Gary Delgado , Ph. D., the Executive Director and founder of the Applied Research Center, is a nationally recognized researcher, lecturer and activist on issues of race and social justice. He has worked extensively in both the organizing and the academic communities. He received his B.A. from SUNY Old Westbury in 1972, a Masters in Urban Affairs from CUNY Queens College in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 1983. He was a Danforth Fellow in 1979 and a Whitney Young Fellow in 1980. In 1993, he was a Kenneth Pray Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work. He is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at U.C. Berkeley. His analytical work includes over 30 articles and studies on social change practice including his doctoral dissertation from UC Berkeley, Organizing the Movement: The Roots & Growth of Acorn, published by Temple University Press in 1986. His book Beyond the Politics of Place: New Directions in Community Organizing in the 1990s, published by ARC in 1994, created debate throughout the community organizing world. Most recently, he is the editor of the new anthology From Poverty to Punishment: How Welfare Reform Punishes the Poor.

He is a board member of the Nonprofit Sector Research Fund of the Aspen Institute, an advisory board member of the Institute on Race and Poverty and an honorary director of the ATR Foundation in Seattle. He was formerly a member of the board of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council in Washington, DC. Gary was one of the initial organizers of ACORN, a lead organizer with the National Welfare Rights Organization, and cofounder and director of the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO). In 1988, he received the prestigious Bannerman Fellowship for activists of color in its first year. He was recognized as a Hellraiser by Mother Jones magazine in 1996, and was profiled as a one of 61 Visionaries by Utne Reader.

Recent engagements:

• Panel: "Confronting Institutional Racism in Nonprofit Organizations," Funding Exchange Super Skills Conference (June 2004)
• Plenary Key Note Speaker: "Community Organizing at the Crossroads," Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation conference (May 3, 2004)
• Lecture: "Advocacy Research: A Tool for Social Change," University of California at Berkeley (April 2004)
• Lecture: "Democracy, Detention and Dirty Tricks," Bucknell University Social Science Colloquium Series (March 2004)
• Lecture: “Grassroots Community Organizing and the Future of American Cities,” Brown University Center for Urban Studies (April 2003)
• Workshop: “Uncovering Racial Dimensions of Public Policy,” Quebec Group of Community Action Speakers, Quebec, Canada