Poverty and the Recession in North Carolina: Challenges and Opportunities

UNC CENTER ON POVERTY, WORK AND OPPORTUNITY

Speaker Biographies

Andrea Bazán, Triangle Community Foundation

Andrea Bazán is president of the Triangle Community Foundation, where she guides the strategic vision of the twenty-four-year-old foundation and oversees the stewardship of approximately $140 million in assets housed in nearly 700 charitable funds. Previously, Bazán served as the first executive director for El Pueblo, a North Carolina advocacy and public policy organization. In addition, she was the first Latina lobbyist at the North Carolina General Assembly and has had a career in public health, both at the state level with the N.C. Office of Minority Health and the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, and in academia at the Department of Maternal and Child Health, UNC School of Public Health.

One of a handful of Latina heads of philanthropic foundations in the country, Bazán is a frequent speaker at local, state and national meetings, and she has served as a mentor to many young students. She is a member of the Leadership Council of Hispanics in Philanthropy, based in San Francisco, and the co-chair of the CEO Network of the Council of Foundations in Washington, D.C. As of June 2008, Bazán began a three year term as chair of the board of directors for the National Council of La Raza, which she has served on since 2002. She also sits on the boards of the National Immigration Forum, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina and Wachovia Bank in Raleigh.

Bazán holds a master’s degree in social work and a master’s degree in public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Born in Boston, she grew up in Argentina and spent her high school and college years in New Orleans.

Alan Berube, Brookings Institution

Alan Berube is a senior fellow and research director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. His areas of expertise include urban demographics, tax and banking policies for low-income families and communities, and comparative social policy and demographics in the United States and the United Kingdom. Berube is the author of numerous Brookings publications on the Earned Income Tax Credit and related tax benefits for low-income workers. He oversees the Metro Program’s Living Cities Census Series, for which he has authored several papers and edited two volumes of the Redefining Urban and Suburban America series.

Prior to joining Brookings in February 2001, Alan was a policy advisor in the Office of Community Development Policy at the U.S. Treasury Department, where he authored a joint Treasury and Department of Housing and Urban Development study on predatory lending, Poverty and the Recession in North Carolina April 9, 2009 and developed the First Accounts program to support the development of low-cost bank accounts for unbanked consumers. Prior to that, he was a research assistant at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and a consultant to government clients at Andersen Consulting.

Alan holds a master’s degree in public policy from the Georgetown Public Policy Institute and a B.S. in chemical engineering from Stanford University. He held an Atlantic Fellowship in Public Policy in 2004, when he completed research on housing and neighborhoods at the United Kingdom Treasury and the London School of Economics.

N. Yolanda Burwell, North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center, Inc.

N. Yolanda Burwell is a senior fellow with N.C. Rural Economic Development Center where she looks at barriers to and incentives in economic opportunities. Prior to this position, she taught social work for 25 years in undergraduate programs in Louisiana and North Carolina.

Her research interests and publications are on social welfare history in African American communities and early female leaders and organizations. She has been a scholar-in-residence at five schools/departments of social work to speak on social work history and African American contributions. In addition to research and teaching, she has conducted numerous successful trainings and consultancies on team-working, cultural competence, conflict resolution and communication.

Burwell received her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She was awarded her master’s degree from the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis and her bachelor’s degree in social work from North Carolina A&T State University.

David Dodson, MDC, Inc.

Since joining MDC in 1987, David Dodson has directed major projects to strengthen public schools and community colleges, address rural economic decline, create new philanthropic structures, and build multiracial leadership for civic change in the Carolinas, the Deep South, and Appalachia. He frequently speaks around the country on creating equity and opportunity for low-wealth communities and has advised major philanthropic foundations on strategies to address poverty.

Dodson is co-author of several MDC publications including Disconnected Youth in the Research Triangle Region: An Ominous Problem Hidden in Plain Sight for The North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, State of the South 2007: Philanthropy as the South’s ‘Passing Gear,’ and An Action Agenda to Spur Economic Success: A Report to the Distressed Areas Task Force of the South Carolina Council on Competitiveness.

