Dear Friends of GCI,

The last month has been an important one at the Great Cities Institute. We have just completed the second phase of a year-long strategic exercise meant to engage all of us, community partners, staff, researchers and students, in considering "new directions" for GCI. We started last fall with an Institute-wide meeting to lay the ground work for our assessment of engaged research and we have just completed a series of small group meetings during which we worked actively to review our past accomplishments, assess our challenges and arrive at some new directions based upon both the past and our approach to the future. This phase of the process was a good one, allowing us to entertain some much needed communication between faculty scholars, past and present, fellows, students and staff not only at the Institute but also at our affiliates, the Center for Urban Economic Development and the Voorhees Center. By the end of April, a draft report of our efforts will be circulated and we will meet during the summer to review and inaugurate our strategic efforts.

April will also see the publication of three new working papers on the GCI website: one by Dennis Judd, professor of Political Science and Great Cities Institute Fellow, one by Anthony Orum, and one by Marcia Farr. For full titles of the studies, please read on in this Monthly. For full copies of these exciting new additions to our research program, please drop by the Great Cities Institute website at http://www.uic.edu/cuppa/gci/publications/workingpaper.htm.

David Perry Professor and Director

News

May course offerings for the Online Certificate in Nonprofit Management Courses include "Nonprofit Governance," and "Marketing Management for Nonprofit Organizations," held from May 13 - June 16, 2004. For more information on the program, please visit http://cnm.cuppa.uic.edu or contact Katie Kaminski at katiek@uic.edu, 312.355.0423.

The Voorhees Center and the Chicago Mutual Housing Network will be releasing their study, "Limited Equity Cooperatives: Their Conditions and Prospects in Chicago" on April 23rd at LaSalle Bank, 135 South LaSalle Street, 43rd floor. The event is from 1:45 to 4:30 pm. Watch www.chicagomutual.org for more details or contact Patricia Wright at pwright@uic.edu.

Wim Wiewel, who will be leaving UIC after 25 years to become the Provost at the University of Baltimore, would like to bid everyone farewell. Starting in August, his new email will be wim@ubalt.edu.

Calendar

Jane Addams College of Social work cordially invites you to attend the 10th Karen Honig Memorial Lecture, "Latino Elders as Community Assets for Children and Families", by Melvin Delgado, Boston University of Social Work, Monday, April 12, 4pm. For more information, please contact Byron Samuel at (312) 996-3219 or e-mail: byrons@uic.edu.

There will be a farewell reception for Wim Wiewel on May 10, from 4:30-6:30 pm, in Rooms A-B of the Student Services Building.

People

Irma M. Olmedo, Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholar, will be giving a presentation at the American Educational Research Association annual conference in April. Her topic is "Walking the Walk: Teachers Mentoring Teachers for Effective Bilingual Instruction" and is based on research carried out on the Effective Bilingual Instruction Institute that she has offered at UIC under a federal grant.

Laurie Schaffner, Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholar, will be presenting findings from her GCI research at the Law and Society Annual Meetings here in Chicago, May 27-30, 2004. The panel, "Developments in United States Sex Crime Law and Policy," will be chaired by Emory Law Professor Kay Levine.

Roberta Feldman would like to announce the release of her book, that was partially supported through a Great Cities Institute Fellow position, "The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents' Activism in Chicago Public Housing", Cambridge, 2004, with Susan Stall. For more information, please contact Roberta Feldman at rmf@uic.edu.

Faculty Scholar Spotlight

Laurie Schaffner, one of this year's Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholar and Assistant Professor in UIC's Criminal Justice department, focuses her work on youth in trouble with the law and the sociological and political responses by the juvenile corrections systems, both legal and psychiatric. Drawing upon research using interviews, ethnography, cultural documents, and secondary national data, she examines shifts in the constitution of trouble for girls as compared with boys in the legal system, other adolescent girls, and young women a century ago. She is working on a manuscript, More Harm Than Good: Worlds of Girls In Trouble with the Law, which critiques orthodox delinquency theories by uncovering ways in which contemporary youth are punished for the transgressing mainstream gender norms. This research, focusing on young women in urban neighborhoods, argues that gender-responsive programs and policies must challenge conventional adolescent stereotypes. Her work has earned awards from the American Sociology Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the American Society of Criminology.

For more information, please contact Laurie Schaffner at schaff@uic.edu.