IAJS-sponsored Stanford Impact Labs fellows collaborate with community partners to advance racial justice
As part of its efforts to advance racial and ethnic justice, Stanford’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies is sponsoring two Stanford Impact Labs design fellows for the 2024-25 academic year.
The Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellowship, a 10-month fellowship for faculty members from any of Stanford’s seven schools, supports up to 10 faculty members each year. Each fellow works on a project that uses their research skills and scholarship to tackle a pressing social problem, with the IAJS fellows’ projects focusing on accelerating racial and ethnic justice.
All fellows participate in monthly workshops and receive one-on-one mentoring on topics ranging from problem identification and refinement, to developing an operational plan for giving life to their vision of impact and partnership. They also receive a $50,000 grant to cover expenses such as staff, travel, equipment, or workshops.
“There are a lot of scholars on campus that care deeply about having an impact, but the historical norm of higher education institutions hasn’t necessarily provided the resources and training to enable scholars to do that,” said Sarah Hopwood, director of programs and education at Stanford Impact Labs. “That’s where Stanford Impact Labs comes in: supporting scholars that want to think about: How can they move the needle on a particular social problem? It requires training, funding, and shifting the culture of higher education.”
Fellows from schools of Law and Education
Stanford’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies is sponsoring two fellows whose projects align well with the institute’s goal of using rigorous research and partnerships with government and/or community organizations.
Michelle Wilde Anderson, Larry Kramer Professor of Law and a Professor in the Doerr School of Sustainability, will work with the civic sector, local government, and historically black colleges and universities in Jackson, Mississippi. The goal is a shared understanding of how the city came to struggle with an obsolete water system, dramatic population loss, and deepening poverty — as well as of the opportunities to overcome these problems. Anderson’s fellowship is also sponsored by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Guilherme Lichand, Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Education, will collaborate with partners in Brazil to collect quality data on educational inequalities based on student characteristics such as socioeconomic status, race, and learning disabilities — and to track the effectiveness of policies to mitigate them. While governments spend significant resources to make learning opportunities less unequal, they often do so without accurate data to target them effectively.
“Both Michelle and Guilherme are conducting research to identify inequities in the distribution of public resources, and both are seeking to resolve these disparities by collaborating with policymakers,” said Tomás R. Jiménez, professor of sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences, faculty co-director of the institute, and Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. “This aligns well with the institute’s focus on solutions-based research to advance racial and ethnic justice.”
A partnership for practical solutions
Hopwood said the fellows’ desire to work with partners on solutions made them a good fit for the IAJS-sponsored fellowships.
“They both are seeking to address a really complex and important social problem,” Hopwood said. “They both have relevant scholarship and a motivation to work with partners to make a tangible impact and to co-create and develop solutions.”
The Institute for Advancing Just Societies at Stanford University brings together researchers, thought leaders, community partners, and policy makers to develop practical solutions to pressing societal problems involving race and ethnicity. Backed by Stanford’s research capacity and external partnerships, the institute works on a local, national, and global scale to ensure that race and ethnicity no longer adversely impact people’s security, health, freedom, opportunity, political self-determination, or life experience. The institute was founded in 2022 with the goal of developing a cross-disciplinary infrastructure at Stanford for the study of race and its effects on society.
Stanford Impact Labs (SIL) trains and invests in teams of researchers working with leaders in government, business, and communities to design, test, and scale interventions that can help make progress on some of the world's most pressing and persistent social challenges. SIL works with collaborators and change agents at all levels — government, higher education, philanthropy, and local communities — to put social sciences to work for society.