Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy Director Dolores Acevedo-Garcia has been named to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Response and Resilient Recovery Strategic Science Initiative in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The committee, composed of academic, business and national security leaders, aims to inform national policy for crisis response and recovery across the United States.
“I am honored to join some of the nation’s leading experts in this effort to ‘see around corners’ of the COVID-19 response,” says Acevedo-Garcia. “We have a huge responsibility of thinking through the impacts of COVID-19 not only on health, but also on the economy, society, education and infrastructure. Some effects are not obvious, and it is sobering to consider the ramifications of the public health and economic crisis in all areas of our society.”
Acevedo-Garcia, the Samuel F. and Rose B. Gingold Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, is an expert on social determinants of health and racial and ethnic health equity, especially for children.
She will work with seven other experts to “identify major categories of concerns and opportunities for improvement related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its collateral effects,” such as vulnerability in the food production sector, financial viability of hospitals and the healthcare system, differential efficacy of vaccines, or childcare and K-12 education.
Acevedo-Garcia says, “The goal is that the scenarios developed by the strategy groups will provide key information to decision-makers allowing them to invest resources in a way that will help us prevent further long-term negative consequences from COVID-19.”
This is only the second such committee NASEM has convened in response to a crisis. Its first was to address the wide-ranging effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.
In addition to her work on COVID-19 recovery at NASEM, Acevedo-Garcia also recently received a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation for the study, “Including Children of Immigrants in the Post-Pandemic Economic Recovery Efforts and Safety Net.”
Acevedo-Garcia previously served on the NASEM Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years. She co-authored the report, “A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty,” which was released in February 2019 and provides policy and program packages that could cut the child poverty rate by as much as 50 percent.