Winter
2024
A Magazine from the School of Social Work
The city of Pittsburgh often is ranked as one of the best and most affordable places to live in America by various polls, media outlets, and marketing groups. But many Pittsburghers who don’t share that perspective have been overlooked, says Kyaien “Kya” Conner (MSW ’04, PhD ’08), who in July 2023 was named director of the Center on Race and Social Problems (CRSP) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work. Pittsburgh “continues to have some of the highest rates of disparities for people of color,” she says.
Conner has a vision that is focused on building on a foundation set more than 20 years ago at CRSP: for academics and students to expand their research and community outreach to address racial inequities, helping to reduce disparities in health, economics, education, and other outcomes for people of color in Pittsburgh and across the country.
“Racism is a public health crisis, and must recognize that systemic racism and racial inequities continue to significantly contribute to a myriad of challenges and poor outcomes for communities of color,” says Conner, who also is the associate dean for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion at Pitt Social Work.
Founded in 2002 by Larry E. Davis, then dean of the School of Social Work, CRSP was created to conduct social science research on racial inequalities and how they influence quality of life for people across the country. The center, which was the first race-related research center to be housed in a school of social work, has risen to national prominence since then.
Conner is the first permanent director of CRSP since Davis retired in 2019. She also is Pitt’s Donald M. Henderson Endowed Chair, a position that Davis held. (Henderson, who served as Pitt’s provost from 1989 to 1993, is the only Black person to have held the position.)
Conner was a social work graduate student at Pitt when CRSP was founded.
“So now, 20 years later … I guess an important piece, which is also unfortunate, in many ways unacceptable, is that the mission of the center is just as important today as it was 20 years ago,” says Conner.
“We can’t solve them in silos. We need to collaborate with one another. And we want CRSP to be one of the avenues for us to be able to do that.”
—Kyaien Conner
With new energy and a realignment, the center is aiming to expand its reach and its impact.
“In addition to achieving our goal of dismantling racism and oppression through rigorous research and practice, we want to be in the business of mentoring emerging scholars [and] developing innovative training and programmatic opportunities for students, faculty, and staff at Pitt [and] also in the community. We want to be involved in advocacy and helping to make policy that improves the lives of individuals, families and communities,” Conner says.
She also wants to extend CRSP’s research and scholarship arm and bring in more consistent external funding to support its initiatives as well as to expand the center’s collaboration with scholars nationwide to address complex social problems.
“We can’t solve them in silos. We need to collaborate with one another. And we want CRSP to be one of the avenues for us to be able to do that,” she says.
Other changes include the planned expansion of CRSP’s staffing, a CRSP faculty affiliate program, as well as revamping the center’s website and the recent creation of CRSPConnect, a newsletter that highlights the center’s activities, opportunities for community members and researchers to engage, and CRSP perspectives on world events.
CRSP wades into and leads conversations and research on topics that can be sensitive to broach but necessary to have, says Ralph Bangs, who retired as CRSP associate director in 2014 but still teaches courses on race and racism through Pitt’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
Discussing race can be difficult for several reasons, including the lengthy history of the brutalization and criminalization of Black people in this country because of their skin color, he says.
“And so they have a long history and recent personal history, which makes them very sensitive about race. And then you have many white people who are sensitive about just discussing race because whenever race is mentioned, quite often some white people will feel like they’re being attacked or they’re being called racist, just by raising the issue of race,”
he says.
Those wounds are exacerbated for people of color, particularly Black Americans, who in general are not faring as well economically, educationally, and in other areas as their white counterparts.
“These persistent differences reflect systematic barriers to quality jobs, such as outright discrimination against African American workers, as well as occupational segregation—whereby African American workers often end up in lower-paid jobs than whites—and segmented labor markets in which Black workers are less likely than White workers to get hired into stable, well-paying jobs,” according to the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit think tank.
One of the issues creating or accelerating challenges for people of color living in Pittsburgh is the displacement of residents through the gentrification of neighborhoods, Conner says.
“There are whole neighborhoods that look[ed] completely unrecognizable to me upon my return. ... And most of those communities were where Black and brown families lived, who were likely lower income. I don’t know where else in the city they could afford to be,” she says.
The types of challenges that Black Pittsburghers encounter are common in many large cities that lost major economic drivers, like the decline of the steel industry in the 1970s and 1980s that took away thousands of blue-collar jobs that provided financial stability to families of color in Pittsburgh, says John Wallace, vice provost for faculty diversity and development at Pitt and David E. Epperson Chair at Pitt Social Work.
