcased student research, featuring graduate students from the master’s program in Pan African studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Moderator , professor of African American Studies and director of the Renée Crown University Honors Program, acknowledged that “the Department of African American studies has a long and rich history at Syracuse University. It continues to be a space where intellectuals across many disciplines center Africa as a site of intellectual knowledge, where faculty and researchers contest pre-existing ideas of what Africa and its diaspora mean, and present alternative knowledges.”

Taana Smith then introduced first-year graduate students Joy Nyokabi, Kailey Smith and Austin Lewter.

From left: Melissa Yuen, Abdullah Naimzadeh and Danielle Taana Smith during a panel discussion on African Diasporic Studies.

Nyokabi presented her preliminary research on attempts by the British government to conceal documents and evidence of war crimes against Kenyans during the Mau Mau War in the 1950s.

As a critical component of the discussion about reparations, Kailey Smith’s presentation argued for the return of stolen cultural artifacts from Western museums to the African nations from which they originated.

Lewter presented his research on the legacy of lynching in the United States, arguing that lynchings have moved from public spectacle—such as the courthouse lawn—and become quieter and more institutionalized, invoking the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland and Eric Garner as examples of modern lynchings.

The second panel, Democratizing Internet Access, was moderated by Abdullah Naimzadeh, a graduate student in the School of Information Studies (iSchool), studying applied data science. Exploring the principle of global internet access as a human right, panelists Catherine Forrest ’22, doctoral candidate Jane Asantewaa Appiah-Okyere and Professor , from the iSchool, shared ongoing research on deployment of the , which was co-invented by McKnight.

Use of the internet backpack to expand global internet access was presented through the lens of several contexts and projects, including for health care workers in rural and remote Central America; teachers in rural Ghana; and elementary school students in underserved areas of Brooklyn and the Bronx in New York City. The panel also addressed the moral imperative for universal internet access—especially amidst the COVID-19 pandemic—and the importance of championing a framework for ethical data collection.

The morning then segued into a full schedule of faculty research briefs and presentations, including:

• , assistant professor of management in the Whitman School, presented on the characteristics and outcomes of diverse teams;
• *, assistant professor of communications in the Newhouse School, presented on contemporary representations of Mexico, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Hollywood films;
• *, assistant professor of management in the Whitman School, presented on dehumanization and maladaptive perfectionism at work;
• , associate professor of communications in the Newhouse School, presented on her forthcoming book, “Diversity and Satire: Laughing at Processes of Marginalization;”
• , Newhouse Professor in the Newhouse School, presented on the personal, professional and political challenges of critical race scholar-activism;
• , associate professor and director of graduate studies in marriage and family therapy in the Falk College; , Dean’s Professor and Provost Faculty Fellow in counseling and human services in the School of Education; and , assistant professor of public health in the Falk College, presented research on the continuation of teletherapy post-COVID-19;
• , assistant professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, presented on his forthcoming book, “The Body is Not the Land: Memory, Translation, and Territorial Aporias;”
• *, assistant professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, presented on her current book project, “Aerial Geographies: Rooting Aviation in Global Black Literature;”
• *, assistant professor of music history and cultures in the College of Arts and Sciences, presented on racial and language identity within the mixed race or coloured community of Cape Town, South Africa;
• , assistant professor of music history and cultures in the College of Arts and Sciences, presented “Mirroring Motherhood/Land in Diaspora: Igbo Women in Music;”
• Melissa Yuen, the curator at the Syracuse University Art Museum, presented “Teaching and Learning Social Justice at the Syracuse University Art Museum;”
• , associate professor of communication and rhetorical studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, presented “Too Much to Tolerate: School Bathrooms, Trans Temporality, and Black Excess;” and
• , associate dean and Andrew W. Cohen, Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber professor of history in the Maxwell School, presented “Gender at the Polls: Illicit Voting and Suffrage Before the Civil War.”

*Indicates a cluster hire in the Social Differences, Social Justice research cluster.

Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives Marcelle Haddix

, associate provost for strategic initiatives and Distinguished Dean’s Professor of Literacy, Race and Justice in the School of Education, shared her thoughts on the significance of the day prior to Marcus’s keynote address.

“This inaugural symposium is exactly the type of output, the kind of research work we want to see coming from the research clusters,” Haddix said. “Today spoke to the power of interdisciplinarity, the power of connecting us, bringing us together. And what we often don’t talk about are the kinds of resources it takes to engage in this work; how we acknowledge and reward interdisciplinary collaboration; how we create spaces and opportunities for people to come together across differences. That’s what today’s event really highlighted for me.”

Haddix then welcomed Marcus to deliver her keynote address, “Belonging: Essential to Enhancing the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Equation.”

Gisele Marcus ’89 delivers her keynote address, “Belonging: Essential to Enhancing the DEI Equation.”

Marcus began with a definition of belonging from diversity and inclusion expert Verna Myers: Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion means being asked to dance; belonging is “they’re actually playing some of my music.”

She spoke of belonging as a human requirement, shared how companies can expand their DEI initiatives to include belonging to address the Great Resignation, and how increased feelings of belonging for students lead to better outcomes in higher education.

“Belonging is all about feeling welcomed in a space, feeling that you’re included, feeling that your contributions are valued,” Marcus said. “It matters because when people belong, they are going to help their organization be more productive, there’s going to be better teamwork and an increase in their pride as an employee. And all of those things can be contagious in your environment.”

Marcus earned a bachelor’s degree in management information systems and transportation management from Whitman and an MBA from Harvard University. She is a member of the Syracuse University Multicultural Advancement Advisory Council; former vice president of the Syracuse University Alumni Association; an inaugural lecturer for the University’s Sankofa Lecture Series; and a 2014 recipient of the Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence in Global Business Management. Marcus also endowed an Our Time has Come scholarship in her name in the Whitman School and joined the University’s Board of Trustees in 2021.

, associate professor in writing studies, rhetoric and composition in the College of Arts and Sciences and member of the Social Differences, Social Justice cluster, closed the symposium, remarking on the scholarly community being strengthened through the cluster. Berry stated that this group of scholars will be prepared to inform the academy, the arts, business and society, and that including students in the endeavor prepares them to make a global impact.

The Social Differences, Social Justice research cluster includes more than 30 affiliated faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences, College of Engineering and Computer Science, College of Law, College of Visual and Performing Arts, iSchool, the Maxwell School, the Newhouse School and the Whitman School. The group has a listserv to which interested scholars can subscribe to stay connected and learn of future events: SDSJ@listserv.syr.edu. To join, send an email to Professor Patrick Berry at pwberry@syr.edu. To learn more about its work, .

Evan Weissman

Honoring the life and legacy of professor and local food justice activist is an ongoing effort, much like Weisman’s tireless work to strengthen the local food system. Weissman was selected as the 2020-22�� Lender Center for Social Justice Faculty Fellowship shortly before his untimely passing in April 2020. A food studies scholar committed to community-engaged research and social change, Weissman envisioned using his Lender fellowship to co-construct a local food policy council rooted in justice and equity.

To honor his legacy, Professor Jonnell Robinson, six student fellows, ��and community members have spent two years collectively engaging in reflective dialogue, research and action around promoting greater control over the local food system by people marginalized by the current global corporate food regime. While we all engage in the local food system, which includes everything from farm to fork and beyond, not everyone has equal access. Weissman set the stage with his scholarly work, and his vision continues as part of the second annual Lender Symposium, “Centering Food Justice in Food System Transformation: Honoring the
Legacy of Professor Evan Weissman.” The event takes place in person on March 31 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. ET at the Schine Student Center.

“Evan’s deep commitment to social justice was evident in all he did,” says Robinson, a friend and colleague of Weissman. “He also had an incredible impact on his students. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked with this amazing group of students to advance the important work he dedicated his life to. I think he’d be proud of the students’ accomplishments.”

The Lender Symposium will have a partner event this year.�� The Social Differences Social Justice Symposium will also take place on March 31 from 8:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. ET�� at the Whitman School and is presented by the Social Differences, Social Justice faculty cluster and sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, Renée Crown University Honors Program and Whitman School of Management. The inaugural symposium will explore the themes of equity, social justice and global transformation. Additionally, the Humanities Center is also serving as a sponsor of the symposium.

Avalon Gupta VerWiebe

“With the (Lender) symposium, we hope to accomplish a demonstration of how the Lender Center has successfully built itself as a place where academia and the community can come together,” says Avalon Gupta VerWiebe, an M.S. candidate in food studies. “We want to show how the Lender Center’s generous resources were utilized to create real change in the community and set projects in motion that will have long reaching effects.”

Taylor Krzeminski

Among them is a project conducted by Lender Student Fellows focusing locally on the Onondaga Nation, to begin developing a food stories archive, preserving the nation’s food traditions, history and knowledge.

“The most important thing to me about food justice is giving people back autonomy when it comes to their relationship with food,” said Krzeminski, an M.A. candidate in public diplomacy and global communications. “Food is a huge part of our lives, but many people find themselves disconnected from the history or traditions that are so intertwined with the foods they eat. This project with the nation perfectly represents the idea of food sovereignty—we assisted in teaching youth so that they could continue the archive process on their own and complete ownership over that content. And most importantly, the youth have a strengthened relationship with their culture, the nation and food.”

