Steering Committee
Amy Armenia 
Amy Armenia is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Randolph-Macon College. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2006. Her dissertation research examined union and professionalization campaigns for family day care workers. She is currently using the NICHD Study of Early Child Care to explore the effect of child care choices and experiences on women's labor force participation and the likelihood and consequences of racial-ethnic match between children and child care providers.
Elana Buch
Elana Buch, M.S.W. is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Program in Social Work and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation research uses ethnographic methods to compare how home care participants' diverse cultural and economic backgrounds influence publicly funded and individually funded home care for older adults. Elana's work has received funding from the National Institutes on Aging and the Hartford Foundation. Her research and teaching interests include home and community based long term care, low wage work (specifically care work), kinship, qualitative methods and comparative/global aging.
Jennifer Craft Morgan
Jennifer Craft Morgan is Associate Director for Research at the UNC Institute on Aging, based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently co-principal investigator, with Thomas R. Konrad, PhD for the Evaluation of the Jobs to Careers: Promoting Work-Based Learning for Quality Care Program. Jobs to Careers is a national initiative of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in collaboration with the Hitachi Foundation. Jobs to Careers seeks to establish systems that train, develop, reward, and advance current frontline health and health care workers to improve the quality of care and ensure the quality of services provided to patients and communities. She previously served as a co-investigator on the now-complete Better Jobs, Better Care Applied Research project (STEP UP NOW) and currently serves as a the Associate Director for the on-going intervention program WIN A STEP UP (Workforce Improvement for Nursing Assistants: Supporting Training, Education and Payment for Upgrading Performance).
Dr. Morgan is also involved in other workforce and evaluation studies in the Institute including the Workforce Aging in the New Economy (WANE) project, the Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science (WILIS) project and the Lifelong Access Libraries Evaluation Project. She received her Ph.D. (Just a Job? A Mixed Methods Analysis of the Situation of Direct Care Workers in Long Term Care) in the Summer of 2005 from the Department of Sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill where she also received her M.A. Dr. Morgan's substantive interests include medical sociology, gender stratification, evaluation research, health care workforce, and the sociological study of work and careers over the life course.
Anna Guevarra is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar and a Visiting Researcher at De La Salle University's Social Development Research Center in the Philippines from 2001-02 and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California Institute for Labor and Employment (ILE) in UCLA from 2003-04. Her research interests include immigrant labor, migrant careworkers, and globalization. Her forthcoming book, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The transnational labor brokering of Filipino workers (Rutgers University Press), is an ethnographic exploration of Philippines' labor export industry, focusing on the racial, gender, class, and cultural dynamics of the transnational production and management of Filipinos for varied global economies. A component of this book comes from a recently-completed project, which examines the labor migration and immigrant identity-formation of Filipino nurses recruited to work in Texas and Arizona.
Among her current research projects include examining the continued demand for "upgraded" careworkers (e.g., highly educated/skilled domestic workers) and 2) exploring the relationship between carework and masculinity, specifically looking into the role of men as careworkers situated in traditionally-construed feminized occupations like nursing and domestic labor.
Deborah Little
Deborah Little is an assistant professor of sociology at Adelphi University, where she teaches courses in gender and carework, disability studies, research methods, and sociology of law. She formerly worked as an attorney, assisting clients with domestic violence, welfare, and disability cases in legal aid and private practice. She has published in the area of care and welfare reform. Her current research interests include the construction of disability identity, the intersections of disability, race, and class, and the relationship between care theory and disability theory. She has been a member of the Care Network for many years.
Diane Pagen
Diane Pagen is a social worker and a policy analyst, and an advocate for economic policy change that benefits mothers and other unpaid caregivers. She obtained her MSW from Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service and her BA in Modern Languages from the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. She has worked as a community organizer of low income women and families, as a researcher on school equity issues, and as a social worker in New York. She has written articles on poverty and unpaid caregiving for The New Social Worker, and the NASW New York City newsletter; and articles on policy and political issues for the daily New York Spanish newspaper Hoy, and Real Health magazine. She has taught social policy at the School of Social Work at the State University of New Jersey at Rutgers.
She is co-author and art director, with veteran women's activist, welfare policy expert and political analyst Theresa Funiciello of The Adventures of Carrie Giver: The Cost of Caring, a comic book about the economic value of unpaid labor. In their work to get women's unpaid labor counted in the GDP of the United States and to secure income via the U.S. tax code for unpaid caregivers, Diane has helped to establish an International Network on Unpaid Caregiving, an organization of over 40 women delegates to the UN who seek economic justice for unpaid caregivers of children and adults in their own countries. She has travelled to Europe and Canada to speak about women's unpaid labor. She is a member of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network and of the Spanish Basic Income Network. She is currently writing a book and collecting thousands of signatures of women nationwide to support the conversion of the Child Tax Credit to include care of adults, thereby making it a Caregiver Credit.
Tamara Smith
Tamara Smith is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Westfield State College of Massachussetts. She is also the director of the Gerontology minor at the college. Her research and teaching interests include aging, intergenerational carework, and motherhood. Her dissertation research was a qualitative study of adult grandchildren who provide care to grandparents. She has been a member of the Carework Network since 2003.
Leonila Vega
Leonila Vega is the Executive Director of the Direct Care Alliance. The Direct Care Alliance is a national advocacy organization focused on improving quality care for elders, people with disabilities and others by (1) building a state-based alliance of direct-care workers, employers, consumers and concerned citizens and (2) giving workers a direct voice in improving the quality of direct-care jobs. First initiated as a project of PHI—a national organization that promotes quality care through quality jobs within the long-term care system—the Direct Care Alliance was then launched as an independent 501(c) (3) in 2006.
The DCA works at the intersection of three key policy issues: a) quality long-term care for consumers; b) workforce development for low-income workers; and c).economic and social justice for women. The DCA builds on this base by adding the vital missing piece for sustainable change by directly engaging key stakeholders—workers, consumers and employers—in grassroots advocacy initiatives. The DCA and PHI remain in close alliance, with the DCA building constituency-based power, and PHI providing practice and policy expertise. The DCA pursues a two-pronged strategy for constituency-based change Prior to her work with DCA, Leonila practiced law as a disability and elder rights lawyer and worked with SEIU Local 150 as its Home Care and Political Director.
