About the William T. Grant Foundation and Panelists

The William T. Grant Foundation recently reaffirmed its years-long commitment to supporting research on programs, policies, and practices to reduce inequality in youth outcomes and sharpened its focus by calling for research that examines how social movements—or other collective efforts to disrupt power hierarchies—might reduce inequality for young people of color. The Foundation’s ultimate goal is to mobilize research so that the structural conditions that have created inequality for too long can be dismantled and rebuilt in an equitable way.

Panelists:

Jenny Irons leads the William T. Grant Foundation’s Reducing Inequality program area and is a key member of the senior program team which sets the Foundation’s research agenda and annual priorities. Previously, Dr. Irons was Associate Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College focusing her research and teaching on race, gender, and social movements. As a senior research analyst at The Policy & Research Group in New Orleans, she directed qualitative evaluation research, and as a research consultant, she conducted a summative evaluation for the Greater New Orleans Foundation (GNOF) of their post-Hurricane Katrina Community Revitalization Fund.

Dr. Nyeema C. Watson is the vice chancellor of diversity, inclusion, and civic engagement at Rutgers University–Camden, where she oversees efforts to build an inclusive campus community while connecting the resources of the university with communities in Camden and across southern New Jersey. Dr. Watson leads campus efforts to establish diversity, equity, and inclusion as key institutional values in recruitment, retention, the curriculum, and civic and community engagement. She has experience in education policy at the New Jersey Department of Education, where she was responsible for managing state and federal grants, research, and policy analysis. Dr. Watson was the program officer for the New Jersey 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program, at the time a $12.75 million program that provided grants to support expanded academic enrichment opportunities during out-of-school time hours for children attending low-performing schools.

Moderator:

Dr. Sherri-Ann P. Butterfield will moderate the discussion. Dr. Butterfield is Executive Vice Chancellor and Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University–Newark. She is a nationally recognized scholar, teacher, and thought leader in race and ethnicity, immigration, and diversity in higher education. Sherri-Ann is also a sought-after facilitator on managing diversity within complex institutions. As an advocate for leveraging diversity in all its dimensions, she works with her RU-N colleagues to actualize the public mission of colleges and universities as engines of social mobility, and as anchor institutions that collaborate with partners from multiple sectors in order to help communities succeed.

Her work has appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes that include the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy and the Research in Urban Sociology Series. While at Rutgers-Newark Sherri-Ann has served in numerous academic and administrative capacities, including: Visiting Academic Fellow in Nuffield College at Oxford University, American Council on Education Fellow at New York University, Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Chancellor, Acting Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program, Associate Director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, and former Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department. She received her B.A. in Sociology from Yale University and M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan.