SBAN Director Receives Grant for New Urban Equity Collaborative
SBAN Director Willow Lung-Amam, Ph.D., has received a Grand Challenges Grant from the University of Maryland to establish the Urban Equity Collaborative (UEC), a research and policy initiative to promote economic, racial, and gender justice and shift power towards communities on the frontlines of struggle. With a focus on issues of dispossession and displacement, the new initiative will complement SBAN’s small business anti-displacement work.
The UEC is a cross-disciplinary effort between the University of Maryland Urban and Studies and Planning program, where Lung-Amam is Associate Professor, the Department of American Studies, and the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health in the School of Public Health. With a mission to uphold equitable community partnerships and prioritize research in service to community-led work, UEC will target issues of affordable housing access, immigrant rights, and small business displacement.
A unique feature of the initiative is a community fellows program where community leaders, including community-based organizational representatives, organizers, and activists, are invited to become researchers-in-residence.
