The Sociological Initiatives Foundation has named Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI) of Chicago, Illinois the 2010 recipient of the Leo P. Chall Award.  The Chall award recognizes exemplary research projects funded by the foundation. It honors organizations that successfully link research with social action, thereby strengthening community organizations and influencing public policy.

Community Organizing and Family Issues was founded in 1995 to build the leadership and power of low-income parents – mostly African-American and Latina mothers and grandmothers – in neighborhoods across Chicago. With its unique model of Family Focused Organizing, COFI brings historically disenfranchised communities and single parents into public life, often for the first time.

The Chall Award recognizes COFI’s work to understand, from the point of view of low-income and immigrant families, why so many eligible low-income children of color are not enrolled in quality early childhood education programs.

With a grant from the Sociological Initiatives Foundation in 2008, COFI examined the reasons why low-income parents did not enroll their children in early childhood education programs despite their eligibility. The project, the Early Learning Campaign, done in collaboration with the leadership of COFI’s parent-led organization POWER-PAC (Parents Organized to Win, Education, and Renew Policy Action Council), analyzed more than 5000 interviews with the support of a professional researcher and presented the findings at several community forums in 2008 and 2009.

After receiving feedback and analyzing results with stakeholders, POWER-PAC’s Early Learning Committee developed recommendations for strategies to expand access to preschool. They published these recommendations in the report, Why Isn’t Johnny in Preschool? that received extensive local and national attention and won new programs to address the barriers identified.

“The research developed by this project stands out because even though Illinois leads the nation in establishment of high quality programs, only a fraction of eligible children are enrolled and it is important to know why to correct that” said Sociological Initiatives Foundation Chair, Glenn Jacobs

“The funding from the Sociological Initiatives Foundation proved key to the success of this campaign. The struggle to eliminate barriers to access to quality early learning programs continues, but our progress has been significant,” explained Ellen Schumer, Executive Director or COFI.

The award program begun in 2009 is named after Leo P. Chall, best known in the field of sociology as the founder of Sociological Abstracts. Leo P. Chall launched Sociological Abstracts in 1953 as a journal that abstracted and indexed the international literature in sociology and related social and behavioral sciences. Therafter, Language Learning and Behavior Abstracts was established with a similar mission. An endowment to establish the Sociological Initiatives Foundation was funded by the proceeds from the sale of the Abstracts in 1999.

The foundation makes yearly grants to support research that furthers social change and its intersection with social and policy questions.

The award is in keeping with Leo P. Chall’s conviction that the dissemination of scholarly information is subject to the democratic principle of reciprocity. As Glenn Jacobs, who was first a student of Chall’s and then an abstractor working under him in the 1960s recalls, “I was struck by a conversation I had with Leo in which he answered my query of why the Abstracts consistently included the sociology produced by Third World countries. Leo replied that ‘They read our [i.e., U.S.] sociology and we must read theirs.’ Leo’s work to correct social inequities underlies both the Abstracts and the mission of the Sociological Initiatives Foundation”.