Leah E. Gose

Leah E. Gose is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Harvard University. She is broadly interested in how community organizations provide social services and resources to people in need and how they both shape access to help and the structure of the American social safety net.

Gose will spend her year as a Radcliffe Graduate Student Fellow completing her dissertation, tentatively titled “Feeding the Need? Hidden Disparities in the Social Safety Net.” Post-welfare reform, America has leaned heavily on community organizations like schools and churches to provide resources and services to people in need, yet researchers have explored little about the variability in what these organizations are doing and how they shape the safety net. Gose narrows in on food provision services responding to hunger and food need to explain how these efforts are extremely diverse, impacting what types of food and other services are offered by organizations and who has access or is eligible to receive help, exacerbating inequality. Her data include approximately 170 interviews and site visits with nearly 100 organizations in metropolitan Atlanta, site photos, historical data, and self-developed maps combining organizational traits with individual-level data from the American Community Survey.

Gose is a Malcolm Hewitt Wiener PhD Scholar in Poverty and Justice within the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy and a past fellow at the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. She serves as a resident tutor in Pforzheimer House at Harvard College.