According to VerWiebe, “Food justice is important because it expands on the initial idea of food insecurity and sheds light on the very real issues of justice and equity that impact when, how and why people get fed.”

For Lender Student Fellows, it goes beyond the research.

“My experience working so far with the Lender faculty has been fabulous,” said VerWiebe. “Jonnell is truly dedicated to her work as a participatory researcher, and is a shining example of how academics can learn from, and with, communities even as they are also teachers. Jonnell’s perseverance in carrying out Dr. Weissman’s vision shows in all of the work that we have done collectively as fellows. I’m so grateful for her in my life and that she is at Syracuse University in general.”

The Lender symposium takes place in room 304 AB of the Schine Student Center. Refreshments will be offered. Registration is required.

Learn more about the Lender Student Fellows

This past fall, five new student fellows were selected to work with , associate professor of environmental and interior design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts’ (VPA) School of Design. Their two year project involves the , run by the YMCA and branded as a facility where women from all socioeconomic backgrounds, ages and ethnicities can pursue wellness. Lee’s expertise was sought by local officials to help design the facility and, with her leadership, Lender Center student fellows will help determine if the building matches the needs of the people who use it.

Professor Seyeon Lee

“The core idea of this is: how can we use this space as a hub and connect it with other parts of the community?” says Lee. “There is a ton of community space that is underutilized, a lot of pockets of opportunities that are lost, and that’s where I would look to engage with the students with their different perspectives and backgrounds.”

For their part, Lender Center student fellows are thrilled with the opportunity to work with Lee.

Roselynne Hodges

“Dr. Lee is extremely talented and I am so honored to be working very closely with her,” says Roselynne Hodges ’23. “I’m the only VPA design student (my major is environmental and interior design and my minor is architecture) that was selected for this fellowship. I was interested in this opportunity from the beginning because it was a collaboration between students across different colleges at Syracuse. I loved this idea of bringing students with different backgrounds together to make a positive impact on the community that we live in. This project would directly work to try it ease some of these struggles that female refugees and their children face. “

Taylor M. John ’22 typifies the wide range of backgrounds and experiences of Lender student fellows.

Taylor M. John

“I am excited for this fellowship and grateful for the opportunity to serve under Dr. Lee’s guidance,“ says John, a citizenship and civic engagement and international relations major and Chinese language minor. “I chose to apply to this fellowship because of my interest in social justice, wellness, and reproductive justice. I am a full spectrum doula through Sankofa Reproductive Health and Healing Center in Syracuse, so it was only fitting that I apply to join this team to further expand my knowledge of Syracuse and its community. “

Iona Volynets

But it’s not only expansion of knowledge of Syracuse and Central New York. For Lender student fellows, the focus is also worldwide. Iona Volynets ’23 is a history and international relations major interested in studying how societies vary across the globe and change over time, along with how unjust disparities occur and how they are solved. “I’m honored to be part of the Lender Center project to try to leave a positive impact on Syracuse and to work with some of its vulnerable populations to provide them with the tools they need to be healthy and secure,” says Volynets. “I hope to focus on addressing potential linguistic barriers, expanding green spaces and access to nutritious food, and on the healing power of creative outlets. I cannot wait to embark on this wonderful opportunity and I am so grateful to Dr. Lee and everyone at the Lender Center.”

For Ana Aponte ’24, a communication and rhetorical studies major in VPA, being a Lender student fellow�� is an opportunity to deepen the connection between the Syracuse University community and the rest of the city at large.

Ana Aponte

“Due to my upbringing and the values I was raised with, connecting with those communities is something that I have always valued because it creates an environment where we can all learn from each other’s experiences and needs within the society we live in nowadays,” she says. “The Lender Center for Social Justice is a great opportunity to learn do just this and value humanity even more.”

Student fellows not only come from diverse backgrounds, but also represent young people from undergraduate and graduate programs alike. Aaishanni Agny, a graduate student in the School of Education, is among them.

Aaishanni Agny

“In my understanding, local realities, resources, and socio-cultural issues are best known and understood by grassroots community members. I am passionate about making mental health resources accessible to diverse populations and enjoy exploring the role of family systems, culture and identity in the same. I am honored to be able to work with the Lender Center, Dr Lee, and the other fellows in participatory research and dialogue, thereby engaging in work that directly promotes social justice, better public health and emotional resilience,” says Agny.

The Lender Faculty Fellowship supports a two-year research agenda to critically and creatively explore contemporary social issues, develop innovative approaches to these problems, and implement useful and sustainable initiatives. Dr. Lee is the third faculty fellow, following Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani and Jonnell Robinson, fellows for the program that was created to critically explore contemporary social issues and develop sustainable solutions to pressing problems. The Lender Center is now seeking its next faculty fellow for the two-year appointment. More information about the fellowship, along with how to apply, can be found on the .

The Lender Faculty Fellowship will support a two-year research agenda to critically and creatively explore contemporary social issues, develop innovative approaches to these problems and implement useful and sustainable initiatives.

The selected faculty fellow will work with a team of student fellows to create an interdisciplinary research team focused on the proposed social issue. The Lender Symposium will serve as the culmination of the two-year projects with invited national guests and experts participating in a thorough discussion of the research and proposals developed by the Lender fellows’ team.

Faculty applying for the Lender fellowship should be dynamic and accomplished scholar/teachers who are committed to an agenda of engaging issues relevant to social justice. They will be expected to foster an interdisciplinary team that will simultaneously encourage student learning and growth and the pursuit of concrete engagement with real-world problems.

The faculty fellow will receive research support for both years of the project, a summer stipend and additional resources to facilitate the development and execution of their project as well as to publicize the results.

Only Syracuse University full-time faculty, either tenure or non-tenure track, are eligible for the Lender Faculty Fellowship. For more information on����and to��, visit the��.

James Haywood Rolling Jr.

Rolling, a dual professor of arts education in the College of Visual and Performing Arts and teaching and leadership in the School of Education, is the new co-director of the . Marvin Lender ’63 and his wife, Helaine Gold Lender ’65, created the interdisciplinary Lender Center to fulfill their enduring mission to develop ethical and courageous citizens.

The center provides research support, faculty and student fellowships, and symposia such as the upcoming Nov. 11 Lender Center Conversation, which this fall is focusing on the “Creative Activity as a Human Right” theme that was first advanced in a special issue of that Rolling published in July 2017, when he was the journal’s senior editor.

Art Education is the official journal of the , which Rolling currently leads into its 75th anniversary next year as the organization’s president. As he was contemplating that issue in 2017, two main questions ran through his mind.

“What would it mean for artists, art and design educators, and arts institutions to reconceptualize creative activity as a universal and inalienable human right?” Rolling says. “How might it change our conception of the visual arts and design in practice and in education?”

Those questions will be at the heart of “,” which is co-sponsored by�� and the . The public is invited to attend. for the “Creative Activity as a Human Right” virtual event.

The event will feature “interdisciplinary artists, activists and educators with expertise in the arts, humanities and social sciences joining together to examine what it might mean to rethink creativity as a universal and inalienable human right, a remedy for complicated histories of inhumanity and carelessness, and a change-making, emancipatory form of social intelligence.”

The event includes keynote speaker , panel discussions and a spotlight conversation with celebrated contemporary artists, ’81 and University Artist in Residence . to attend the virtual event.

Rolling has spent his entire career as an educator focused on developing the next generation of diverse, creative leaders who travel paths of self-evident worth they weren’t at first aware they could trailblaze. Here is what he says about the history behind “Creative Activity as a Human Right”:

“Social justice has a long history in the arts and education. As W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain LeRoy Locke, John Dewey, Maxine Greene, bell hooks and other pioneers of emancipatory philosophy understood, there is an essential relationship between participation in creative cultural production and the making of a free, democratic society.

“Creative activity opens up alternate possibilities for thinking, feeling and doing. In its most hopeful form, it enables us to adapt, connect, relate, join forces and pool our resources in new ways so that we are all less alone, less vulnerable and less unable.

“Creative activity and invention have been the collective fuel necessary for human survival, the evolution of social relations, and our creative leaps as a civilization along the way. Indeed, repressive social systems are quite effective, at least in part, because they restrict creative activity as an agency for defining individual identity while curtailing and controlling access to the shaping of cultural content and currency.”

As the Lender Center formalized plans for the event and lined up its prominent panelists, Rolling has posed the following key questions for all participants and audiences to consider:

• What happens when we boldly proclaim that creative activity—or��creativity, for abbreviation—is a human right, and not merely a privilege?
• How do avenues for creative response open up space for individual fulfillment and higher achievement, interrupting the systems and structures of social inequity?
• What are the benefits of centering our art and design practices and culture creation through a social justice lens?
• What practice-based research, philosophies and histories help to animate a human rights discourse promoting creative, critical citizenship for the public good?
• What practical instructional tactics and partnering strategies are essential in promoting an equity-oriented ecosystem of creative activity, education and social entrepreneurship?
• How can we better coordinate our commitments to creative activity as a tool for self-actualization and the address of generational and collective traumas—especially within marginalized and under-resourced local communities as we enter the post-pandemic era?

