Erica Kohl-Arenas is the Faculty Director of Imagining America at the University of California, Davis, where she is also an associate professor in the Department of American Studies. Her primary research areas include studies of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, social movements, and the intersection of American and global poverty studies. Kohl-Arenas’s book The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty (University of California Press, 2016) is an investigation into the relationship between funders and farmworker and immigrant organizing in California’s Central Valley.