“That was devastating. And for so many people in our city, it never recovered. There are many people who left because of the lack of employment opportunities,” says Wallace, who also served as the interim director of CRSP from July 2021 until Conner’s arrival.
Disparities affecting people of color in the city also are tied to the inequitable distribution of resources as well as to racism and resistance to change, says Aliya Durham, assistant professor and director of community engagement in the School of Social Work and a faculty affiliate at CRSP.
“When people are fighting for change, when people are fighting for equity, they risk being labeled as rabble-rouser or worse. Their work is pigeonholed [and] sometimes discredited, and their reputations are soiled when, in fact, they are speaking truth to power and making or keeping public the frustrations, dreams, anger, and hopes of so many [who] want and deserve equal opportunities,” she says.
Durham and Wallace cofounded a nonprofit called the Homewood Children’s Village, which was created in 2010 to provide educational and social support services to children in Homewood, a neighborhood on the eastern side of Pittsburgh.
Because of Durham’s work with the Homewood Children’s Village, she is involved in community engagement under CRSP to lead social work students in projects that serve residents in Homewood, the Hill District, and Hazelwood, all of which are predominantly Black, low-income communities.
“And part of that is, now that this realignment [of CRSP] has happened, having a clearer understanding of the vision that Dr. Conner is studying for the center,” says Durham, who adds that the specific initiatives that students will be undertaking has not yet been determined.
Several nonprofits in Homewood, the Hill District, and Hazelwood are already doing impactful work, so it’s important that the CRSP team works alongside them to add value, she says.
Part of the challenge with effecting change to fight systemic racism is people’s discomfort in discussing it—or even acknowledging it, says Ron Idoko, CRSP associate director.
In 2021, he founded the Racial Equity Consciousness Institute (RECI) with Pitt’s Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, now housed within CRSP.
He says that the founding of RECI came about in the wake of the nationwide protests calling for racial justice and an end to police brutality that erupted in response to the high-profile killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery in 2020. As companies and institutions were grappling with the idea of anti-racism, “I thought it was important that we help build the capacity of our community to really understand how racism works so that they’re in the best position to re-change or restructure our environment through practices and policy toward equity,” he says.
RECI holds community learning cohorts of 30-70 Pitt students, alumni, and staff and faculty members who voluntarily attend seven weekly sessions, totaling 15 hours, of a deep dive into curriculum to understand how racism works and how to actively cultivate racial equity. Examples of cultivating racial equity include recognizing one’s own biases, being mindful of how they influence behavior, and being able to leverage data to inform the practices and policies of individuals or organizations, Idoko says.
Since 2021, a few dozen community learning cohorts also have been held, with the aim of helping participants to understand racism on ideological, institutional, and interpersonal levels.
“And it’s to help people understand that most folks have not been socialized to know how racism works, which means most folks are not positioned to effectively address it, and we recognize that being passive or silent or neutral or inactive in the face of racism works in favor of racism,” he says.
RECI’s community learning cohort program is gaining local, national, and international momentum. Not only did the program hold its first Facilitators Academy in July 2023 at CRSP to teach people how to lead the sessions, but RECI also has applied for grant funding from the National Institutes of Health to study the intervention as a “vaccine” to racism, Idoko says. A movie about the cohort program, called “Illuminating the Vaccine for Racism: Instituting a Structured Cognitive Behavioral Training Framework to Develop Grounded Personal and Collective Racial Equity Consciousness,” was released Jan. 25, 2024. And RECI, in conjunction with Pitt’s Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice and the David C. Frederick Honors College, is working with the United Nations to develop a global database to house racial equity resources.
One of the biggest research projects at CRSP is the Just Discipline Project, which started in 2015 as an initiative to reduce the use of exclusionary and punitive discipline, which disproportionately affects students of color, in Pittsburgh-area schools, says James Huguley, principal investigator for the project and chair of CRSP’s Youth Development Area.
Often schools would like to address student behavioral issues with something other than punishments, but they lack the skills and resources to do so, he says.
“We partner with schools to provide staffing and expertise to allow them to move more relationally instead of punitively,” says Huguley, who is an associate professor in the School of Social Work.
The program is now in 18 schools in seven school districts, including the Pittsburgh Public Schools, Woodland Hills School District, and Penn Hills School District.
The Heinz Endowments is the founding benefactor of the program, having given more than $1 million since 2015.