Here is the schedule for the Lender Center for Social Justice Conversation “Creative Activity as a Human Right” on Nov. 11:

Keynote speaker Amelia Kraehe

• Keynote and Q&A, 1-2:15 p.m.: Opening the day’s proceedings with a talk titled “Joy, Justice, and Creative Futures,” the keynote speaker is , the inaugural associate vice president for Equity in the Arts for Arizona Arts at the University of Arizona. She is also co-founder and co-director of the university’s , which serves as a transdisciplinary incubator for the study and practice of intersectional anti-racism in and through the arts.
• Panel discussion on equity, 2:30-4 p.m.: The panel of national leaders in art and design education includes Kraehe; , Endowed Assistant Professor of Art Education and affiliate faculty in Gender Studies at the University of Arkansas; and , associate professors in the Department of Art Education at Florida State University; and , principal of City Neighbors Hamilton K-8 charter school in the Baltimore City Public Schools.

Rolling will moderate this discussion.

• Panel discussion with local creative leaders on youth and civic engagement, 4:15-5:45 p.m.: The panel discussion with local creative leaders includes , member of Everson Museum of Art’s equity and engagement committee, board member of Community Folk Art Center and communications coordinator of Light Work; , director of fine arts in the West Genesee School District and former supervisor of fine arts in the Syracuse City School District; , community engagement organizer at ArtRage Gallery; and , assistant professor of art therapy in the Department of Creative Arts Therapy at Syracuse University and former learning behavior specialist for Chicago Public Schools.

, professor of practice in African American Studies and executive director of the Community Folk Art Center at Syracuse University, will moderate this discussion.

• Spotlight event, 6-7 p.m.: A candid conversation between prominent contemporary artists and . Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video who is best known for her photography. Zughaib is a Lebanese American painter and multimedia artist who graduated from Syracuse University in 1981 and now lives and works in Washington, D.C.
  

  Carrie Mae Weems, Artist in Residence at Syracuse University

, co-director of the Lender Center and professor of communication and rhetorical studies in Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, will moderate this discussion.

Featured throughout the day will be a series of small original drawings about the human condition by Jewish American artist . Her three-year study of refugees across people groups, man-made crises, wars, persecutions and social traumas offers a profound visual argument for why creative activity is essential in the address of the acts of inhumanity that have erased and displaced so many lives.

Co-directors report to the dean of the School of Education and are responsible for coordinating all aspects of the Lender Center. Building upon and enhancing existing programs and courses, the Lender Center fosters dynamic collaborations among students and scholars who are committed to practices of social justice. Co-directors support the development of courageous and ethical scholars and citizens at Syracuse University and foster faculty-student-community collaborations to strengthen the capacity for understanding and action through expanding educational, critical inquiry and activist skills.

Established with a generous gift from Helaine and Marvin Lender and administered by the School of Education, the Universitywide supports faculty and students across the University in actively challenging prejudice and dehumanization.

The co-directors work with an advisory board to host robust interdisciplinary dialogues and events related to social justice, equity and inclusion; recruit and support faculty and student fellows, community stakeholders and University units to promote equity-driven and engaged scholarship and teaching; and serve as liaisons to the Lender family.

The co-director will work with James Haywood Rolling Jr., who will continue as co-director for the remainder of his three-year term. Details of this appointment are as follows:

Department: Dean’s Office, School of Education
Job Title: Co-director, The Helaine and Marvin Lender Center of Syracuse University
Term: Three-year term beginning in fall 2022
Compensation: Summer stipend, plus course release provided by home school/college

Co-directors are responsible for:

• supervising a graduate assistant who staffs the Lender Center office space, coordinates applications, communications and events, and assists the co-directors and a faculty committee in the selection process and orientation of Lender Fellows;
• facilitating the selection of Lender Faculty and Student Fellows and conducting topical discussions with Fellows and planning and coordinating programming with visiting speakers and scholars;
• coordinating with schools/colleges throughout the University to foster engagement and support;
• working with the School of Education dean’s office, budget director and advancement staff to make Center awards;
• hosting an annual Lender Symposium where Fellows present their projects to a wider public; and
• serving as liaison to the Lender family and the University’s advancement team.

More information about the work of the Lender Center can be found .

Avalon Gupta VerWiebe

Avalon Gupta VerWiebe, a food studies graduate student in the Falk College, is the first to receive the Evan Weissman Scholarship, a newly created scholarship fund honoring the late Professor Weissman that supports food studies graduate students. Gupta VerWiebe’s personal dedication and ongoing work in the fields of food and social justice and community food projects follow the legacy of Professor Weissman’s lifelong commitment to food justice and using food as a tool for social change.

Gupta VerWiebe is from Syracuse, but moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she attended high school and completed her undergraduate degree in public health. “From the systemic inequalities I witnessed, I developed a passion for environmental justice and later food justice,” says Gupta VerWiebe. Before starting graduate school, she was involved with many organizations working in food justice, such as Louisville Community Grocery, Field Day Family Farm, Garden Commons Community Garden, New Roots Fresh Stop Markets and the Cardinal Cupboard Food Pantry, all in Louisville.

“I applied to Syracuse University’s food studies program because it offers courses that examine the social, political and cultural elements of the food system,” she says. “These courses are giving me the tools to advocate for transformational change.” The Falk College food studies program focuses on the social, political, economic and environmental contexts of food production, manufacturing, distribution and consumption—locally, nationally and globally. Students of the program gain a deep understanding of food policy and governance, gastronomy, health outcomes of food systems, human nutrition and food access.

“I hope to one day be able to work toward a more just food system that allows everyone the access to culturally appropriate, delicious, safe and healthy food grown and distributed by just means,” adds Gupta VerWiebe.

At Syracuse University, Gupta VerWiebe is completing a practicum with the University’s Lender Center for Social Justice. As a Lender Center Fellow, she works with the Syracuse Onondaga Food Systems Alliance (SOFSA) and is engaged in efforts to create an equity statement for SOFSA. In addition, she is working with the Onondaga Nation and with youth to document food stories of elders.

“Avalon stands out in her deep commitment to social and racial justice in the food system,” says Professor Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Gupta VerWiebe’s advisor and the director of the graduate food studies program. “Since returning to Syracuse last year, she has taken every opportunity to get involved in community-based food system projects here in the city. She embodies Professor Weissman’s personal and professional commitments to community-engaged research and creating lasting ties that improve food access and sustainability for all.”

Professor Evan Weissman was a tireless advocate for equity in the food system. A highly approachable, committed teacher who engaged students in community-based work to advance social change, his efforts provided the foundation for many communities regionally, nationally and beyond for grassroots food justice initiatives. He passed away unexpectedly in April 2020. To honor his legacy and to continue the work he believed in so deeply, his family created the Evan Weissman Scholarship Fund to defray tuition costs for food studies graduate students.

“This scholarship is an invaluable gift that will allow me to continue these studies,” says Gupta VerWiebe. “I am beyond honored to receive this scholarship in Evan Weissman’s name. Although I did not get a chance to meet Dr. Weissman, stories of how he advocated for social justice in the local food system and within the University inspire me to do the same.”

For more information about the food studies program at Syracuse University’s Falk College, please visit the .

Lee, an associate professor of environmental and interior design in the in the College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA), met with northside residents to conduct what is known as a design charrette—a wide-ranging discussion to determine if the design of the building matches the needs of the people who are going to use it.

The , which is run by the Central New York YMCA, opened in the fall of 2020 as “a welcoming and accessible space in the heart of the North Side, where women from all socio-economic backgrounds, ages, and ethnicities can purse wellness,” according to the center’s website.

That was the goal, but is that the reality? Is the center being utilized as intended, and if not, what else can be done to maximize its use? And what lessons from that building can be applied to other spaces in the city that are available to residents but not necessarily accessible?

Those are the questions that will be asked and answered by Lee and a group of Syracuse University students who will be selected to participate in the 2021-23 Fellowship. This is the Lender Center’s third fellowship and Lee will follow and as faculty fellows for the program that was created to critically explore contemporary social issues and develop sustainable solutions to pressing problems.

Seyeon Lee, an associate professor of environmental and interior design in the School of Design, is the 2021-23 Lender Center for Social Justice Faculty Fellow.

“The core idea of this is, how can we use this space as a hub and connect it with other parts of the community?” says Lee, who is also the George Miller Quasi Endowed Professor in the School of Design. “There is a ton of community space that is underutilized, a lot of pockets of opportunities that are lost, and that’s where I would look to engage with the students with their different perspectives and backgrounds.”

, co-director of the Lender Center, says the two-year timetable for the fellowships is to allow for the faculty fellow and student fellows to spend a year identifying a problem and the next year trying to fix it. He said Lee’s project fits nicely with the previous fellowships that focused on justice messages on social media, and designing more equitable food systems.

“This new focus on health and wellness for women demonstrates how widespread issues of social justice are in our contemporary world,” says Phillips, a communication and rhetorical studies professor in VPA. “This new project will explore these issues of global importance here in Syracuse, which is a great example of working locally while thinking globally.”

The fellowship is open to any Syracuse University undergraduate or graduate student who can commit to the two-year project, and selected students will receive a stipend of $500 per year. For interested students, or faculty and staff who know students who are passionate about social justice, more information is available on the . Five students will be chosen, and the application deadline is Oct. 15.

Emily Stokes-Rees, director of the School of Design and an associate professor in the Museum Studies Graduate Program in VPA, says Lee is enthusiastic about teaching and mentoring students about the many ways design can have far-reaching effects by working for a social good.

“Perhaps the most important thing to know about Seyeon’s research is that underpinning all of her work is a passion and commitment to social justice and sustainability,” Stokes-Rees says. “It is part of who she is—her core values—and it infuses every aspect of her academic life.”

Lee says that while the title of her research that led to this fellowship is “Access to Women’s Wellness,” she wants to emphasize that the fellowship is not about women’s fitness. Lee encourages students of any gender identity from across the University to apply because the project will require many talents and viewpoints.

“It’s all-around wellness: physical wellness, mental wellness, what’s happening in the family, what’s happening outside of the family, child care, does the child have access to better education and extracurricular activities?” Lee says. “With the dynamics and characteristics of the North Side neighborhood, we have found it’s the women, the moms, who really need this type of access.”

The student fellows will observe wellness and health opportunities in the North Side neighborhoods, talk to residents and work in partnership with local nonprofits YMCA, YWCA and , a family empowerment organization, to identify and help close the gaps between wellness and health opportunities available in that community.

Lee (standing) led a design charrette with northside residents to discuss the design of the Northside Women’s Wellness Center in Syracuse.

Stokes-Rees says Lee has a history of involving her students in every aspect of her work and exposing them to community-based projects. Over the past four years, these projects have ranged from researching and designing sustainable low-income housing to creating a fully accessible community garden to improving access to health and wellness services for low-income, ethnically diverse women.

“One specific example of this is a project she undertook with her EDI 451 Community Design Project class, in which Seyeon and her students transformed vacant houses into transitional refugee homes for a local organization, Interfaith Works, learning about the impact of abandoned properties on the local economy and the lives of refugee families,” Stokes-Rees says. “Having the opportunity to cultivate empathy and relatedness are indispensable values in a university education that prepares students to be professionals as well as civic-minded global citizens.”

For Lee, the faculty fellowship connects her love of design with her passion for social justice. A former architectural and interior designer��and project manager, her professional portfolio includes residential, commercial, retail, hospitality and urban planning projects in the United States, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

While working on a Ph.D. at Texas A&M University, Lee studied ways to improve the quality of living for low-income families. And she spent much of her professional design career on affordable housing development.

But often, Lee says, the missing piece in design and architectural work is the voice of the people who will be utilizing those spaces. The 2021-23 Lender Center Faculty Fellowship will give her and the student fellows an opportunity to listen to those voices and impact those lives.

“As I was proceeding with this project, I came about a lot of areas that I didn’t know about–a lot of social issues, a lot of political issues, a lot of about social justice and equity issues that are all wrapped in this topic,” Lee says. “The Lender Fellowship allows me to explore social equity and access from a design standpoint and engage students through participatory learning so they really understand what’s happening in our backyard.”

Informational Session

An informational meeting for any student—undergraduate or graduate—who is interested in learning more about the 2021-2023 Lender Center for Social Justice Fellowship will be held from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Sept. 27 in Sims Hall 123. For more information on the informational session or to apply for a fellowship, visit the .

Nel Gaudé, a graduate student in food studies in the Falk College, laid the groundwork for the creation of justice- and equity-based bylaws for the Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance.

The next big step for the newly formed Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance (SOFSA) started, naturally, with Evan Weissman’s kindness and vision for food justice in the Syracuse community.

Nel Gaudé, who was completing a master’s in food studies from the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, was working in the kitchens at Falk in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Weissman, an associate professor of food studies and nutrition in Falk, started looking for ways for Gaudé and other students who lost their jobs to make extra money.

At the same time, Weissman was in conversations with the at Syracuse University to create a 2020-22 Lender Center for Social Justice Fellowship for students who would help organizations such as SOFSA determine how food systems in Syracuse could better meet the needs of the community.

So Weissman introduced Gaudé to Maura Ackerman, SOFSA’s facilitator, and they discussed a summer internship for Gaudé, who would support SOFSA activities and build a bridge to the work that would be done by students during their two-year fellowship.

That conversation was the last time Gaudé and Ackerman would see Weissman, who died unexpectedly in April 2020.

“He remains the connective tissue,” Ackerman says. “Going through the process of grieving and mourning Evan’s loss really galvanized all of the folks involved in SOFSA to continue this work as part of his legacy.”

Jonnell Robinson, Weissman’s close friend and an associate professor of geography and the environment in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, was selected by the Lender Center to replace Weissman as the 2020-22 Lender Center Faculty Fellow. Following the lead of her friend, Robinson asked the Lender Center for a grant that would pay Gaudé a stipend for their work with last summer, and the Lender Center graciously agreed.

“The last time I met with Evan was the first time that I met with Maura, and he connected us and that was the last time I saw him before he passed,” Gaudé says. “Jonnell and Maura, both knowing Evan better than I, knew his concern for his students and his dedication to supporting us, not just in the classroom but in life.”

Last summer and into the fall, Gaudé laid the groundwork for the creation of that were passed in June and will serve as a “guiding document for the organization,” Robinson says.

“So many organizations right now are doing a lot of reflection and trying to undo some of those systems of inequality that have built up,” Robinson says. “This did present us a unique opportunity to think about these issues on the front end and build an organization that was paying attention to this kind of thing right out of the gate.

“This is what Evan had laid out and was really interested to see happen,” Robinson says. “His major vision was that we didn’t just develop a food policy council, but that we developed a food policy council that was rooted in social justice and equality.”

Giving a Microphone to Those With Food Insecurity

With Weissman as one of its founding members, SOFSA was formed in early 2019 and the organization developed this mission statement:

Our mission is to strengthen our food system so that it works for all people in Syracuse and Onondaga County. We bring communities together to foster relationships, develop projects, align resources, and advocate for policies to improve the health of our neighbors and our environment.

But how to get there? That’s where Gaudé–and the Lender Center student fellows–played prominent roles. Gaudé spent several months researching and reviewing bylaws of other food policy councils and looked more broadly at the idea of creating an accompanying document that would outline the organization’s justice and equity principles.

“Nel took on, with gusto, a national scan of what food policy councils use for their bylaws and led us through developing bylaws that were adapted for our local context,” Ackerman says. “We named a committee that worked through the process to make sure that our bylaws fit our ways of operating and our culture and how best to include what we want for our community.”

Gaudé, who points out that it required “many minds, eyes and hearts” to create the bylaws, says the committee’s main goal was to ensure that SOFSA was following its mission and giving voices to the experiences of people who are marginalized throughout the food system.

“People who have lived with food insecurity or are daily victims of racial discrimination, these people know this situation better than anyone else and that wisdom needs to be acknowledged,” Gaudé says. “They need to have the microphone. They need to be telling us what they need and it’s our job to try to do what we can to support them.”

Led by SOFSA project coordinator Steve Ali, SOFSA created a diversity, equity, inclusion and accountability committee that includes Lender Center Fellows Avalon Gupta VerWiebe and Nicky Kim ’24. VerWiebe and Kim helped create an equity and justice statement that’s included in .

“I think that there was a lot of momentum last year to have conversations about this and creating an organization like SOFSA from the ground up that is designed to be a communitywide initiative gave us a perfect opportunity to incorporate anti-racist activities from the very beginning,” says VerWiebe, a second-year food studies master’s candidate in the Falk College. “This opportunity to bring together Native American, Black, white, Latine, rural and city populations in one space to talk about how to affect change in the food system is extremely special and exciting to me.”

From left to right: Lender Center Fellow Avalon Gupta VerWiebe, Lender Center Faculty Fellow Jonnell Robinson, Fellow Taylor Krzeminski and new Lender Center for Social Justice co-director James Haywood Rolling Jr., a dual professor of arts education in the College of Visual and Performing Arts and teaching and leadership in the School of Education.

Fellows Carry on Weissman’s Vision

The next step for all the stakeholders is to put the vision of the bylaws into practice.

This past April, the six Lender Center Fellows, Robinson, the SOFSA board members and representatives from 15 food system organizations in Onondaga County participated in a training hosted by . Soul Fire, according to its website, is “an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system.”

The training, Robinson says, helped SOFSA and the food system organizations understand where they stand in terms of engaging in anti-racist activities and that helped set the agenda for the new diversity, equity, inclusion and accountability committee.

“What does the history of inequality in the food system look like?” Robinson asks. “The Soul Fire Farm training did an amazing historical overview to show that there are deep chasms in equality. How, as an organization, do we change that course?”

To that end, the Lender Center Fellows have been participating in new SOFSA initiatives such as the “Chop, Chat, Chill” event that creates a welcoming space to people of color and others who have been excluded from various food planning initiatives; and a Political Coffee Hour event that enabled those from across the food system to meet with local policymakers.

VerWiebe (left) and Krzeminski led an activity for guests at the launch event for FoodPlanCNY, an initiative to improve the health of residents through access to healthier food.

