Margaret Lee (she/her) is a PhD student in Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines immigrant-serving community-based organizations as social welfare innovators, focusing on how care, emotion, culture, and policy intersect in everyday practice. Using qualitative and mixed-methods approaches, she studies how institutional logics and emotional labor shape service delivery and workforce wellbeing—particularly within Southeast Asian and other marginalized communities—and how community organizations translate state programs into culturally grounded care within structural and political constraints. She aims to contribute to models of organizational resilience that move beyond scarcity narratives, centering community capacity, interdependence, and collective care as drivers of sustainability and wellbeing.
Margaret is affiliated with the Asian American Research Center at UC Berkeley and is a recipient of the Critical Southeast Asian American Studies Fellowship. Alongside her doctoral studies, she contributes to state-level research on California’s social service programs, focusing on implementation and workforce experiences. She has ten years of experience in community development, nonprofit practice, and mental health and education services, and holds an MSW from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA from Yale University.
Immigrant and refugee communities; community-based organizations; organizational theory; emotional labor and secondary traumatic stress; anti-oppressive social work practice; critical epistemologies.