The Just Discipline Project’s first federal grants came from the U.S. Department of Education—$3 million in 2021 and $4 million in 2022—to conduct randomized controlled trials at 15 of the participating schools to test the effectiveness of the program.
“If our control trials are successful, schools anywhere in America can point to the Just Discipline model as an evidence-based practice that they can implement in their schools,” Huguley says.
Huguley believes that under Conner’s leadership, CRSP can make the case to local and national policymakers that Just Discipline should be adopted in more places.
“If our control trials are successful, schools anywhere in America can point to the Just Discipline model as an evidence-based practice that they can implement in their schools.”
—James Huguley
When Pitt’s then chancellor, Mark Nordenberg, and then provost, James Maher, recruited Davis from Washington University in St. Louis in 2001 to become Pitt’s dean of social work, he was already known as a leading academic on race, Bangs says. Davis told the Pitt leaders that he had been wanting to develop a center on race for several years.
Nordenberg and Maher promised Davis that he would get the University’s support, including financial resources, to create the center, says Bangs, whom Davis hired to help him start CRSP.
Davis had two main goals for CRSP. The first was to create a setting where people could discuss race in a calm, rational way, which led to the creation of a lecture series, summer institutes, and interdisciplinary faculty committee discussions on race, Bangs says.
CRSP’s Race in America conference drew 1,300 scholars, researchers, students, business and community leaders, public officials, and others to Pitt’s campus in 2010.
Davis’ second major goal was to conduct and sponsor research in which race was the first focus of the research, not an afterthought, which often happens in research, Bangs says.
“And so we conducted our own research. And then I got funding for research. And we provided funding to faculty each year who proposed new lines of research on race,” he says.
In 2009, they started a journal called Race and Social Problems, which “has been extremely successful in getting academics and researchers from around the country to submit papers and publish and republish papers in that journal that were very high quality,” Bangs says.
Under its new leadership, CRSP is poised to add innovative research and programs, he says.That work would build upon the trailblazing legacy of Davis, who worked to effect change and spur meaningful communication with his research and initiatives.
Conner is the right person at the right time for CRSP, Wallace says. “She brings significant experience and expertise but also new ideas [and] fresh experiences and has her own national reputation and reach. And so I think she is the perfect person to build upon the history and legacy of the center and the work of Larry Davis. I’m confident that he would be extremely proud for her to have assumed that role, to have the endowed chair that he held, and to be poised to lead the center into this next decade and beyond.”
Conner is enthusiastic about the new initiatives that CRSP is undertaking, including working with Pitt’s Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion to create a priority list of pressing issues in the city.
CRSP also is collaborating with the Center for Research on Innovations, Services and Equity in Mental Health, which is housed within the School of Social Work.
“One of the things that we’re excited about that’s going to be coming up is the development of a pilot grant program that is focused on mental health and race, racial disparities, and equity around mental health, which would provide resources to doctoral students [and] junior faculty who are interested in social justice research to plant seed money to help get them started, which we hope would then turn into larger, more expansive grants in the future,” she says.
Before returning to Pitt, Conner was an assistant professor in the University of South Florida’s Department of Mental Health Law & Policy. In her current position, she hopes to continue some of the successful initiatives she undertook in Florida or bring them to Pitt.
As a principal investigator, Conner has received more than $3 million to fund her community-engaged research, highlighted by a $2.5 million award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, to evaluate a transitions-in-care intervention to mitigate disparities in hospital readmissions among older Black and Latino adults living with chronic illnesses.
She also wrote a bill, which became Florida law in 2021, whose goal was to improve access to culturally sensitive health and mental health care for underrepresented communities.
Conner plans to use her new role at CRSP “to develop relationships with policymakers in the state of Pennsylvania to continue advocating for and developing programs and policy to improve outcomes for communities of color,” she says. ■
So how are people of color in Pittsburgh faring in relation to white residents?
• A significantly larger share of Black families (28.5%) were living under the poverty level, compared with 11.3% for Hispanic or Latino (of any race) families and 6.1% for white families, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey.
• Black residents’ unemployment rate was 11.1%, compared with 8.6% for Hispanics or Latinos (of any race) and 4.1% for white residents.
• The median household income was $28,016 for Black residents, $53,470 for Hispanics or Latinos (of any race), and $65,036 for white residents, according to the Census Bureau data.
• While 19.8% of Black Pittsburghers 25 or older have at least a bachelor’s degree, the rate for whites is more than double that: 51.2%
