Barrett Ebright

Sociology
Willamette University

Barrett Ebright spent a summer as a case manager intern in one of Chicago’s starkest inner-city neighborhoods where she discovered that the theories she was learning in the classroom did not always explain the situations she encountered with her clients. She also came to understand that the poverty of the inner city was quite different from the poverty of her rural hometown. To truly understand poverty, she realized, was going to require a broader view, one that encompassed both its rural and urban dimensions. Ebright intends to use her fellowship to expand her understanding of rural poverty, and to discover whether she prefers a career in research or policymaking. She has helped coordinate outreach programs in Salem, Oregon; has volunteered as a tutor and mentor in local schools and at her university; and has volunteered at freemeal programs in Vashon, Washington. Ebright would like to pursue a future in research and policymaking, and the RPRC grant, she believes, will help her hone her skills and focus her future interests.

Ebright graduated from Willamette University with honors in Sociology in 2004 and is currently a Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellow working in Washington DC for the Community Food Security Coalition and the National Family Farm Coalition. For the first six months of the fellowship she was placed in Tucson Arizona at the Community Food Bank to gain experience working on hunger and poverty issues at the local level. There she worked with another fellow to develop and implement a mobile market that visits two rural communities providing residents with local access to affordable fresh produce, meats and dairy products and a local EBT redemption site. At CFSC and NFFC she is working on federal policy issues that affect rural communities, such as expanding direct marketing opportunities for farmers through CFSC’s Farm-to-Cafeteria initiative. In the future, she would like to go back to school for a graduate degree in public policy.

Tonya Christine Miller

Family Social Science
University of Minnesota

Reading the book Making Ends Meet sparked Tonya Christine Miller’s interest in poverty. The book, which chronicles the daily struggles of a group of poor urban women, also started Miller thinking about how their struggles differ from those of community members in her own hometown in South Dakota. Wanting to learn more, she applied for a position as an intern in a research project at the University of Minnesota that tracked the well-being of rural low-income families under welfare reform. From that, she learned just how different the struggles of rural and urban families are, and how many current policies fail to acknowledge that difference. She hopes to use the RPRC grant to study residential mobility among low-income families in rural communities. In addition to her internship in the rural poverty study, she was involved in campus ministry activities and a wide variety of public service experiences, including volunteering in a homeless shelter, helping build a house for a family in the Habitat for Humanity program, and as a member of Hope Youth Core, with Hope World Wide, held in Washington, DC.

Miller is finishing her first year of graduate school at the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work with a clinical concentration. She worked at Head Start with low-income, immigrant, mostly Hispanic families in her first field placement. She also worked at a domestic violence agency during the first semester with women experiencing intimate partner violence.

Matthew Moehr

Political Science and Psychology
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Growing up in rural western Nebraska left an indelible mark on Matthew Moehr. He saw firsthand how the lack of resources and services affected life chances of rural residents, and he vowed to commit himself to addressing these disparities. During his work on a community sustainability project at the University of Nebraska, he came to realize the direct link between lack of community capital in rural areas and the subsequent brain drain and economic decline. With support of RPRC, he hopes to document the extent of barriers to resources and community capital in rural areas and the policies that can best alleviate those barriers. He has held several research and public service positions, including program evaluator in the Community Health Department, University Health Center. He has studied abroad at the University of Swansea, Wales, and served on the University of Nebraska student judicial board.

Moehr is currently a first year graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Since the fall of 2004, he has been working as a research assistant with faculty in the Department of Rural Sociology. The research is broadly focused on demographic trends in rural areas and the causes and consequences of different migration patterns. Of special interest is the interaction between population growth and environmental impact on sensitive ecosystems such as forests and lakeshores. Specifically, Matt is now developing a series of population and household projections for use by the North Central Research Station of the U.S.D.A Forest Service. Through coursework, he has also become interested in the spatial and temporal aspects of demographic trends as they relate to rural-urban population change and is planning to develop conference presentations surrounding these issues. He may pursue spatial migration patterns over time in rural areas as a master’s thesis topic.

Katherine M. Pearson

Sociology and Human Services
George Washington University

Katherine Pearson chose George Washington University because, located in a major city, it offered opportunities to gain hands-on experience helping poor families. Although her volunteering and internships offered her an invaluable external classroom, she began to wonder whether her focus on urban poverty and planning was overlooking an important segment of the poor in America. This question became more pressing as she focused on urban planning and affordable housing issues. To better serve people with housing issues, she realized, she must become more familiar with the issues and dilemmas of all families in poverty, both rural and urban. She hopes to use the RPRC grant to analyze whether current affordable housing policy is biased toward urban solutions and whether rural needs are being met. She believes that ultimately a broader perspective of poverty is necessary to meet all needs.

Pearson has an extensive public service background, including an internship advocating for housing and support services for people with disabilities, a domestic violence hotline counselor, and an outreach volunteer for the elderly. Although initially she had intended to pursue a career in social services exclusively, her education has made her realize that she can combine research and direct service and ultimately enhance both.

Hilary S. Smith

Policy Analysis and Management
Cornell University

Hilary Smith applied for the RPRC undergraduate fellowship after an internship at the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, where she was introduced to a broad and in-depth view of urban poverty. However, as with the other fellowship awardees, she began to realize that the policies and problems she was studying were not those of her own rural roots. Believing that addressing poverty is one of the most direct ways to alleviate many social problems, she hopes to use the fellowship to broaden her understanding of poverty and uncover what leads to poverty in rural and nonmetro areas of the country. As a native of upstate New York, she hopes to eventually provide tangible and meaningful results to New York policymakers.

Smith has an active roster of service and research accomplishments, including her internship at Brookings, a research assistant on a smoking cessation project at Cornell, an organizer for an AIDS benefit bike ride, and Girl Scout and school counselor. Her future plans include combining Peace Corps services with a master’s in public administration or a master’s in environmental policy.

Edwardo Valero

Urban and Regional Studies
Cornell University

Edwardo Valero has his sights set on a career in public service. Growing up in first-generation Mexican-American family, Valero experienced first-hand the need for better policies and services for farm laborers and other low-wage immigrant workers. In his community, parents and children work the fields to support their family, and his college education is an extreme sacrifice for his family. Yet he also realizes that his education is a necessary step on the ladder to social mobility for him and his family. He hopes to earn a PhD in urban planning or American studies with a special emphasis on the issues of Latino enclaves, economic and community development, and other pressing social issues facing ethnic Mexicans in the United States. Through teaching and a political career, he hopes to keep policymakers and community organizers abreast of the current status of the rural Latino population and to help low-income, rural, and socially deprived communities rise from their current insolvent situations.

During the summer of 2004, Valero was selected as the Latino Issues Forum Summer Fellow. The Latino Issues Forum is a public policy and advocacy institute that focuses on issues at the state level in California.

Currently, Valero is in the Great Valley Fellows Program, a fellowship that offers young professionals the opportunity to participate in the day-to-day business of leadership and management in California’s Central Valley. He will serve in apprenticeship roles with senior level managers in the public, private and nonprofit sectors, and conduct a consulting project for a client.