On July 14, VerWiebe and Lender Center Fellow Taylor Krzeminski ’20, a second-year graduate student who graduated in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in citizenship and civic engagement and international relations in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Maxwell School, joined Robinson at the launch event for FoodPlanCNY, an initiative imagined by Weissman and Matt Potteiger to improve the health of residents through access to healthier food (Potteiger is a landscape architecture professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry). VerWiebe and Krzeminski led activities asking visitors for their thoughts on how to improve the local food system.

“We’re with the Lender Center for Social Justice, so for us fellows working with SOFSA it’s a wonderful opportunity to engage with an organization in the community that’s trying to establish itself as a social justice-based organization,” VerWiebe says. “SOFSA down the line won’t just be about policy, it’ll be about creating and transforming our community and creating spaces for change, accountability and justice.”

In addition to their work on the bylaws and with the diversity, equity, inclusion and accountability committee, the Lender Center Fellows are supporting SOFSA’s efforts to develop relationships with marginalized communities and learn more about their food stories so SOFSA can focus on projects that acknowledge the communities’ struggles and elevate their causes.

“There’s a particular energy that comes with the framing of this Lender project that Evan left us,” Ackerman says. “That’s his legacy that Jonnell is really committed to–and that the Lender (students) are just incredible advocates for—and they really seem to embody that energy, that vision and the drive to do this life-changing work.”

Participants are asked to and all community members are welcome. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) live captioning and American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided. For additional accommodations or assistance, email suschoolofed@syr.edu.

“Conversations about race, disability and justice in the policing of communities and schools are happening across the country,” says Marcelle Haddix, dean’s professor of reading and language arts in the School of Education and co-director of the Lender Center. “Consistent with the Lender Center’s mission, the intention is to create a space where national experts, community activists and local stakeholders have the opportunity for critical dialogue on citizen-led reform of policing and public safety.”

The keynote address will be given by award-winning author and social justice scholar , director of the 2019 documentary film “.” The author of four books and dozens of articles exploring race, gender, justice and education, Morris is founder of the National Black Women’s Justice Initiative, an organization that works to interrupt school-to-confinement pathways for girls, reduce barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated women, and increase the capacity of organizations working to reduce sexual assault and domestic violence in African American communities.

Participants can hear from experts and activists and engage in dialogue during :�� Policing and Reform Initiatives in Black and Brown Communities, Policing Bodies in Schools, and Community Engagement and Action. The Saturday panel will be followed by breakout room conversations where community members can interact with panelists and participants, continuing the conversation regarding the future of community policing.

“This is a crucial opportunity for the Lender Center and our partners to facilitate conversation about a timely and pressing topic that is at the forefront of our nation’s public dialogue,” says Kendall Phillips, professor of communication and rhetorical studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts and co-director of the Lender Center.

“We are hoping for strong participation from Syracuse University students, faculty and staff as well as the broader Syracuse community,” Phillips says. We are grateful that this virtual format allows us to bring the national experts together with our own community leaders to have meaningful conversations about the future of community policing.”

Abdul-Ghani, who is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies, worked with a cadre of student fellows who served as co-investigators. Each of the four student fellows chose a well-established hashtag to analyze how those hashtags have catalyzed larger conversations about social justice issues at the national and international level.

Established by Marvin and Helaine Lender in 2018, the Lender Center for Social Justice seeks to create a hands-on experience for undergraduate and graduate students interested in social justice that crosses academic disciplines.

Center co-directors Marcelle Haddix, dean’s professor and chair of the reading and language arts department in the School of Education, and Kendall Phillips, professor of communication and rhetorical studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, introduced the symposium presentations, noting that the Social Justice #Hashtag Project is a digital humanities project, combining computational scientific research with history, sociology, writing and communication.

Joining by Zoom, Marvin Lender said, “This symposium is the beginning of a dream come true. What has been done by this first group sets a high bar for the work of future Lender Fellows.” Noting the challenges to social justice presented by the global pandemic and other national and international events, Lender added, “This was a tough year to do the kind of work that you are doing. We will forever be indebted to all of you who are doing the work.”

Lender also welcomed James Haywood Rolling Jr., professor of arts education in the College of Visual and Performing Arts and teaching and leadership in the School of Education, who will succeed Haddix as the Lender Center’s co-director in fall 2021.

The research presentation was preceded by an invited keynote address presented by Mark Anthony Neal, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies at Duke University. Neal, the founding director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship at Duke, conducts research and teaches courses on Black masculinity, popular culture and digital humanities.

His presentation focused on the idea of social justice in the practice of digital media, including content aggregation and curation, provision of a platform, community formation and the implications of digital media for a generation that has been immersed in multitasking media technologies.

These themes were carried through the symposium. In introducing the project, Abdul-Ghani presented the idea of Instagram and Twitter as culturally neutral spaces that lead to critical discussions. She and the student fellows asked why these platforms are impactful and interrogated the aims that can push a national or international conversation about social justice topics to create a diverse and inclusive message that anyone can understand.

Lender Student Fellows Abigail Tick ’22, Grace Asch ’22, Andrea Constant ’24 and Adriana Lobo ’22 presented research on how hashtags can help advance social justice at the inaugural Lender Center for Social Justice Faculty Symposium.

These concepts were further examined by Grace Asch ’22, Andrea Constant ’24, Andriana Lobo ’22 and Abigail Tick ’22 in their examination of four specific hashtags, their aims and outcomes.

Asch, a television, radio and film major in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, studied the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. She found that the hashtag, created in 2015 when all 20 acting nominations by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences went to white actors, has been influential beyond the Academy.

“#OscarsSoWhite is not just about nonwhite actors receiving their due, but has become associated with the need for structural change in the film industry,” Asch says. “There’s a recognition that for real inclusion, there needs to be a fundamental change in filmmaking.”

Constant, a Ph.D. student in sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, examined the hashtag #SayHerName, which highlights police violence and gender-based violence against Black women and girls. Building on her extensive study of the history of criminalization of Black girls and women in the United States and Black-led social movements, including Black Lives Matter, Constant provided broad context for the proliferation of #SayHerName after 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor was killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky, as they executed a no-knock warrant.

Noting the geographical concentration of #SayHerName in Louisville, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Philadelphia during the spring and summer of 2020, she found that much of the hashtag’s use stayed close to the original intent of shining a spotlight on police violence toward Black women and girls. However, Constant also noted that the hashtag has become international, indicating that it may be opening up discussion about gender-based violence for all women.

Lobo, a communication and rhetorical studies major in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, studied the hashtag #NiUnaMenos and its close counterpart #NiUnaMas. Pulling together the complex threads of cultural forms, government impunity, victim blaming and the economics of NAFTA, Lobo followed the use of the hashtags to mobilize mass protests in 2020 against the Mexican government.

The protests were sparked by anger that the government is not enforcing or implementing current laws aimed at curbing gender violence. Lobos explored the implications of the hashtags in protests against violence toward LGTBQ people and indigenous women, noting that economic vulnerability is another key factor contributing to gender violence. The use of the hashtags has spread beyond Mexico to Chile, Peru, the United States and Canada.

Tick, a triple major in sociology, women’s and gender studies, and citizenship and civic engagement in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Maxwell School, studied the rise of the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport, used by individual women telling their stories of sexual violence in the wake of the Senate confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. By explaining why they chose not to report their experience using the hashtag, women created a space where they could engage non-survivors and move from passive victims to active survivors.

Tick also analyzed the reasons that women chose not to report their experience to officials, finding that fear, self-blame and the lack of belief in their lived experience were significant factors. The social media space brought these hidden stories to light, providing women with control and agency around the discourse of sexual violence that they lacked when they decided not to report their experiences.

James Haywood Rolling Jr.

James Haywood Rolling Jr. walked into the Museum of Modern Art in New York City wearing faded jeans, old sneakers and a backpack, just like the rest of his classmates from Cooper Union, a private college in the city. Rolling, still not much older than 16 after having started college a year early, was at the museum with the rest of his lithography class to see a special collection of prints.

As the students moved past the front desk, a security guard asked if he could help Rolling. The guard, who was African American, told Rolling that the delivery entrance was on the side of the building, implying that Rolling was a delivery boy and not part of the class.

“I felt like I had been slapped upside my head with his powerful uniform-clad words, sucker-punched by a representative of the (museum), the institution on whose property I stood,” Rolling writes in his new memoir “.” “I was left stinging.”

While his white classmates didn’t react at all, Rolling realized he had been singled out because he was the only African American in the group. After explaining he was with the class, Rolling followed the group to another reception area on the upper floor. This time, a white female receptionist singled out Rolling and asked, “May I help you?”

“No, you may not help me! I am with the group!” Rolling said angrily before peeling away from the group and heading to the subway. It was the first time, Rolling writes, when “all I felt was my skin.”

“I was a first-generation college student on a full tuition scholarship at the Cooper Union but no one walking past me could see that. My skin was all in the way,” Rolling writes. “Fully aware of myself as others saw me, I felt ashamed and angry at what I was wearing — not the torn jeans and beat-up sneakers, but the skin.”

