Dolores Acevedo-Garcia brought her team to the BU School of Social Work to open the Institute for Equity in Child Opportunity & Healthy Development, which is headquartered on the Fenway Campus.
Social Work
Nationally renowned researcher Dolores Acevedo-Garcia launches Institute for Equity in Child Opportunity & Healthy Development
When it comes to helping kids succeed, a handful of factors have been proven to give them the best shot at a happy and healthy life: quality schools, clean air, parks and playgrounds, access to healthcare, families earning sufficient salaries and benefits. So how can it be, in this modern age, that many children still lack those essentials? And what will it take to level the playing field for all children?
Tackling those questions is the mission of nationally renowned health inequities researcher Dolores Acevedo-Garcia. She and her 11-member team recently joined the Boston University School of Social Work to create the new Institute for Equity in Child Opportunity & Healthy Development. The team has long-term support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, important in a time of turmoil for researchers who depend on the federal government for funding.
Previously based at Brandeis University, Acevedo-Garcia and her researchers and staff brought along their respected diversitydatakids.org project, a hub for rigorous, data-driven research and policy programs on racial, ethnic, and geographic equity in child opportunity and well-being.
“One thing that I was always very interested in is: To what extent are we living in neighborhoods that have very different conditions?” says Acevedo-Garcia, director of the institute and an SSW professor of human behavior, research, and policy. “Do we see patterns that Latino kids or Black kids, for example, are largely living in neighborhoods with much harder conditions for them to grow in a healthy way? Much to my surprise, we did not have a national data system to look at that.”
The main way to gather that information had always been through the poverty index. But, beginning in 2009, Acevedo-Garcia and her team cast a wider net. “Let’s look at parks. Let’s look at education, schools. Let’s look at health, at whether people in the community have health insurance,” she says.
Acevedo-Garcia and her team created diversitydatakids.org, a rigorous, data-centric research program on racial and ethnic equity in child opportunity and well-being.
In 2014, diversitydatakids.org published the first iteration of the Child Opportunity Index (COI), mapping and measuring many neighborhood resources in areas such as education, health, environment, and economics. Now in version 3.0, it includes data for virtually all US census tracts from the years 2012 to 2021.
In the past decade, the institute has provided vast amounts of highly specific data to public, private, and nonprofit users in health, education, and public policy—from researchers to municipal public health workers. The users have employed that data in a variety of ways to improve equitability for children of all backgrounds.
COI data on racial disparities in opportunity for children in New York led the state’s Early Care & Learning Council to convene a statewide meeting on equitably reducing school suspensions and expulsions. Michigan’s Great Start Readiness Program, which offers public preschool to many low-income children in the state, has begun using the index to target services toward children in low-opportunity neighborhoods. A University of California professor studied more than six million emergency room visits alongside COI data to show that children in low-opportunity areas are far more likely to visit emergency rooms for medical issues that could be treated more appropriately and more cost effectively by a primary care provider.
This is a transformative hire for the School of Social Work.
Barbara Jones
“This is a transformative hire for the School of Social Work to bring in this large of a research team that is so aligned with our goals and mission,” says Barbara Jones, SSW dean and a professor of clinical practice. “Dolores is a nationally and internationally renowned health equity researcher with a real focus on children’s well-being and opportunity.”
Given that number crunching is a big part of the team’s work, Acevedo-Garcia says a major selling point for the move to BU was its Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences. She will be a faculty fellow there and collaborate with CDS researchers, as well as experts from other parts of BU, such as the School of Public Health.
According to Azer Bestavros, associate provost for CDS, Acevedo-Garcia’s work “exemplifies what we mean by civic data science. By using data-driven platforms and tool kits, like those developed under the Child Opportunity Index project, communities and policymakers alike are empowered to efficiently allocate resources and develop opportunities for all learners to thrive.”
The CDS Faculty Fellows Program is a way to connect with non-CDS faculty members “who pursue novel computational and data-driven research with strong potential for long-term impact,” Bestavros says.
“One thing we bring to the table is a connection to people actually using the data,” says diversitydatakids.org research director Clemens Noelke, now an SSW research associate professor. “It’s a lot of work, sometimes, to get organizations to a point where they can leverage the data correctly. But we’ve had that experience over time and built some solutions that we can then offer to multiple organizations, to make all of this more efficient for real-world impact.”
Another important area for the institute is policy analysis, examining such things as equitable access to childcare subsidies or the family and medical leave rules in a state or region. “I focus on evaluating policies using an equity perspective,” says the institute’s associate director, Pamela Joshi, now an SSW research professor. That means “systematically analyzing whether policies that are designed to help children are actually doing that and doing it for children who have been the most underserved or may not have as much access to resources.”
Researchers Clemens Noelke (left) and Pamela Joshi (right) are among those who have moved to BU with Acevedo-Garcia.
“We look closely at questions of equity, like the very high poverty rates for Hispanic children, which largely stem from very high poverty rates for children in immigrant families,” says Acevedo-Garcia, who’s a member of the congressionally mandated National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Federal Policy Impacts on Child Poverty. “And those are not an accident—those are the result of very explicit exclusions in social policy that prevent kids, even kids who are US citizens, from receiving some benefits from the government if their parents are immigrants.”
The move to BU had been in the works for many months, with the conversations arising from an ongoing collaboration between Joshi and Yoonsook Ha, an SSW associate professor, through their Massachusetts Child Care Research Partnership.
“Frankly, especially right now, the importance of [Acevedo-Garcia’s] work to really advocate for children’s health and opportunity seems essential,” Jones says.
Given the rhetoric on the national stage, and the movement against ideas like “equity” from the White House down, is this a risky time for this initiative at BU?
“We are starting during a very difficult time. It’s a general trend,” Acevedo-Garcia says. “I am happy that, if we are going to live through these times as a country, as a society, that I am where I am. It’s a community that has been cohesive and supportive, trying to move forward in the best possible way.”
“This is something that social work will always be about,” Jones says. “It will always be about having access for children and their families to have healthy opportunities.”
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