CURA is pleased to announce the recipients of this year′s Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs and Community Action Research Grant.
J'Mag Karbeah from the School of Public Health is the 2025-2026 Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs with this project, Racial Discrimination, Gender, and Ethnic Identity: Identifying Potential Effect Modifiers to Improve Mental Health Outcomes for Black Youth.
Additionally, two Community Action Research Grant proposals were funded:
- Sarah Hoffman (School of Nursing) Enhancing Equitable Access to Forensic Healthcare: Leveraging Data and Community Engagement to Improve SANE Services for Minnesota Populations
- Ceema Samimi (School of Social Work) The Inclusion Project: A school discipline community of practice
The Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs and Community Action Research Grant programs connect University of Minnesota faculty expertise with community needs through funded research partnerships.
The Fesler-Lampert Chair provides one-year support for faculty research on Minnesota urban and regional issues, with past projects examining urban environmental policy, employee retention, and technology impacts on rural communities.
The Community Action Research Grant encourages faculty to partner directly with Minnesota community organizations to address critical regional concerns spanning criminal justice, housing, environment, healthcare, and other social issues.
Both programs exemplify CURA's commitment to leveraging university resources for community-driven change, producing scholarship that informs policy and practice while building meaningful connections between academic expertise and community knowledge.
The research from these projects will be published in The CURA Reporter.
Edward Goetz
Edward G. Goetz is director of CURA and a faculty member at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
Ed specializes in housing and local community development planning and policy. His research focuses on issues of race and poverty and how they affect housing policy planning and development. Before coming to the University of Minnesota in 1988, he worked at the mayor's Office of Housing and Economic Development in San Francisco and for several nonprofit community developers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He has served on the board of directors of nonprofit housing agencies in the Twin Cities, and on several regional commissions related to affordable housing and development.
He is the author of The One-Way Street of Integration: Fair Housing and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in American Cities (Cornell University Press, 2018), New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy (Cornell University Press, 2013), Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in Urban America (2003, Urban Institute Press), Shelter Burden: Local Politics and Progressive Housing Policy (1993, Temple University Press), and co-editor of The New Localism: Comparative Urban Politics in a Global Era (1993, Sage Publications).
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