Dr. Robert L. Hawkins Named Sterling Network Fellow

McSilver Associate Professor in Poverty Studies and Assistant Dean and Director of the Undergraduate Program Robert L. Hawkins was selected by The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation to join the Sterling Network NYC, a multidisciplinary network of New York City leaders working together to tackle the challenge of increasing economic mobility. Dr. Hawkins is one of 15 new Sterling Network Fellows named to the initiative, which launched in October 2017 with the aim of building and strengthening a network of leaders who will develop partnerships and collaborations to enhance economic mobility across New York City.

In announcing the latest fellows, Brooke Richie-Babbage, Director of Sterling Network NYC, said, “this group of 55+ cross-sector systems-leaders will continue to come together multiple times a year to identify ways that they can collaborate to push for economic mobility and economic justice on issues from housing to labor to criminal justice.”

Dr. Hawkins brings to the network considerable expertise in poverty and welfare, social capital use and development, race and social policy, community participatory research with mixed methodologies, and social policy analysis. He also has extensive programming, research, and teaching expertise in race and racism, gender studies, diversity, oppression, and privilege. Dr. Hawkins’ current research interests include inequality, the role of racism and poverty as trauma, social capital development, and addressing structural, sociological, and psychological barriers faced by low-income people trying to make a successful transition from poverty to economic sustainability.