The livestream below will begin at the time of the event.

Growing up in poverty has life-long consequences for a child’s physical and mental health and economic well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated conditions for millions of children and families. Yet, child poverty is not an intractable problem. Join leading national experts in an engaging dialogue on actions that can be taken to address urgent threats to children and our stubbornly high child poverty rates. 

This webinar will feature a discussion between Jeff Madrick, director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative and author of Invisible Americans, and three members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s consensus committee that authored the landmark report, A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty, Greg Duncan, Christine James-Brown, and Dolores Acevedo-Garcia. 

Join us on Thursday, June 18 at 2:00 pm as we both celebrate Children’s Week and discuss policies and programs that can significantly reduce child poverty in our country. 

Please register to obtain the Zoom link.

Featuring:

  • Jeff Madrick, author, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, and director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative
  • Greg Duncan, distinguished professor of education, University of California, Irvine
  • Christine James-Brown, president and chief executive officer, Child Welfare League of America
  • Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, Samuel F. and Rose B. Gingold professor of human development and social policy and director of the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University
  • Moderator, Cara Baldari, vice president of family economics, First Focus on Children

Sponsored by The Century Foundation’s Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and First Focus on Children

Speaker Bios

Jeff Madrick is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at The Cooper Union, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. He is a former economics columnist for the New York Times. Before Invisible Americans, Madrick published Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World (Knopf) in 2014, which makes a comprehensive case against prevailing mainstream economic thinking. He is the author of a half dozen other books, including Taking America (Bantam) and The End of Affluence (Random House), both of which were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Taking America also was chosen by Business Week as one of the ten best books of the year.  He edited a book of public policy essays, Unconventional Wisdom (The Century Foundation) and also authored the book Why Economies Grow (Basic Books/Century) and Age of Greed (Knopf). His book The Case for Big Government (Princeton) won a PEN America non-fiction award.

He has written many public policy papers and has written for many other publications, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Institutional Investor, The Nation, American Prospect, the Boston Globe, Newsday, and the business, op-ed, and magazine sections of the New York Times. He has appeared on Charlie Rose, The Lehrer News Hour, Now With Bill Moyers, Frontline, CNN, CNBC, CBS, and NPR. He was formerly finance editor of Business Week Magazine and an NBC News reporter and commentator. His journalism awards include an Emmy and a Page One Award. He was educated at New York University and Harvard University, and was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard. 

Greg Duncan is distinguished professor of education at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Duncan spent the first 25 years of his career at the University of Michigan, working on and ultimately directing the Panel Study of Income Dynamics project. He held a faculty appointment at Northwestern University between 1995 and 2008. Dr. Duncan’s recent work has focused on assessing the role of school-entry skills and behaviors on later school achievement and attainment and the effects of increasing income inequality on schools and children’s life chances. Dr. Duncan was president of the Population Association of America in 2008 and the Society for Research in Child Development between 2009 and 2011. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010. Dr. Duncan earned a BA in economics from Grinnell College and a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan. He has an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex.

Christine James-Brown became president and chief executive officer of the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) in April 2007, assuming the leadership of the nation’s oldest and largest membership-based child welfare organization. Ms. James-Brown came to CWLA from United Way International (UWI), where she had served since 2004 as the organization’s fifth president and CEO. As president and CEO, Ms. James-Brown was responsible for the efforts of the worldwide network of United Way nonprofit member organizations spanning six continents and five regions and serving communities in forty-five countries and territories. Before her leadership role at UWI, for ten years she served as president and CEO at United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania (UWSEPA) in Philadelphia. During her decade of leadership at UWSEPA, Ms. James-Brown guided Philadelphia’s largest private nonprofit organization for health and human services. She has served as a member of the boards of the School District of Philadelphia, Community College of Philadelphia, the Samuel S. Fels Fund, the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, Citizens Bank, Public/Private Ventures, and the Pennsylvania Bar Association Judicial Evaluation Commission. She worked at the New York City Department for the Aging, Special Project on Crime Against the Elderly, and the New York City Foundation for Senior Citizens. Ms. James-Brown has received numerous awards and recognition throughout her career, including the National Council of Negro Women’s Mary McLeod Bethune Award, B’nai B’rith’s Humanitarian Award and Operation Understanding’s Distinguished Community Leadership Award. In 1996, James-Brown received an honorary doctorate from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ms. James-Brown holds a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers University.

Dolores Acevedo-Garcia is Samuel F. and Rose B. Gingold professor of human development and social policy and director of the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the social determinants of racial/ethnic inequities in health, the role of social policies in reducing those inequities, and the health and well-being of children with special needs. She is also project director for diversitydatakids.org, a comprehensive research program and indicator database on child well-being and opportunity by race/ethnicity across multiple sectors (such as education, health, and neighborhoods) and geographies, which is funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Acevedo-Garcia was a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on How Housing Matters for Families and Children (2009–2014). She is a member of the editorial board of the journals Social Problems; Cityscape; and the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Dr. Acevedo-Garcia holds a B.A. in public administration from El Colegio de Mexico (Mexico City) and both a master’s degree in public administration/urban and regional planning and a Ph.D. in public policy with a concentration in demography from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Cara Baldari (moderator) is the vice president of family economics at First Focus on Children. In this role, she leads the U.S. Child Poverty Action Group, of which First Focus is a founding member. Her work centers on building the political will for a national strategy to reduce child poverty in the United States, including policies that increase cash assistance and other forms of income support to low-income households with children. In 2016, she helped to secure federal appropriations funding for the landmark NAS study, A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty. Cara received a JD from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and a BA from the University of Pittsburgh.