WKU News

A WKU Professor with the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences was recently awarded a prestigious grant from WorkRise with the goal of driving action towards accelerating economic mobility and advancing equity in the US labor market, particularly for workers in low-wage occupations.

Dr. Monica Galloway Burke, Professor with the Department of Counseling and Student Affairs, Western Kentucky University received a grant for a project named “Do Language Restrictions on Obtaining Drivers Licenses Influence Labor Market Outcomes of Immigrants?” Her teammate is Colin Cannonier, an Associate Professor at Belmont University. 

This project was one of 13 that received funding to design and field new surveys or combine a variety of existing public and private data sources to create new datasets to answer seminal research questions on workers’ economic security and mobility. Each team will produce a variety of reports, data visualizations, and other resources to share their findings with key stakeholder audiences, including policymakers, employers, worker advocates, practitioners, philanthropy, and the broader research community. 

A total of 22 projects out of the 175 that were submitted have been awarded a grant from a pool of $2.4 million.

WorkRise is a research-to-action network on jobs, workers, and mobility hosted by the Urban Institute. You can learn more about them and the additional projects funded here.