He is a member of the boards of The Mary Reynolds Babcock and the The Hitachi Foundations, and the Center for Law and Social Policy. Prior to joining MDC he served as executive director of the Cummins Engine Foundation and director of corporate responsibility for Cummins Engine Company in Columbus, Indiana.

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Cynthia “Mil” Duncan, Carsey Institute and University of New Hampshire

Cynthia “Mil” Duncan returned to the University of New Hampshire in the spring of 2004 as founding director of the Carsey Institute.

Widely recognized for her research on rural poverty and changing rural communities, Duncan was a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire for eleven years before leaving to become director of the Ford Foundation’s Community and Resource Development Unit in 2000. At the Ford Foundation, she was responsible for a team of national and international leaders in the community development, youth, and environmental fields. Duncan was the associate director of the Rural Economic Policy Program at the Aspen Institute prior to her former work at the University.

In 1999, Duncan published Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America, which received the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best book in Community and Urban Sociology. Duncan is the author of numerous book chapters and refereed articles. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in sociology and is a recipient of the University of Kentucky Department of Sociology Thomas R. Ford Distinguished Alumni Award. She has a B.A. from Stanford University.

Chris Estes, North Carolina Housing Coalition

Chris joined the Housing Coalition as its executive director in September 2003 with a variety of experiences related to low-income communities and affordable housing. The North Carolina Housing Coalition is a private, non-profit membership organization working for decent, affordable housing that promotes self-determination and stable communities for low- and moderate-income North Carolinians.

Prior to the Coalition, Estes completed a master’s degree in social work and a master’s degree in city and regional planning, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works closely with the Coalition’s partners on its legislative agenda and in promoting the Campaign for Housing Carolina initiative across the state. He hopes to broaden the membership of the Coalition while increasing its impact on the production of affordable housing and improving the quality of life of low-income communities.

In his free time he enjoys spending time with his wife, Cherie and stepson, Wilson, as well as cycling, backpacking, and listening to live music.

Chris Fitzsimon, N.C. Policy Watch

Chris Fitzsimon is the founder and director of N.C. Policy Watch, a progressive public policy think tank that is a special project of the N.C. Justice Center and the A.J. Fletcher Foundation. He writes the daily Fitzsimon File, delivers a daily radio commentary that is broadcast statewide on the North Carolina News Network, and hosts “News and Views,” a weekly radio news magazine that also airs on the network stations. Prior to N.C. Policy Watch, Fitzsimon served as the spokesman of the Campaign to Protect America’s Lands, a national, nonpartisan advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.

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Before heading to Washington, Fitzsimon was the founder and for nine years the executive director of the Common Sense Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina. Common Sense is a nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy foundation whose mission is to expand the policy debate in North Carolina to include the views and voices of those traditionally locked out of that debate. He is also a frequent speaker across North Carolina on government and politics. Fitzsimon has been quoted in scores of national publications including The New York Times, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, and Columbia Journalism Review.

Fitzsimon was an award-winning television news reporter for nine years, including four years at North Carolina Public Television and three years at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, where he covered government and politics. Fitzsimon, has a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ferrel Guillory, UNC Program on Public Life and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Ferrel Guillory founded the UNC Program on Public Life in 1997 to build bridges between the academic resources at UNC-Chapel Hill and the governmental, journalism and civic leaders of North Carolina and the South. He is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Public Policy and a senior fellow at MDC, Inc., a workforce and economic development nonprofit research firm in Chapel Hill. Through MDC, he has co-authored The State of the South, a series of biennial reports to the region and its leadership (1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2007). He also co-authored the book, The Carolinas: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: An Exploration of Social and Economic Trends, 1924-1999 commissioned by the Duke Endowment.

Governor Mike Easley appointed Guillory to the North Carolina Education First Task Force and to the Council on the Southern Community of the Southern Growth Policies Board. In addition, he served on the steering committee of the Rural Prosperity Task Force, appointed by Governor Jim Hunt and chaired by Erskine Bowles.

Before working in academia, Guillory spent more than twenty years as a reporter, editorial page editor and columnist for The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. He has had free- lance articles published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The New Republic, America, Commonweal, Southern Cultures and The Atlanta Constitution. Guillory has contributed chapters to books on David Duke and the politics of race, on economic transition in tobacco regions and on North Carolina politics and government. He was inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame in 2007.

