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Advancing Equity in the Campus Community: Considering the Effects of Insufficient Child Care and Caregiver Support

Jan 26, 2023 - 12:00 PM
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Event time is listed in Central Standard Time (CST).

Join us for a discussion on the equity issues faced by campus communities due to inadequate child care and caregiver support. Drs. Wendy Wagner Robeson and Autumn Green will discuss the factors that make up family-friendly campuses as well the problems faced by student caregivers/parents. This session will focus on equity with respect to child care and the problems families and children face when they have inadequate or no child care. The trilemma of care—affordability, availability and high quality—will be examined with respect to the needs of a campus community. This discussion will be inclusive of all members of the community: undergraduate and graduate students, staff and faculty.

Dr. Autumn Green is an applied sociologist and interdisciplinary scholar who engages a wide range of methods to impact social change through policy, systems, practice and data strategies. A primary nexus of her work has focused on facilitating opportunity, inclusion and success for students and scholars with children and other caregiving responsibilities. She has led and contributed to numerous collaborative projects impacting change in higher education across the United States, including The Family Friendly Campus Toolkit, The Campus Family Housing Database and The Find Your Way Project. She is currently a non-resident Fellow at The Urban Institute and the 2023 Twink Frey Visiting Scholar-Activist at the University of Michigan focusing on support for student caregivers

at the University of Michigan. Dr. Green started her own scholar-activist journey as a student mother, and her projects work to engage pregnant and parenting students and alums as research and action partners, emerging scholars and impact leaders.

Dr. Wendy Wagner Robeson is a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women and the director of the Work, Families and Children Research Group. Dr. Robeson's research areas include child development, childcare policy, early childhood care and education, and school readiness. Dr. Robeson's body of work includes a landmark federally-funded study that ran from 1991 to 2010 and provided definitive evidence that high-quality childcare programs benefit children's cognitive development and school readiness. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she collaborated with early childhood education advocates to examine COVID-19's impact on the childcare and education business, as well as on families. Dr. Robeson’s research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and other federal, state and community

foundation sources. She received her Ed.D. from Harvard University.