Now a Syracuse University professor, Rolling says that day “shook his awareness” that his pigmentation sent signals to people that he was something other than a full-scholarship college student attending a museum exhibit with his class. It was, Rolling says, just one of the earliest examples of the microaggressions, slights and underestimations he has had to overcome in his life.

“From that day I understood I was always going to be perceived differently because of my hue, but I also didn’t want that to be an impediment for me accomplishing the things I was interested in doing,” Rolling says. “I wanted to become a catalyst for other individuals who are likewise traumatized by a society that clearly thinks very little of them and has low expectations for their achievement.”

Rolling, a dual professor of arts education in the College of Visual and Performing Arts and teaching and leadership in the School of Education, has spent his entire career as an educator focused on developing the next generation of diverse, creative leaders who travel paths they weren’t aware they could travel. And that’s why Rolling was the ideal candidate to replace Marcelle Haddix as co-director of the at Syracuse University.

Rolling’s appointment will be announced March 4 at the annual and he will begin his three-year term at the start of the fall semester.

“I’ve never seen a resume with involvement in such a diverse group of areas,” says Marvin Lender ’63, who along with his wife, Helaine ’65, provided the inspiration and funding for the Lender Center. “When you talk to James, you realize he is full of energy and creativity, but what resonates most to me is his commitment to the area closest to our hearts, social justice.”

A Commitment to Students and Social Justice

To fulfill their enduring mission to develop ethical and courageous citizens, Marvin and Helaine Lender provided a generous $5 million gift to create a multidisciplinary center that would include research support, symposia, and faculty and student fellowships. The Lender Center for Social Justice launched in September 2018, and Haddix, Dean’s Professor in Reading and Language Arts in the School of Education, and Kendall Phillips, professor of communication and rhetorical studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, were named as the inaugural co-directors.

Haddix’s three-year term is ending, and Phillips’ term will end next year.�� The idea of limiting a co-director’s term to three years, Phillips says, is to prevent “founder’s syndrome,” which occurs when someone who builds a system doesn’t allow it to develop and grow.

“Marcelle and Kendall have made an incredible contribution because they have set, not just the tone, but the structure on how the center will operate and the procedures by which we’ll be guided,” Marvin Lender says. “That’s very important, because we were starting from scratch and there was no model for this. To their credit, they have set the foundation here so that James and the people who will follow will have a starting point.”

With Rolling, Phillips says, the Lender Center found a co-director who will adhere to the center’s principles but also bring a fresh perspective. Phillips and Rolling previously worked together in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, where Phillips was an associate dean of research and graduate studies and Rolling was VPA’s first Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

“James is a tremendously accomplished scholar; his resume is staggering,” Phillips says. “And I think what really makes James stand out, to me, is that he combines a very impressive intelligence with a wide-ranging vision and a deep commitment to issues of social justice, equity, inclusivity. He really brings that full package.”

Rolling received his undergraduate degree from Cooper Union in 1988 and graduate degrees from Syracuse University (M.F.A.) and Columbia University’s Teachers College (Ed.M. and Ed.D.). He started his professional career as an elementary school art teacher, moved to Pennsylvania State University as an assistant professor of art education in 2005, and joined Syracuse University in 2007 in his dual role in VPA and the School of Education and as the university’s Chair of Arts Education.

Rolling’s reach extends nationally as he is the incoming president of the (NAEA), where he currently serves as Chair of the association’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Commission.

Like Phillips, Haddix has had several opportunities to collaborate with Rolling on community-engagement and literacy-focused projects, and she considers him a mentor as she has moved up the academic ranks. Haddix says the Lender Center position was “a natural progression” for Rolling as more of his local and national work has centered around diversity, equity and inclusion.

“The Lender Center’s main mission is supporting and cultivating student leaders who are socially just and equity-minded, and I know James to be a committed and passionate teacher, educator and advisor to his students,” Haddix says. “That love and commitment to teaching and education is an important attribute to being one of the co-directors.”

If Archie Bunker Isn’t the Enemy, What Is?

On Feb. 27, Rolling presented “Strategies for Effective Intervention into Systemic and Structural Inequities” at Syracuse University’s first Racial Equity Academic Symposium. His talk focused on how humans are immersed in, sustained through, and sometimes imperiled by various types of systems.

Self-portrait by James H. Rolling Jr.

Since the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery in 2020, Rolling says he has turned his focus to researching how a thorough understanding of the nature of systems can become an advantage in the effort to effectively dismantle what is typically termed “systemic racism.” Last summer, at the request of the NAEA’s executive director, Rolling wrote an to art educators that explored how to construct an anti-racist agenda based on the understanding that the primary problem is not individual mindsets, but actually the systemic conditions that produce those mindsets.

“Archie Bunker isn’t the enemy, it’s the systems that produce the Archie Bunkers,” Rolling says, referring to the famously bigoted TV character from the 1970s sitcom “All in the Family.”

Rolling’s recent activities – his diversity, equity and inclusion roles with the College of Visual and Performing Arts; the open letter and his recent presentation at the university’s Racial Equity Academic Symposium; and his new memoir which is dedicated to youngsters who are looking to discover their own creative superpowers – are all the result of a lifelong journey that will continue at the Lender Center.

“I’ve always frankly thought of myself more as a creativity educator than an arts educator,” Rolling says. “So my interest has always been, how do we create a better society and greater common ground? How do we create better functioning and better relationships? How do we create effective communication and transformation?”

In other words, how can you redirect and educate the Archie Bunkers before they become Archie Bunkers, and what can the Lender Center bring to this effort? A former architecture school major at the Cooper Union before switching to fine art, Rolling is planning to build a few working models to find out.

“One of the avenues the Lender Center might be able to explore is, how do you redesign the behaviors of institutions and structures that are resistant to change?” Rolling says. “I’m going to keep up my own scholarship about these matters and hopefully there’s a synergy between what I and Kendall and other directors who follow behind us – as well as future student and faculty fellows – can all do that will help inform that key question.”

The time is not just right for Rolling, it’s right for all of us. From the Floyd, Taylor and Arbery murders to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, the last year has told us we are long overdue for change, and it’s time to start looking deeper at the reasons why it has been so difficult to change.

“We’re at a pretty low point, and we keep going down. We’re anything but turned around in this country,” Lender says. “The Lender Center is not the answer to all of the problems we are having, but we can make a contribution and do the right thing, and to do that we need the right people in place. James is one of those people.”

Lender Center Faculty Fellow Jonnell Robinson will lead a team of six student fellows who’ll carry out the food justice vision of late professor Evan Weissman, pictured here with Robinson at a Nature Society workshop in 2014.

Stop hunger in Syracuse.

In its simplest form, that was Evan Weissman’s vision and why he pursued the Lender Center Faculty Fellowship. Weissman, an associate professor in Food Studies and Nutrition in the Falk College, wanted to use the fellowship to determine if the food systems in Syracuse were meeting the needs of the community, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sadly, Weissman died unexpectedly last April. In collaboration and consultation with Falk College and local food system representatives, the Lender Center chose Weissman’s close friend and colleague, Jonnell Robinson, to continue the fellowship in Weissman’s name. And this past fall, the Lender Center selected the six student fellows who will ensure that Weissman’s passion for advancing food justice in Syracuse will live on.

Avalon Gupta VerWiebe

“I don’t think we have a single meeting,” says student fellow Avalon Gupta VerWiebe, “where we haven’t talked about Evan and his vision and the work he was doing.”

Robinson, an associate professor of geography and the environment in the Maxwell School, said the fellows are fully aware of Weissman’s legacy and are “motivated to do something that is impactful in his memory.”

“I did not have the chance to meet Dr. Weissman, unfortunately, but I have heard such positive and inspirational stories about him and his impact on both SU students and the City of Syracuse,” fellow Nicky Kim says. “Knowing that Dr. Robinson and a few of my student fellows that I’ll be working with were so close to Evan has deepened my understanding of purpose in this fellowship.”

Taylor Krzeminski

This is the second Lender Faculty Fellowship, and there is a two-year timetable that allows the faculty fellow and student fellows to spend a year identifying issues and the next year trying to address them. The 2021-22 Lender Center student fellows are:

• Phoebe Ambrose (junior): food studies and citizenship and civic engagement double major, , sustainable food enterprises minor; member of the
• Shiori Green (senior): architecture major, ;��member of the Renée Crown University Honors Program
• Anna Gugerty (junior): linguistics and environment, sustainability and policy (ILM) major, and , food studies and Spanish double minor
• Avalon Gupta VerWiebe (first-year graduate): food studies master’s candidate,
• Nicky Kim (freshman): citizenship and civic engagement and policy studies major, , Spanish minor
• Taylor Krzeminski (first-year graduate): public diplomacy and global communications master’s candidate, , and , pursuing certificate of Advanced Studies in Women’s and Gender Studies; who had been a member of the Renée Crown University Honors Program as an undergraduate

Lender Center Co-Director Marcelle Haddix, Dean’s Professor in the School of Education, says she was pleased that the fellowship attracted interest from students from throughout the campus.