The Honorable Joe Hackney, Speaker of the House, North Carolina General Assembly

Joe Hackney was elected speaker of the N.C. House of Representatives in January 2007 at the start of his fourteenth term in office. Prior to becoming speaker, Hackney was House Democratic leader for one term, House majority leader for one term and Speaker pro tempore for two terms. As House leader, he helped win back the majority in 2004 and expand this majority in 2006. Hackney is also president of the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 2007, he received the group’s Excellence in State Legislative Leadership Award, the nation’s top honor for state legislators.

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Hackney began his legal career as a clerk for North Carolina Supreme Court Associate Justice Frank Huskins. He worked as an assistant district attorney in Orange and Chatham counties from 1971-74 before entering politics as the campaign manager for N.C. Congressman Ike Andrews.

Since 1974, Hackney has been a partner in the Epting & Hackney law firm in Chapel Hill, N.C. In addition, he and his brother continue to operate the family cattle farm in Chatham County where they grew up. Hackney received a bachelor’s degree in political science and a juris doctorate degree from the University of North Carolina.

George Hausen, Legal Aid of North Carolina

George Hausen has been the executive director of Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC) since its creation in 2002. LANC is a statewide, non-profit law firm serving the state’s most economically marginalized households. At LANC, he has been privileged to work with some of the smartest and most dedicated advocates of social justice found anywhere.

He has spent his legal career in legal services since entering the bar in Chicago, where he focused on housing rights and fair housing litigation. He received his B.A. from the University of Illinois and his J.D. at DePaul University in Chicago.

James H. Johnson Jr., UNC Urban Investment Strategies Center and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

James H. Johnson Jr. is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center. His research interests include community and economic development, the effects of demographic changes on the U.S. workplace, interethnic minority conflict in advanced industrial societies, urban poverty and public policy in urban America, and workforce diversity issues. With support from the Russell Sage Foundation, he is researching the economic impact of September 11 on U.S. metropolitan communities.

Johnson’s research focuses on the causes and consequences of growing inequality in American society, particularly as it affects socially and economically disadvantaged youth; entrepreneurial approaches to poverty alleviation, job creation, and community development; and business demography and workforce diversity issues. He has published more than 100 scholarly research articles and three research monographs and has co-edited four theme issues of scholarly journals on these and related topics. His latest book is Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles.

He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University, his M.S. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and his B.S. from North Carolina Central University.

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Mark McDaniel, Center for Community Capital, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Mark McDaniel is senior research associate with the UNC Center for Community Capital. He consults with foundations, policymakers and others on strategies that help connect low-income populations to economic opportunities. These strategies include connecting neighborhoods to regional workforce opportunities, connecting the unbanked and underbanked to financial services, and leveraging investment in low-income areas for housing, community facilities and other economic development opportunities.

McDaniel brings a diverse set of experiences in conceptualizing, designing and implementing initiatives intended to improve the socio-economic outcomes of low-income residents and the neighborhoods in which they reside. McDaniel has particular interest in the economic challenges and pathways to opportunity taken by different subpopulations, including students, residents of public housing, youth and the formerly incarcerated.

McDaniel has a master’s degree in city and regional planning from Morgan State University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The Honorable Brad Miller, Representative from North Carolina Congressional District 13

In 2002, Congressman Miller was elected to Congress to represent North Carolina’s 13th district, a new district gained after the 2000 Census. As a member of the Financial Services Committee, he has quickly become a leader in protecting vulnerable consumers from unconscionable practices by the financial services industry. He is lead sponsor of legislation to protect consumers from predatory mortgage lending practices, legislation supported by a broad coalition of consumer and civil rights organizations. He has also spearheaded bankruptcy reform legislation.

Before his election to the U.S. House of Representatives, Miller served six years in the North Carolina Senate. As a state senator, Miller introduced legislation to expand North Carolina’s domestic violence law; to reduce air pollution from cars and trucks; to freeze construction of new or expanded hog lagoons; to limit the influence of political patronage in state government hiring; and to protect consumers from dishonest automobile mechanics by prohibiting garages from charging for work not authorized by the consumer. As a Judiciary Committee chairman, Miller helped guide into law legislation to address “Driving While Black,” or racial profiling.

