The Center on Children, Families, and the Law is accepting applications for faculty fellowships to facilitate creative activity and collaboration between center projects and campus faculty.

University of Nebraska faculty external to the center can work with internal faculty and staff to increase research, scholarship and engagement. Upon selection, fellows will contribute their areas of expertise to expand the center’s overall competency and capacity. In turn, the center will offer long-standing engagement with prominent community partners and the opportunity to conduct sponsored research.

The center’s Community Services Division, which focuses on shelter and housing needs, is seeking a faculty fellow to help build and advance research evidence that informs practice to prevent and end homelessness. This faculty fellowship will last 15 months, beginning in May 2024 and continuing through August 2025.

The center is the lead agency for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Continuums of Care with the City of Lincoln and the State of Nebraska. In this capacity, the center’s Community Services Division provides planning, development, evaluation, research, data collection and management, and training for the homeless service system. The center also administers the Homeless Coordinated Entry System and the Homeless Management Information System, both of which provide significant data for research.

The Community Services Division follows the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness Research Agenda. The agenda framework focuses on two primary areas:

• Preventing Homelessness, which includes questions such as lexible funding pools’ effectiveness in providing rent and utility assistance, barriers to uptake of effective shelter diversion, and predictive analytics to assist in determining the risk of homelessness; and

• Ending Homelessness, which includes questions such as long-term outcomes of the Housing-First approach for different subpopulations, role of shelter in expediting rapid exits from homelessness, and impact of anti-camping laws on individuals and communities.

Applicants for the fellowship should review the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness Research Agenda and identify up to three areas of inquiry from the agenda. Additionally, applicants should specify in their submission how they will use research to shape policy and/or practice, inform state or local decision-making, and develop tools and strategies in the field.

The selection of the Community Services Division’s faculty fellow will be based upon a faculty member’s substantive and methodological expertise in selected areas of inquiry that will most likely assist the center in the goal of supporting policymakers’ use of evidence as they shape local, state, and national responses to homelessness.

Outlined objectives for all Center on Children, Families, and the Law fellowships will be to:

• Conduct research that expands a center project, diversifies expertise, and strengthens professional collaboration;

• Submit with a center faculty or staff member one or more manuscripts to a peer-reviewed journal; and

• Develop with a center faculty or staff member a new grant proposal for an external agency that would be routed through the Center on Children, Families, and the Law. Ideally, the proposal will be submitted during the fellowship. However, to accommodate varying submission deadlines, fellows may submit the proposal up to six months after completing the fellowship.

Faculty fellows are compensated through the first two summers of work ($6,000 per year). If the project requires further help for completion, funding may be available for a summer graduate student research assistantship. Workspace at the Center on Children, Families and the Law can be requested if needed.

Applicants can submit fellowship materials here. Submissions must include a research proposal (no more than 750 words following prompts provided online), a CV, and other administrative information. The application deadline is 5 p.m. April 19.

For more information, contact Brittany Brakenhoff, research assistant, at brittany.brakenhoff@unl.edu.