GSSWSR RESEARCHERS PARTNER WITH HOUSING ADVOCATES

Visiting Professor Sandy Schram

How can programs focusing on home repair and maintenance improve access to housing for low-income Philadelphians? That is one of the questions under consideration in a participatory-action research project that two doctoral students and a professor in the Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research have undertaken in collaboration with a Philadelphia advocacy organization. The project, designed to promote change based on solid research, is a model of engaged scholarship.

Visiting Professor of Social Work and Social Research Sanford Schram and doctoral students Corey Shdaimah and Roland Stahl are working on the project with the Women's Community Revitalization Project. The WCRP representatives to the project are "real research collaborators," says Schram. "We devise and revise our study in dialogue with them. This ensures a greater chance that our research will serve their advocacy needs and help inform efforts to improve the ability of low-income families to obtain and retain affordable housing.

"Philadelphia is an important place to do such work," says Schram. Philadelphia ranks first among major American cities in the rate of homeownership among low-income families, but the high rate is largely due to the city's abundance of dilapidated housing available at low prices, Schram says. Philadelphia's rate of homelessness is also high, and because Pennsylvania ranks very low in per-capita expenditures on affordable housing programs, Schram says, many low-income families who own houses face the prospect that they cannot maintain them in habitable condition and are forced to move out; in certain cases, families become homeless.

The research Schram and his team are conducting focuses on how public policy currently deals with the situation and how advocates can most effectively promote policy changes to improve it. "We are analyzing census data to identify residency and abandonment patterns," says Schram, "and interviewing government officials, program administrators, community leaders, activists and homeowners to find out what they think should be done." The GSSWSR researchers stay in constant touch with their WCRP partners as well, to revise plans and get the information that activists need.

<<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 1/22/2004