Miller first held state-wide political office in 1992 when he was elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives, where he served two years. As a member of the House, he wrote North Carolina’s safe gun storage law. He also practiced law in Raleigh from 1980 until his election to Congress.

Miller was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a law degree from Columbia University. He served as law clerk to Judge J. Dickson Phillips, Jr. of the United States Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals for one year following his graduation from law school.

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Miller has been a leader for working Americans caught in a painful economic transition. He founded the Community College Caucus in the House to rally support for the important role of community colleges in adult education and job training.

Gene Nichol, UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity and University of North Carolina School of Law

Gene Nichol is professor of law and director of the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. He teaches courses in constitutional law, federal courts, civil rights and election law. From 2005-2008, Nichol was the 26th president of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Nichol was Burton Craige Professor of Law and dean of the law school at the University of North Carolina from 1999-2005. He served as law dean at the University of Colorado from 1988-1995; and as James Gould Cutler Professor and Director of the Institute of Bill of Rights Law at William & Mary from 1985-1988. He has published articles in the Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Chicago, California, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Duke law reviews; as well as The Nation, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education and other periodicals.

In 2003, Nichol won the American Bar Association’s Edward R. Finch Award for delivering the nation’s best Law Day Address. Two years later, Governor Easley inducted Nichol into the Order of the Long Leaf Pine; and Equal Justice Works named him pro bono law school dean of the year. In 2007, he received Oklahoma State University’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. This year he received the Courage To Do Justice Award from the National Employment Lawyers Association and the Thomas Jefferson Award from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Nichol attended Oklahoma State University, where he received a degree in philosophy. He obtained his J.D. from the University of Texas, graduating Order of the Coif, in 1976.

Adam Searing, North Carolina Justice Center

Adam Searing joined the North Carolina Justice Center as director of the North Carolina Health Access Coalition in 1997. The Health Access Coalition is North Carolina’s leading voice for progressive health care reforms that address the needs of the uninsured and underinsured. The project advocates both for more comprehensive and effective public health care programs and on behalf of average consumers in the private market.

During his tenure, Searing has: led the fight to defeat of a proposed conversion of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina to a for-profit; won and helped implement expansions of the state Medicaid program; helped win passage of the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (Health Choice); and fought for consumer rights for North Carolinians in HMOs.

Searing has received awards and recognition for his work from the N.C. Public Health Association, the N.C. Primary Health Care Association, regional and state newspapers, and the honorary societies Delta Omega (public health) and Pi Sigma Alpha (political science). He received his graduate degrees in law and public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1994.

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Margaret C. Simms, Urban Institute

Margaret C. Simms is a fellow at the Urban Institute and director of the Institute’s Low- Income Working Families project, a research initiative exploring challenges faced by 9 million families and their 19 million children. A nationally recognized expert on the economic well- being of African Americans, Simms spent 21 years with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in a number of leadership positions. Most recently, she was appointed vice president for governance and economic analysis in 2005 and served as interim president from May to December 2006. She began working at the Joint Center, one of the nation's premier think tanks dealing with public policy issues of concern to African Americans and other communities of color, in 1986 as deputy director of research.

Simms was a senior research associate at the Urban Institute from 1979 to 1986 and directed the Institute’s Minorities and Social Policy Program from 1981 to 1986. She was a faculty member at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta) from 1972 to 1981, teaching first in the School of Business Administration and then serving as chair of the Department of Economics. She also taught at Clark College in Atlanta and the University of California at Santa Cruz. In 1977 and 1978, she was a Brookings economic policy fellow at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Simms has also edited many books and monographs, including Job Creation Prospects and Strategies (with Wilhelmina Leigh), Economic Perspectives on Affirmative Action, and Slipping Through the Cracks: The Status of Black Women (with Julianne Malveaux). She was editor of the Review of Black Political Economy from 1983 to 1988 and board chair of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research from 1993 to 1998. She has been a member of Black Enterprise magazine’s board of economists since 1987 and is the incoming president of the National Academy of Social Insurance. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. Simms earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University.

