Chapin Hall Equity First Summer Associates Program for PhD Candidates

For decades, Chapin Hall has documented persistent racial inequities in child and family wellbeing. While we have worked to provide evidence to inform how to address these inequities, we also acknowledge that it matters who does the research. Studies are shaped by who establishes the research questions, how they collect the data, and what life experiences and perspectives they bring to frame the results.  

Eligibility

This program is a summer career-building opportunity for PhD students in the Chicago area who: 

• have completed a minimum of two years of their course of study (slight preference for those who have completed comprehensive exams, though this is not required); 
• have experienced education, career, and life barriers due to racial discrimination; and 
• want to apply their scholarship and lived expertise toward equity and social justice. 

The Equity First Summer Associates are exposed to human service system change work in an applied research and policy organization. The Associates use this eight-week period to learn and apply racial equity principles in a non-academic environment and submit a capstone project implementing these principles in a specific context.  They deepen their understanding of the culturally responsive racial equity (CRRE) approach to research,  and apply that approach to their own equity action plans for their future research.