Friday, July 16, 2010
Noon-1:30 p.m. ET
Panelists:
 | Greg Berman is the director of the Center for Court Innovation, a public-private partnership that seeks to reduce crime, aid victims, and improve public trust in justice. He is the coauthor, with Aubrey Fox, of Trial & Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure (Urban Institute Press) and a coauthor of Good Courts: The Case for Problem-Solving Justice (The New Press). The center, located in New York City, has won numerous prizes for innovation, including the Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation and the Innovations in American Government Award from the Ford Foundation and Harvard University. |
 | Martha R. Burt an affiliated scholar, has been with the Urban Institute for more than 30 years, conducting research and writing about policies on welfare, homelessness, hunger, teen pregnancy and parenting, and social services. She directed an analysis of how public systems for welfare, child care, and child protective services had changed after welfare reform. Her most recent book, Repairing the U.S. Social Safety Net (Urban Institute Press), coauthored with Demetra Nightingale, puts U.S. social policies in historical perspective and discusses the importance of significantly reducing poverty and its effects. |
 | Kevin Finneran is editor-in-chief of Issues in Science and Technology, the quarterly policy journal of the National Academy of Sciences. |
 | Olivia Golden is an Institute fellow at the Urban Institute, where her research focuses on the service delivery, leadership, and political strategies human services programs use to help children and families. She is also the interim director of the Institute’s Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population. Previous posts include director of state operations for New York’s governor (2007), director of the District of Columbia’s Child and Family Services Agency (2001–2004), and assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (1997–2001). She is the author of Reforming Child Welfare (Urban Institute Press). |
 | Susan J. Popkin, an expert on assisted housing and mobility, is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and the director of its Program on Neighborhoods and Youth Development. Her research includes the HOPE VI Panel Study, the first large-scale, systematic look at families involuntarily relocated from public housing; the Chicago Family Case Management Demonstration, a partnership testing the impact and cost-effectiveness of intensive services for the most troubled public housing residents; and the only national study of public housing desegregation. She is a coauthor, with Margery Austin Turner and Lynette A. Rawlings, of Public Housing Transformation: The Legacy of Segregation (Urban Institute Press). |
“Good people are good,” William Saroyan observed, “because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”
Join four wise writers—keen observers and learners from across the social policy spectrum—for a revealing exploration of what they’ve gleaned from public policies and programs that went awry, failed, or somehow fell short of the mark. From courtrooms to classrooms, child welfare to social welfare, this discussion will add light to the summer heat.
At the Urban Institute
2100 M Street N.W., 5th Floor, Washington, D.C.
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