When Brenda Mathias, a postdoctoral scholar at the Social Justice Institute, returned to CWRU last August, she set her research sights on studying the impact of her alma mater’s community engagement efforts on surrounding neighborhoods. Specifically, she is authoring a case study of the Neighborhood Advisory Council and performing an impact evaluation of the National Youth Sports Program. Read more about Brenda Mathias.
Education: PhD, Social Welfare with a minor in Global Metropolitan Studies, UC Berkeley; MSSA, CWRU Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences; BSW Social Work with a double major in Psychology, Temple University
Hometown: Philadelphia, PA
How she became interested in social work: I'm adopted and when I was growing up, there was tension in the house around mental health, so we ended up working with a lot of social workers. They were all awesome people who provided really good services. So when it came time for me to decide what I wanted to do, I thought social work seemed like a meaningful profession.
On community work: I was a service coordinator in the Philadelphia public high schools and I did a lot of work with local youth who had been experiencing socioeconomic challenges. I realized that there are a lot of gaps in service provision that lead to many of the challenges we see and deal with in social work and in other fields. When I came to Case Western Reserve, I pivoted from doing clinical work to doing more macro-level work in community development, resident-led revitalization and equitable partnerships.
On her case study of the CWRU Neighborhood Advisory Council: When I came back to CWRU as a postdoc, I was interested in the unique community engagement work going on here. For me, it was an opportunity to uplift some of the good work that’s happening on the part of a lot of people at the university, including the president. I wanted to look more closely at the challenges that the NAC might be experiencing and how we could improve the practices that we’re already engaging in here at CWRU. We’re also looking at the successes of the NAC from both sides of the table, so from within and outside the institutional walls, as well as challenges in terms of impact and reach of the NAC. Our goals with this case study are to advance the regional impact of the partnership between the university and the people who live in surrounding communities, to publish this research about the NAC and to bring more attention to the community engagement work we’re doing here. We hope to wrap up our data collection this summer and then publish in the summer of 2025.
On her evaluation of the National Youth Sports Program (NYSP) at CWRU: After I met with the NYSP staff and learned more about the program, it was clear that it was primed for an impact evaluation. They have a ton of data and the program has been going on for years. I’d already done impact evaluations on youth programs in Philadelphia and at UC Berkeley, so I knew this would be a good fit for me. We’re taking a two-phase approach to our work. Starting this summer, we’re going to do a small pilot for a pre/post evaluation of the program. We’ll get some preliminary findings on what the potential impact is of NYSP and we’ll help get the staff used to engaging in research activities. Then, we’ll be able to do a larger-scale evaluation that will involve collecting data from school districts and other sources that will enable us to follow the NYSP participants’ outcomes over time—for example, we’ll be able to track grades and attendance, both of which are quantifiable data. We’ll also do some qualitative research by talking to the parents of participants and NYSP staff to learn what they like about the program, why they think the program works, what the barriers are for the program, etc. Given the data, history and scale of the program, we’ve been having conversations with folks at SUNY Albany to explore the possibility of submitting a federal application for grant funding, so that’s exciting.
On what is unique about Cleveland’s neighborhoods: Cleveland is unique geographically, socially and culturally. My research focuses on understanding how the relationships young people have with neighborhood institutions influences their well-being. The unique thing about Cleveland is that the neighborhoods here are long standing neighborhoods. And because of that, there's a lot of strengths and assets embedded in these different neighborhoods. In addition to that, you have this very strong community development corporation network in Cleveland that isn't seen in other cities. So organizing in Cleveland is actually much more noticeable and much more active than in some bigger cities, where the work is much more fractured and where the communities don't work as well together.