New book offers hope for ailing American family finances
“What It’s Worth: Strengthening the Financial Future of Families, Communities and the Nation” includes 40 essays by the nation’s leading experts on economics, financial services, public policy and philanthropy from across a broad range of sectors.
St. Louis treasurer officially launches college savings for kindergarteners
Every kindergartner enrolled this year in St. Louis City public and charter schools is receiving a college savings account, Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones said at the official launch of the College Kids program.
Israel adopts savings accounts for children based on CSD recommendation
Israel’s parliament has passed a law funding long-term savings accounts for all newborns, based on a proposal developed by Michal Grinstein-Weiss, associate director of the Center for Social Development, and on research efforts led by Michael Sherraden, director of CSD.
Spotlight: ‘Scholarship for social change’ is Metzger’s modus operandi
When Molly Metzger was a PhD student, the time came for her to draft research questions for her dissertation. She drew a blank. After three years in classrooms, she felt out of touch with her topic: low-income housing.
Treasury launches national myRA retirement plan
The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced the national launch of the myRA program, a government-backed retirement plan for people who don’t have access to a retirement savings plan at work or who haven’t found an easy enough way to save.
New report explores global lessons from youth savings
In 2010, researchers in the vast YouthSave Initiative started investigating whether low-income youth can build savings in the developing countries of Colombia, Ghana, Kenya and Nepal. Now their findings are summarized in a newly released report.
Event on Child Development Accounts draws crowd from 24 states
More than 100 people gathered in St. Louis in October to hear leading experts discuss the latest research, funding, program and account-structure ideas in the growing field of Child Development Accounts.
Expert: We must understand racial segregation’s history to remedy it
Warning that “we are going to see many more Fergusons in this country,” Richard Rothstein recounts the history of government’s role in racial segregation, in a video created for our event “Inclusive Housing: A Public Forum for Policy Action in St. Louis.”
Public forum aims to reshape housing policy in St. Louis metro
Despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, stark racial and economic segregation in housing continues. On Oct. 22, the Center for Social Development and the Clark-Fox Policy Institute hosted “Inclusive Housing: A Public Forum for Policy Action in St. Louis.”
Author: Millions of American struggle on $2 a day
A woman in Tennessee sells her plasma twice a week to help her family of four survive. She has little cash, about $2 a day, but she has a lot of company. The number of families living on $2 per person, per day, has soared to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children.
‘Taking the bank to the youth’ proves fruitful, researchers find
YouthSave researchers gathered recently in Washington, D.C., to discuss what they learned over five years about how to provide scalable saving mechanisms to low-income youth—and what their findings could mean for youth development and financial inclusion.
‘Our goal is to substantially reduce incarceration rates’
Answering the call to participate in the Smart Decarceration Initiative’s first conference, about 150 people from throughout the country gathered September 24-27 at Washington University in St. Louis to work on redefining justice in America.