Stanford University

In 2006, two years before the Great Recession, Professor David Grusky joined Stanford University to found The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. We joined forces with him even before we "earned our wings" as an official 501.c.3 Foundation, funding The Elfenworks Foundation Visiting Scholars program, building their inequality.com website and co-producing and documenting the launch with A Concert for Hope. The Center credits note "It is testimony to the Elfenworks team that, some 10 years later, much of their code and design lives on in the current website." [more history here]

Professor Grusky and his colleagues published the definitive work on the effects of the last economic recession in their text, The Great Recession, and dedicated a number of issues of their groundbreaking Pathways Magazine to the era. They also studied the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina. They have trained scores of scholars, and provided groundbreaking research on "what works, what doesn't, and why" that is used by civic leaders in crafting governmental programs. In 2020, when the Covid19 economic downturn hit, Grusky had been leading an American Voices project documenting the unique experiences and challenges of communities in all 50 states, our capital, Puerto Rico and Native Nations with a goal of reaching 5,000 individuals in 200 communities. This work is being reimagined and relaunched as a remote-connect program that uses telecommunications to capture these voices while observing social distancing.