Alexandra Sirota, Action for Children North Carolina

Alexandra Forter Sirota is Director of Policy and Research for Action for Children North Carolina. She joined Action for Children in November of 2007 as a Fellow in Economic Security. Sirota oversees the organization’s policy and data work, while focusing on strengthening the asset-building potential of children in families working below the poverty line in North Carolina.

Before joining Action for Children, Sirota worked as a community affairs analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She worked with partners in New York City and upstate New York to document conditions of concentrated poverty and to develop plans for strategies that connected working families to the financial mainstream, work supports and asset-building opportunities. Sirota has also worked to promote financial health at Toynbee Hall in London, England, on the Services Against Financial Exclusion (SAFE) program.

Earlier in her career, she served as the Community Relations Coordinator and Volunteer Services Coordinator for the Association House of Chicago, and as the International Relations Coordinator for ASAPROSAR (the Salvadoran Association for Rural Health) in Santa Ana, El

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Salvador. Sirota received a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies, from Haverford College in Pennsylvania. She earned master’s degrees in international relations and public policy from the Harris School and Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago.

Karl Stauber, Danville Regional Foundation

Karl Stauber became the first president and CEO of the Danville Regional Foundation in August 2007. He served in a similar capacity at the Northwest Area Foundation in St. Paul, Minnesota, for the previous eleven years.

Before that, Stauber served as a senior appointee in the Clinton administration at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Washington, D.C. Here Stauber’s work focused on rural development policy, including refocusing agricultural research and education efforts, and implementing the community development portion of the Northwest Timber Initiative. As the first Senate-confirmed Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics, he oversaw the consolidation and integration of USDA’s “knowledge producing agencies.” Before that, Stauber served as the Deputy Under Secretary for Rural Development at USDA.

From 1986 to 1993, Stauber was vice president of programs for the Northwest Area Foundation. In this role, he was responsible for developing new approaches to economic development, focusing on rural and other low-income communities. Under his direction, the Foundation helped low-income communities gain access to capital to create businesses and examined the economic, environmental, and social impact of sustainable agriculture.

Stauber holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the Union Institute and the University of Cincinnati, a certificate from the Program for Management Development at the Harvard Business School, and a B.A. in American studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Eric Stein, Self-Help and Center for Responsible Lending

Eric Stein is president of the Center for Community Self-Help and serves as chief operating officer for Self-Help and its affiliates. Self-Help (www.self-help.org) is a nonprofit community development lender whose mission is to create ownership and economic opportunity for people of color, women, rural residents and low-wealth families and communities. Its programs include direct home lending, financing home loans to low-income families through banks and credit unions via its secondary market program, commercial and community facilities lending, retail credit union services, and residential and commercial real estate development. It has provided over $5 billion in financing to over 55,000 home buyers, small business owners and nonprofits in North Carolina and across the nation, with a loss rate of less than 1%.

Stein is also senior vice president of Self-Help’s affiliate, Center for Responsible Lending (www.responsiblelending.org), which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and policy organization dedicated to protecting homeownership and family wealth by working to eliminate abusive financial practices. He has testified in Congress on predatory mortgage

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Stein was formerly executive director of CASA, a nonprofit organization that develops housing for primarily homeless persons with disabilities. In addition, he worked for Fannie Mae's Office of Low- and Moderate-Income Housing, Congressman David Price and U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sam J. Ervin III. Stein holds a law degree from Yale Law School and a B.A. from Williams College.

Deborah Weissman, University of North Carolina School of Law

Deborah Weissman is the Reef Ivey II Distinguished Professor of Law and director of Clinical Programs. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Syracuse University and graduated cum laude from Syracuse University Law School. Prior to teaching law, she had extensive experience in all phases of legal advocacy, including labor law, family, education-related civil rights, and immigration law in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Tampa, Florida, and as a partner in a civil rights firm in Syracuse, New York. From 1994 to 1998, she was deputy director and then executive director at Legal Services of North Carolina.

Weissman teaches domestic violence law, the civil lawyering process, the Civil Litigation Clinic, and the Immigration/Human Rights Policy Clinic. She also serves as an Executive Committee member for The Consortium in Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, as a member of the Advisory Board with The Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina, and as an advisory board member for the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.

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