Speakers

Marty Strange, keynote speaker ˜
Thursday, August 15th 4:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

"Rural Schools: Small Works and Community Counts"

Marty Strange manages a public policy program for the Rural School and Community Trust, a national non-profit organization whose mission is to strengthen rural schools and communities. He was a founder of the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska, serving as its program director for 23 years. He is the author of Family Farming: A New Economic Vision, a leading critique of industrial agribusiness. Marty received the Rural Sociological Society's Distinguished Service to Rural Life Award and national Common Cause's Public Service Achievement Award. He is a trustee of the Vermont Land Trust and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation.

John P. Kretzmann, Co-Director of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University, works with community building leaders across North America and beyond to conduct research, produce materials and otherwise support community-based efforts to rediscover local capacities and to mobilize citizens' resources to solve problems. A much-traveled speaker and trainer, Kretzmann brings over thirty years of community experience and study to his current position. His popular book, Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets (with John L. McKnight) is one of the field's most cited works. He holds a B.A. from Princeton University, an M.A. from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Sociology and Urban Affairs from Northwestern University.

"The Community Effect in Urban Places"
Saturday, August 17th ˜ 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
Glen H. Elder, Jr, Commentator

Glen H. Elder, Jr., is Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Research Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he co-directs the Carolina Consortium on Human Development and manages a research program on life course studies. He has also served on the faculties of the University of California (Berkeley) and Cornell University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Elder has served as Vice-President of the American Sociological Association (1989), and as president of the Society for Research on Child Development (1995-97). His books (authored, co-authored, edited) include Children of the Great Depression (1974; 1999, expanded edition), Children in Time and Place (1993), Methods of Life Course Research (1998), and Children of the Land: Adversity and Success in Rural America (2000).

PANELISTS:

Greg Duncan is professor of education and social policy and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan in 1974 and has spent much of his career there working on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data collection project. He is a member of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Family and Child Well-Being Research Network and the MacArthur Foundation Networks on Successful Pathways Through Middle Childhood and Family and the Economy. He directs the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research. Duncan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the spring of 2001. His latest book, For Better and For Worse: Welfare Reform and the Well-Being of Children and Families, edited with P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale at Northwestern University, was published in January 2002.

Robin Jarrett is Associate Professor of Family Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received her PhD from the Univ. of Chicago, Dept. of Sociology. Her research interests include child and adolescent development, African-American families, family functioning and resilience, urban poverty and qualitative research methods. A particular focus is how demographic, social, and ecological aspects of urban neighborhoods influence specific parenting practices and child-youth developmental processes an trajectories. Currently, she is collaborating on a project that examines how extracurricular and community-based youth activities promote adolescent development. Her publications reflect her interests in the intersection between neighborhood contexts and family practices and child-youth development.

Robert J. Sampson is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago and Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. His major research interests include the sociology of crime and violence, the life course, and urban sociology. Sampson is currently studying the nature, sources, and consequences of community-level social processes (e.g., collective efficacy, density of ties, organizational participation, and spatial dynamics) as part of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), for which he serves as Scientific Director. He is also engaged in a longitudinal study of crime and deviance over 70 years in the lives of 1,000 disadvantaged men born in Boston during the Great Depression era. His book with John Laub on this project, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life (Harvard University Press, 1993), received the outstanding book award from the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Crime, Law, and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association. In 1997, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. In 1999-2000, Sampson was appointed to serve on the National Research Council's "Committee on Future Research Directions for Behavioral and Social Sciences at the NIH," which issued its report in February, 2001. Last fall (November 2001), Sampson was presented the Edwin H. Sutherland Award for outstanding contributions to criminological theory and research by the American Society of Criminology.