Shiori Green

Anna Gugerty

“The student fellows reflect diverse experiences in food justice work that are both academically and community-engaged focused,” Haddix says. “It will be a unique and generative opportunity for the student fellows to participate in a community-engaged food justice project from an interdisciplinary perspective.”

Led by Robinson, the fellows will work closely with the (SOFSA) to identify food justice projects that Robinson says are “both compelling for students and necessary for SOFSA.” The fellows will help tackle a growing problem exacerbated by the pandemic as Syracuse reflects the national average of 1 in 8 households that are food insecure.

“As a guest in the city of Syracuse, I believe it is my duty to educate myself more on the issues facing local residents as well as engage with the community to dismantle oppressive systems that disproportionately affect BIPOC (black, Indigenous and people of color) community members,” says Kim, who is from Oakland, California. “Additionally, I learn best when connecting readings to real-life situations and consequently implementing solutions or action plans to address those issues.”

Nicky Kim

Robinson says the fellows are already working with community partners to host a virtual food justice symposium that will feature a day of panel discussions and presentations —and include a ceremony to honor Weissman’s contributions to food justice in the community. Weissman was also recently honored as an at the 2021 Martin Luther King Jr. celebration.

The fellows will work with SOFSA on activities that SOFSA outlined in a grant proposal to the United States Department of Agriculture. , and SOFSA Facilitator Maura Ackerman, who wrote most of the grant application, told Robinson she was “channeling Evan and incorporated pieces of his prior writing about what SOFSA should inspire to do.”

Robinson says the fellows are also planning to conduct research that will assess how some school districts in New York State have managed to create farm-to-school partnerships and how the Syracuse City School District, which offers free breakfast and lunch to its nearly 21,000 students—can participate in a similar program.

Phoebe Ambrose

“Our hope is to help (the district) assess how other schools in New York State have managed to get through the bureaucratic hurdles needed for that kind of partnership,” Robinson says. “It would be fabulous for the kids and the farmers to be able to get more fresh produce into the schools in the city.”

VerWiebe, who has a strong community organizing background, says these projects and others will provide the fellows with an opportunity to connect the academic world with the real-world issue of hunger.

“That community participation is something that academia sometimes struggles with and blending those two together creates a powerful structure for change to be carried out based in research and the needs of the community,” VerWiebe says. “That’s what I’m seeing the most (from the fellowship), and I look forward to getting that experience and taking my education at Syracuse out into the world and following in the footsteps of Dr. Weissman and Jonnell and the great work they have done.”

About the Lender Center

The Lender Center for Social Justice was established in 2018�� and is managed and housed in the . The center is host to activities and programming, including multidisciplinary conversations related to issues of social justice and collaborations with other University units to promote a robust dialogue about issues of justice, equity and inclusion.

The Lender Center welcomes students who are passionate about finding solutions to complex problems, and the two-year fellowships will allow students to engage in collaborative research led by Faculty Fellow .

Five Lender Student Fellows will engage in research, community engagement, dialogue and reflection to inform local efforts to create a more equitable, sustainable and inclusive food system in Central New York. Working in partnership with Professor Robinson and the Syracuse Onondaga Food Systems Alliance (SOFSA)—a new food policy council—student fellows will conduct participatory action research to promote community-driven food policies and practices.

“We’re very excited to involve students across disciplines who want to learn more about food systems and community engagement and can bring their interdisciplinary insights into those food insecurity issues,” says Lender Center Co-Director , Dean’s Professor in Reading and Language Arts in the School of Education.

During the two-year period, students will conduct secondary research on food policy councils and food justice initiatives and collaborate with SOFSA to conduct primary research on the strengths and weaknesses of the local food system. The goal of the research will be to provide a model for how local food policy councils can address structural inequalities in food systems.

The selected fellows will:

• Work closely with the faculty fellow in developing the collaborative research project
• Work with students from various disciplines in a dynamic research environment
• Participate in public discussions and presentations of the research project

The deadline for the applications is Oct. 15. For more information on how to apply and submit an application, please visit the .

Ibram X. Kendi

, Ph.D., one of America’s foremost historians and leading anti-racist voices, will present a virtual “Community Conversation” about anti-racism and critical social issues that affect all of us on Wednesday, Oct. 21, from 7 to 9 p.m.

Kendi is a National Book Award recipient and New York Times’ No. 1 best-selling author, and his 2019 book “” was described by The New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”

The free event will feature a presentation by Kendi followed by a live-streamed, moderated conversation with questions from community members. The event is open to all and is required through the event host, Friends of the Central Library. The event is presented by Syracuse University’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Hendricks Chapel and The Lender Center for Social Justice.

Keith Alford, Ph.D., Syracuse University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, says it’s appropriate that the University is presenting Kendi during the campus’ Multicultural Week.

“This week, as elevated by our Student Association, is designated to raising awareness about myriad cultural identities here on our campus and in society,” Alford says. “Multicultural week is also dedicated to active discourse about issues and challenges that impact us on a daily basis.

“Professor Kendi is one of our nation’s prolific thought leaders on anti-racism and the real work it requires,” Alford adds. “I believe his talk will raise our consciousness and spur us into constructive action regarding the racial realties of our times.”

Marcelle Haddix, Ph.D., Dean’s Professor in Reading and Language Arts in the School of Education and co-director of The Lender Center for Social Justice, is chair of the Author Selection Committee for Friends of Central Library and the main organizer of this seminal event.

“This conversation with Professor Kendi is happening at a critical time in our collective history,” Haddix says. “We are honored to create a space for members of the Syracuse and Syracuse University community to come together to consider deeply how embodying anti-racism can cultivate a culture of equity, justice and inclusion.”

Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. A contributing writer for The Atlantic and a CBS News correspondent, Kendi is also the 2020-21 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for the Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Kendi’s highly anticipated next book, “Be Antiracist: A Guided Journal For Awareness, Reflection, and Action,” is available for pre-order and will be published Oct. 6.

In The New York Times’ review of “How To Be An Antiracist,” Jeffrey C. Stewart wrote that “Kendi is on a mission to push those of us who believe we are not racists to become something else: antiracists, who support ideas and policies affirming that ‘the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences—that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group.’ ”

TIME magazine recently named Kendi as one of the for providing concrete and actionable steps and recommendations that we all can take to wipe out the vestiges of racism and bigotry.

“A Community Conversation with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi” is hosted by the Friends of the Central Library and presented by Syracuse University, with sponsorship from The Central New York Community Foundation, The Gifford Foundation and WCNY.

The Friends of the Central Library (FOCL) is a nonprofit group that supports the Central Library, which is the hub of the Onondaga County Public Library system and includes city branches and suburban libraries. By providing funds to the Library System through its Gifford Author Series, FOCL helps to ensure that everyone in our community has free access to libraries and literacy and access to the dialogues and conversations that are vital to changing systems that are inequitable.

The late professor Evan Weissman, shown with friend, colleague and neighbor Jonnell Robinson at a Nature Society workshop in 2014.

Jonnell Robinson never had to go very far to find Evan Weissman. They were colleagues, confidants and next-door neighbors, and all Robinson had to do was call for Weissman over her backyard fence.

When it came time for the heart-wrenching decision to replace Weissman as the 2020-22 Lender Center for Social Justice Faculty Fellow, the Lender Center didn’t have to look very far, either.

Weissman, associate professor of food studies and nutrition in the Falk College, died unexpectedly April 9. Shortly before he passed, Weissman was awarded the Lender Faculty Fellowship; he wanted to examine if the food systems in Syracuse were meeting the needs of the community, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In collaboration and consultation with the Falk College and local food system representatives, the Lender Center chose Robinson to carry on the fellowship in Weissman’s name. By selecting Robinson, associate professor of geography and the environment in the Maxwell School, the Lender Center ensured that the fellowship will be a testament to Weissman’s passion for advancing food justice in Syracuse.

“Jonnell embodies the spirit of Evan’s colleagues rallying to keep his project and dream and all of the work he had done alive, even though he has left us,” says Kendall Phillips, co-director of the Lender Center and professor of communication and rhetorical studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. “Like Evan, Jonnell has a longstanding relationship with the community, which was important, and it was clear she was open to interdisciplinary collaboration and finding new ways to approach this problem.”

Lender Center Co-Director Marcelle Haddix, Dean’s Professor in the School of Education, says Robinson was “an automatic choice” to assume the fellowship.

“You want people in the fellowship who believe in the scholarship and action they described in the application,” Haddix says. “This was Evan’s life work, so I think out of such a negative and sad situation it is reassuring to see Jonnell and a number of people come together to carry out his work in the way that honors the integrity and vision of what he proposed.”

Over the years, Robinson says she and Weissman had many conversations about the importance of conducting research that made a difference in the lives of community members.

“I’m honored to carry out this fellowship in Evan’s memory,” Robinson says. “Evan’s contributions to the everyday practices and academic scholarship of food justice are profound. The Lender Faculty Fellowship will enable a passionate team of SU students and faculty to realize Evan’s vision of strengthened local food policies and grassroots efforts.”

This is the second Lender Faculty Fellowship. Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani, assistant professor of African American studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, is the 2019-21 inaugural Faculty Fellow. Her project, “The Social Justice #Hashtag Project: A Digital Humanities Study,” examines social media as a methodology to uncover social justice trends that challenge global citizens to tackle explicit and implicit racial and gendered biases.

