Ronald Mincy: Professor, Researcher, Author of Social Work & Social Policy

Posted on 27. Nov, 2009 by Leshell Hatley in Faculty, I'm a Full Professor!, Scholarly Celebrations

Dr. Ronald Mincy is the Maurice V. Russell Professor of Social Policy and Social Work Practice at Columbia University. He joined the School of Social Work faculty in 2001 and teaches Introduction to Social Welfare Policy, Program Evaluation, and Advanced Methods in Policy Analysis. He came to the University from the Ford Foundation where he served as a senior program officer and worked on such issues as improving U.S. social welfare policies for low-income fathers, especially child support, and workforce development policies. He also served on the Clinton Administration’s Welfare Reform Task Force.

He previously taught in the economics departments at Purdue University, Bentley College, the University of Delaware, and Swarthmore College, and also worked at the U.S. Department of Labor and the Urban Institute. He is a former co-chair of the Grantmakers Income Security Taskforce and is a Board Member of the Grantmakers for Children, Youth, and Families.

Dr. Ronald Mincy

He is a member of the MacArthur Network on the Family and the Economy, Chicago, IL. He is also an advisory board member for the National Poverty Center, University of Michigan; Technical Work Group for the Building Strong Families and Community Healthy Marriage Initiatives; the African American Healthy Marriage Initiative; Transition to Fatherhood, Cornell University; the National Fatherhood Leaders Group; the Longitudinal Evaluation of the Harlem Children’s Zone; and The Economic Mobility Project, Pew Charitable Trusts.

Dr. Mincy is also a former member of the Council, National Institute of Child and Human Development and the Policy Council, Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, co-chair of the Grantmakers Income Security Taskforce, a Board Member of the Grantmakers for Children, Youth, and Families.

Dr. Mincy is a co-principal investigator of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a faculty member of the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC), and the director of the School of Social Work’s Center for Research on Fathers, Children and Family Well-Being.

“Black people will never reach economic parity if Black children have to depend on one income and White children depend on two,” says Mincy, the architect of the foundation’s “Strengthening Fragile Families Initiative.”

There is a compelling personal reason why Mincy is so interested in these issues — he also grew up without his father.

Like so many Black men in the ’50s, Mincy says, his father opted for the “poor man’s divorce” — desertion. Mincy found out later that his father had another family and he lived with them in a house on Long Island, N.Y. All the while, Mincy, his mother, and his brother lived in the Patterson projects in Brooklyn, N.Y.

While he was a summer intern at a Bronx family court, Mincy found the file on his own parents’ case. The folder was four inches thick, filled with the numerous accounts of his mother’s attempts to get his father to pay child support. “It was a painful experience,” Mincy says. “And I often wonder what I would have been if I had had input from both my parents.”

While at the Urban Institute, Mincy directed a policy-research project on the urban underclass. His work on poor, unwed families caught the attention of the Clinton administration and he led the Noncustodial Parents Issue Group for the Presidents Welfare Reform taskforce. The group’s mission was to figure out how welfare reform could accommodate poor men. His experiences in the Clinton administration laid the groundwork for the Fragile Families Initiative.

Books by Dr. Mincy

Education
After graduating from high school, Mincy enrolled at Harvard University in 1970, one of the few children in his neighborhood to go .on to college. He majored in economics, he says, so he could study the course of events that caused fathers to desert their families. After graduating from Harvard, Mincy went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his doctorate in economics in 1987. He taught economics at Swarthmore College, the University of Delaware, and Bentley College, before heading to the Urban Institute in 1987.

Information obtained from Dr. Mincy’s faculty page and a BNET article.

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