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Dear Subscriber,
Welcome to the May 2024 Ray Marshall Center newsletter, written by Heath Prince and Greg Cumpton. Heath served as Director from 2015-2023. Greg began his tenure as Director of the Center in July of 2023. We begin with a overview of Heath's contributions to the Center from our current Director and hear from Heath as he reflects on his tenure as Director.
Greg Cumpton, PhD, Incoming Director says:
Both the Center and I are deeply indebted to Dr. Heath Prince’s leadership and foresight during both his tenure as Associate Director and as the Director. We are fortunate that he retains his title and duties as a research scientist for the Center and look forward to his completion of ongoing and upcoming research. His collaborative approach to both his research and to management fostered a supportive and collegial environment that continues to make working at the Center feel like being a member of a close-knit family. His encouragement for the Center to collectively focus on poverty and identify solutions to either ameliorate its effects or to end it served as a clarion call to all staff and our work has greatly benefited from this focus.
I know I’ll have many future chances to highlight Heath’s past, current, and future work, but I wanted to take this opportunity to point out some notable successes during his time as Director.
On October of 2017, the Federal Reserve System, in collaboration with the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Ray Marshall Center at The University of Texas at Austin, the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, hosted a national conference on “Investing in America’s Workforce” at The University of Texas at Austin. Featuring all 12 of the Federal Reserve System’s regional banks and the Board of Governors. The following year, Heath served as an editor on a three-volume work with over 100 contributors: Investing in America’s Workforce: Improving Outcomes for Workers and Employers. The conference generated and contributed to a national conversation that continues to influence policy to this day about how to leverage community resources, policy, and social investments to build connections between businesses and workers.
Heath built out a new and powerful portfolio of research in international economic development. Heath and Center colleagues Thomas Boswell and Ashweeta Patnaik began a long-standing research and evaluation partnership beginning in 2016 with Nuru International, which focuses on building “local organizations that create sustainable agribusinesses, equipping communities to build their resilience and track toward prosperity.” Heath’s collaborative work includes research and impact analyses of multiple initiatives in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Kenya.
Heath, Thomas, and Ashweeta (along with other colleagues) also contributed to the PREP (Prevention, Resilience, Efficient, and Protection for workers) investigation (here’s a link to their initial working paper). This work focused on identifying potential solutions to some very grave and serious problems agricultural workers face in Mesoamerica. “For over three decades, an epidemic of chronic kidney disease (CKD)…has been detected among agricultural and other heavy laborers in Mesoamerica, in particular sugarcane workers. There is a growing body of evidence that strenuous work in high environmental temperatures without sufficient rest or hydration is an important driver of the disease.” Finding and testing solutions to reduce the instances of a devastating yet preventable health condition that negatively impacts workers, their families, and their communities, feels at the heart of Heath’s focus on finding solutions to poverty.
Most recently, in April of this year, Heath’s work with several colleagues in Jordan and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region), was published as a book chapter in the University of Bristol’s Policy Press publication “Emerging Trends in Social Policy from the South.” Their chapter, “Economic Growth, Youth Unemployment and Political and Social Instability: A Study of Policies and Outcomes in Post-Arab Spring Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Tunisia,” (here’s a link to their initial working paper) documents their fieldwork to better understand the multiple policy approaches taken by these countries, as well as the constraints they faced, in addressing the crisis of youth unemployment that contributed to the uprisings between 2010 and 2012.
Lastly, Heath collaborated with Dean DeShazo to bring the Ray Marshall Center from our decades-long home on Lake Austin Blvd, back to campus at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. We all greatly benefit from renewed and regular contact with students and having greater opportunities for sharing our research with school-wide colleagues, enabling us to engage in more collaboration with LBJ School faculty and staff in plans for future research.
Heath’s successes in the face of innumerable obstacles (did I mention the Center went immediately, and suddenly fully remote for nearly a year after the beginning of the COVID pandemic?) pose new opportunities for the Center and for me as the Director. My only hope is that I face them with the same reassuring calm and careful planning that Heath provided for so many years. Thank you Heath!
Heath Prince, PhD, Outgoing Director tells us:
It has been the honor of a lifetime to have led the Ray Marshall Center, for two years as Associate Director, and for eight, until July of last year, as Director. As many of you have heard me say before, I was one of Ray’s students in the last class he taught at the LBJ School before he retired from teaching (it’s been a while, but I think it was a Labor Policy course). Contrary to the zeitgeist then (and now, unfortunately), I learned in that course that government is essential to the creation and maintenance of a just society, that education and training are central to raising people out of poverty and instilling dignity, and that the market, left to its own devices, tends to fail those in the greatest need. Ray’s course shaped the direction of my professional career, which has, even over a few job-changes, been focused on the reduction of poverty.
For the vast bulk of my time with the RMC, I have led projects evaluating workforce development policies and programs, asking: “Are they working?” “How well are they working?” “If they’re not working, why not?” My aim has been to do my part to ensure that the policies and programs created to help those in most need are as effective as they can be. I brought to the RMC a decade of experience doing much the same with Jobs for the Future and the Center for Law and Social Policy, to which I am forever grateful for giving me a solid start in my career. My doctoral work equipped me with the skills to question our definition of poverty, and the tools to better measure it, and it occurred to me during my time at Brandeis that the tools and skills that I had applied to domestic anti-poverty evaluations could be, with a little effort, transferred to helping a population that is, arguably, in even more dire need—the poor in the developing world.
I have taken what I’ve learned from Ray, and from my mentor, former RMC Director Chris King, and the skills and tools picked up over a nearly 30-year career and I have begun to focus more closely on international development work. I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have received funding from the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, the Dutch Research Council, Nuru International, the National Science Foundation, and, more recently, to collaborate with colleagues on Department of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs, and U.S. State Department grants to lead research in Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and, as of last October, Nepal. However, the RMC’s focus, and rightfully so, is on the persistently pressing needs of the unemployed and working poor at home, and, for this, it needs a Director who is wholly devoted to this mission.
I hope there comes a time in the lives of everyone in my position when they can look to their left or right and find that there is someone every bit as capable, if not more so, of taking the reins, enabling them to, as I have done, devote more time to new interests. Fortunately for me, the RMC, and all who depend on our work, Dr. Greg Cumpton was ready and willing to step into the Directorship and allow me to branch out a bit. Greg has been my (long-suffering😉) Associate Director and, for the year ending last July, my co-Director, but, more than this, he has embodied the RMC’s mission—to apply rigorous research toward solving some of social policy’s more stubborn problems. And, he has done it with a professionalism and an élan that few have mastered, but that are essential to leading a research center as well known and highly regarded as the RMC. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Greg, my colleagues at the RMC, and Dean DeShazo for affording me this opportunity to shift my focus and, hopefully, expand the reach of the RMC’s vitally important work. I’m not going anywhere, figuratively speaking. I’ll be a part of the RMC for as long as they’ll have me, but it’s time to pass the baton. It has been an honor and a privilege, and I look forward to seeing how this next chapter in the RMC unfolds.
We hope you enjoy this issue, and please stay in touch.
The Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources envisions a world where sound, responsible policies and programs reduce poverty and advance human potential.
Greg B. Cumpton, PhD, Incoming Director
Heath J. Prince, PhD, Outgoing Director
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