The two-year timetable of these fellowships, Phillips says, is to allow for the Faculty Fellow and Student Fellows to spend a year identifying a problem and the next year trying to fix it. Led by Robinson, Weissman’s fellowship will focus on creating a local food system that prioritizes access, sustainability and resiliency.

The student fellowship is open to any Syracuse University undergraduate or graduate student who can commit to the two-year project. Robinson says the student Fellows will work alongside members of the newly created (SOFSA) to engage in research, community engagement and reflection with the goal of building a local food council oriented toward social justice.

For students who are interested in becoming a Fellow, or faculty and staff who know students who are passionate about food and social justice, more information is available on the .

“We’re very excited to involve students across disciplines who want to learn more about food systems and community engagement and can bring their interdisciplinary insights into those food insecurity issues,” Haddix says.

Anne Bellows, professor of food studies in the Falk College, played an integral role in the selection of Robinson to carry on Weissman’s vision of the fellowship. Bellows says Robinson was the ideal choice because of her ability to involve students in her many community projects.

“Jonnell is really special,” Bellows says. “She’s special because she worked at the community level to start the urban agriculture society group, and she has worked with a number of people in terms of food insecurity and different kinds of emergency feeding systems.”

Bellows says Weissman was “unfailingly kind” and supportive of his students. She remembers how Weissman invited several of his students to a public policy webinar hosted by , an urban agriculture and community gardening group, because he wanted the students to have a place at the table and a voice in the discussion.

Alongside University and community partners, Weissman and Robinson co-founded Syracuse Grows, and Robinson remains a member of its advisory board (Weissman was also an advisory board member). Weissman, a Syracuse native who attended Nottingham High School, was also involved with the Syracuse Hunger Project when Robinson moved to Syracuse in 2005. Robinson joined that group, and they hit it off instantly.

Their families became close, and Robinson said her family was thrilled when the house next to the Weissmans became available so they could buy it and become neighbors with Evan and his wife, Erin. Robinson says she misses talking to Weissman on campus, at food system meetings and over the fence, and the best way she can honor Weissman’s memory and those conversations is to support the community through the fellowship.

“Evan played such a huge role in my personal and professional lives. It is still hard to believe he’s gone,” Robinson says. “Not a day went by where I didn’t have a conversation with Evan, and a lot of those conversations were how important it was to do research that had an impact and made a difference in the community where we live.”

The Lender Faculty Fellowship will support a two-year research agenda to critically and creatively explore contemporary social issues, develop innovative approaches to these problems and implement useful and sustainable initiatives.

The selected faculty fellow will work with a team of student fellows to create an interdisciplinary research team focused on the proposed social issue. The Lender Symposium will serve as the culmination of the two-year projects with invited national guests and experts participating in a thorough discussion of the research and proposals developed by the Lender fellows’ team.

Faculty applying for the Lender fellowship should be dynamic and accomplished scholar/teachers who are committed to an agenda of engaging issues relevant to social justice. They will be expected to foster an interdisciplinary team that will simultaneously encourage student learning and growth and the pursuit of concrete engagement with real-world problems.

The faculty fellow will receive research support for both years of the project, a summer stipend and additional resources to facilitate the development and execution of their project as well as to publicize the results.

“We see the faculty fellow project as a unique opportunity to push our thinking about social justice and, at the same time, help students across the University see ways they can engage with social justice issues,” says Kendall Phillips, professor of communication and rhetorical studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. Phillips and Marcelle Haddix, dean’s associate professor and chair of reading and language arts in the School of Education, are the center’s co-directors.

Faculty fellows will be expected to propose a clear issue/problem that will sustain the two-year research/engagement project; be committed to working closely and openly with the student members of the team; develop partnerships with other faculty and entities on campus to support the project; develop partnerships with other entities and communities relevant to the research; and pursue additional external sources for funding and support of the project.

Faculty fellows will receive formal designation as a Lender faculty fellow; a $5,000 stipend to cover their work during the summer between year one and year two; research funds of up to $5,000 for each year of the project; additional funds of up to $5,000 for the Lender Symposium at the culmination of their project; and support from the Lender Center staff.

Faculty applications and supporting materials are due to the Lender Center by 5 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 14, and must include:

• a completed��;
• a letter of support from the faculty member’s chair/director, sent to��lendercenter@syr.edu; and
• supplemental materials as appropriate, either submitted with the application or sent separately to��lendercenter@syr.edu.

With an enduring underlying mission to develop ethical and courageous citizens, The Lender Center aspires to become nationally recognized for encouraging creative and critical engagement with social justice. It supports innovative and multidisciplinary research of contemporary social problems while providing proactive and concrete approaches and solutions. Its members and partners develop collaborations that broaden just and undaunted engagement between students and citizens.

The Lender Center was established on the Syracuse University campus in September 2018. Life Trustee Marvin Lender ’63 and his wife, Helaine (Gold) Lender ’65, turned their lifelong commitment to social justice and greater understanding among people into the establishment of a multidisciplinary center, managed and housed in the School of Education. The couple provided a $5 million gift in support of the creation of the center.

The students have been named the first Lender Student Fellows by the . The group will focus on “The Social Justice #Hashtag Project: A Digital Humanities Study.” They will select hashtags exemplifying the social justice causes they are most interested in exploring and then develop innovative approaches to those social justice concerns.

“The recent events of racism and anti-Semitism on our campus have reinforced the importance of tracking and understanding systemic bias and exclusion,” says Kendall Phillips, Lender Center co-director. “We are hopeful that projects like ‘The Social Justice #Hashtag Project’ can help our University and our culture be more just and more inclusive.”

The 2019-2021 Lender Student Fellows are:

• Grace Asch (sophomore)—television, film and radio major, , African American studies and Spanish minors
• Andrea Constant (graduate)—sociology,
• Erika Hall (sophomore)—linguistics/computer science major, and
• Adriana Lobo (sophomore)—communication and rhetorical studies major, , policy studies minor
• Abigail Tick (sophomore)—sociology/citizenship and civic engagement major, and

The research project was developed by the Lender Center’s first Faculty Fellow, , an assistant professor of African American literature and studies in the . Gibson-Abdul-Ghani will lead the students in exploring contemporary social issues, developing innovative approaches to these problems and implementing useful and sustainable initiatives.

“The ways in which we teach our students in the Information Age about social justice and how they must be equipped to challenge messages of inequality is vital,” says Gibson-Abdul-Ghani. “Our student fellows have an incredible opportunity to help students and the greater campus community understand the importance of advocacy in research as critical to advancing the mission of diversity and inclusion.”

Gibson-Abdul-Ghani’s project will culminate with the 2021 Lender Symposium, with national guests and experts participating in a discussion of the research and proposals developed by the Lender Fellows team.

About the Lender Center

The Lender Center for Social Justice was��established in September 2018��and is managed and housed in the��. The center is host to activities and programming, including multidisciplinary conversations related to issues of social justice and collaborations with other University units to promote a robust dialogue about issues of justice, equity and inclusion.

Casarae Gibson

Casarae Gibson, assistant professor of African American literature and studies in the , has been named the first Lender Faculty Fellow by the . The Lender Faculty Fellowship supports a two-year research project to critically and creatively explore contemporary social issues, develop innovative approaches to these problems, and implement useful and sustainable initiatives.

Gibson will lead a team of Lender Student Fellows focused on “The Social Justice #Hashtag Project: A Digital Humanities Study”—Gibson’s project aimed at utilizing social media platforms as a way of uncovering social justice trends. The fellows will select hashtags exemplifying the social justice causes they are most interested in exploring and then develop innovative approaches to those social justice concerns.

“The ways in which we teach our students in the Information Age about social justice and how they must be equipped to challenge messages of inequality is vital,” says Gibson. “This fellowship is an incredible opportunity to help students and the greater campus community understand the importance of advocacy in research as critical to advancing the mission of diversity and inclusion.”

Center founders Marvin Lender ’63 and Helaine (Gold) Lender ’65 have devoted themselves to philanthropy and advocacy, and recognize that the issues and challenges of social justice will be ongoing. “Professor Gibson’s focus on social media is a wonderful way to get the next generation involved in issues of social justice,” says Helaine Lender.

“The spotlight on digital is a great opportunity for students to take things they are learning in the classroom out into the world and really engage these issues,” adds Marvin Lender.

Gibson’s two-year project will culminate with the 2021 Lender Symposium, with national guests and experts participating in a discussion of the research and proposals developed by the Lender Fellows team.

Gibson, who teaches in the , earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Johnson C. Smith University and master’s and doctoral degrees in English at Purdue University. Her forthcoming book manuscript, “There’s a Riot Going On! Racial Unrest in Black Arts Movement Poetry, Drama, and Fiction,” examines how artists used aesthetics to challenge racial inequalities at the height of the civil rights movement.

About the Lender Center

The Lender Center for Social Justice was established in September 2018 and is managed and housed in the . The center will be host to activities and programming, including multidisciplinary conversations related to issues of social justice and collaborations with other University units to promote a robust dialogue about issues of justice, equity and inclusion.