The UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative (UCLA-LPPI) has awarded a total of $150,000 to six Latino-led research projects at UCLA aimed at developing policy solutions to challenges facing California’s Latino communities.
The $150,000 comes in the form of the inaugural Latino Applied Policy Research Awards.
The six research teams will spend the next year examining a diverse range topics including, how a public art exhibition at the U.S.–Mexico border raised public awareness and fueled criticism of federal immigration policy to how immigration enforcement actions affect Latino students’ educational attainment. Other projects will explore why homelessness counts underestimate the number of unhoused Latinos and how this affects the allocation of resources that could help stem the problem and how wildfire and disaster planning policies impact Latino immigrants and Indigenous people.
“The projects we are funding focus on the ways in which inequity persists within Latino communities and aim to provide real solutions,” said Dr. Silvia González the initiative’s co-director of research. “We are proud to work with researchers who are pushing the envelope and using their expertise to develop the critical analysis needed to drive better policy on a breadth of issues.”
These awards are made possible by $3 million in ongoing funding from the California Legislature for research and policy solutions that address inequities that disproportionately affect communities of color.
