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Season’s Greetings from CSDE!

Posted: 12/18/2020 (CSDE Seminar Series)

The end of 2020 is nigh upon us! At CSDE, we are looking forward to 2021 and want to wish all members of the CSDE community the very best wishes for good health and well-being! As always, as you clean up your desk, don’t forget to send csde@uw.edu your publications and grants news!  It brings us great delight to highlight those announcements and share them with your colleagues.

Many thanks to Professor Maria Bleil for organizing next quarter’s seminar series. The winter quarter poster is now available. The opening quarter will kick off on January 8 with a talk by Professor Melanie Martin (UW Anthropology) about childbirth and infant health outcomes among an indigenous community in Argentina.  Throughout the quarter we will hear about Seattle’s democracy voucher program (Jan. 15), understanding breast cancer as a complex system (Jan. 22), climate migration (Jan. 29), new methodologies in migrations and settlements research (Feb. 5), linking demographic data to administrative data (Feb. 12), partition theorem’s place in stable population theory (Feb. 19), estimating mortality using sampled network data (Feb. 26), race and ethnic population impacts of military enlistment and mass incarceration (Mar. 5), and trainees’ lightning talks and posters (Mar. 12).  Presenters include CSDE affiliates (Almquist, Arar, Catron, Curran, Grumbach, Hess, Long, Martin, Romich, and Williams) and visitors (Feehan, Heerwig, Hiatt, McCabe, Rao, Sykes). I leave it to you to map names to talks via a visit to our seminar series poster and page!

Also, CSDE’s workshops continue (with thanks to Christine Leibbrand for organizing them), covering the following topics: reproducible GIS analysis with R (Jan. 19), micronutrient malnutrition and population health biomarker measures (Feb. 4), introduction to survey data sources (NLSY, Fragile Families, PSID) (Feb. 24), and agent based modeling (Mar. 5).

At CSDE, we are very grateful for the support afforded by working at UW, which has carried us through this very trying year. In the spirit of giving back we would like to share with you the places that we care about and have sought to give our time and resources to support.  If you’d like to join us, here are some of our ideas:

  • I contribute to the Northwest Immigration Rights Project https://www.nwirp.org/and have had a good experience working with them now and then the last four years. They need contributions (https://www.nwirp.org/donate/) and volunteers (https://www.nwirp.org/join-us/volunteer/)/According to Charity Navigator, 83.4% of its budget is spent on programs
  • I contribute to the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund – https://www.naacpldf.org/through the UW Combined Fund  (UWCFD Charity Code – 0316271), because it “uses litigation, advocacy, and public education to …. protect voting rights, reform the criminal justice system, and improve equal access to education, among other civil rights causes.” It gets an A- on Charity Watch, with 75% of its budget is spent on programs relative to overhead.
  • I’ve been thinking about the University District Food Bank. https://www.udistrictfoodbank.org/ and I personally raise money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society via Walk MS (http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/BelindaSachs) and the American Cancer Society via Making Strides against Breast Cancer (http://main.acsevents.org/goto/Belinda).
  • I will throw my support behind the Salvation Army and all of the great work they have been doing in Seattle. Here is a link if you want to include them on the list of places to donate. https://seattletemple.salvationarmy.org/
  • I would suggest UNICEF.  It’s my personal favorite because of the science-based, holistic approach to children and their health and happiness, and to future human capital, and that seems like a good fit for the CSDE community, too.  They are particularly relevant in the pandemic because they are so well-positioned for addressing big, systemic problems like disruption of the food supply and isolation of kids who can’t go to school but lack infrastructure for remote learning. https://www.unicefusa.org/
  • I would suggest FoodLifeline https://foodlifeline.org/ and Roots Shelter https://rootsinfo.org/ both are local and working hard in these times to take up extra needs.
  • I would suggest World Central Kitchen https://wck.org/. WCK is working across America to safely distribute individually packaged, fresh meals in communities that need support – for children and families to pick up and take home, as well as delivery to seniors who cannot venture outside.