CSD News

A study from the Center for Social Development’s SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK) experiment has been nominated for an award given to the best paper published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs.

Sherraden was among 19 fellows inducted into the academy on Jan. 17, 2020.

CSD research and expertise shape proposal for a universal policy in the Show-Me state.

An expanding partnership is pursuing legislation for Missouri children in 2020.

Singapore initiated training in Financial Capability and Asset Building in 2017. It is kicking off its third phase: expanding to a nationwide scale.

The fight for fair and affordable housing has new momentum in one of the nation’s most segregated metropolitan areas.

As financial social work emerges in China, Michael Sherraden and Li Zou highlight its potential at two Chinese universities.

For her work, Dr. Gena Gunn McClendon has been honored with the Ambassador Andrew J. Young Award for Outstanding Ethics, Service, and Commitment to Family and Community.

Robert E. Friedman believes we can close the racial wealth divide in a generation. “I believe in the promise of this country … and in this community. St. Louis has become a symbol to the country of the results of racial inequity, and I think it’s leading the way to close the racial wealth divide, and to let America live up to its ideals.”

Isabel Sawhill thinks too many researchers are more interested in publishing papers than making sure their work has major impact. “An awful lot of researchers are not asking the right questions,” says Sawhill, Senior Fellow, Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. “We need to push scholars to do more research on big questions.”

Amendments enacted on Wednesday, October 2, will affect all newborn children in California. The state became the third this year to adopt a universal, at-birth Child Development Account (CDA) policy.

Research from the Center for Social Development shows that where voters live can influence their ability to vote. “In volunteering at the polls, I noticed that equipment malfunctions and other issues seemed relatively common at some sites, explained Gena Gunn McClendon, director of CSD’s Voter Access and Engagement initiative and a co-author of “Will I […]

On September 12 at the Brown School, representatives from regional universities, Missouri and Illinois election board members and community organizations convened for the second Campus and Community Voter Engagement Summit. “The summit presented opportunities for key stakeholders to have a dialogue about the significance of strategies that promote student participation in voting and the importance […]

Illinois became the most recent state in the U.S. to adopt universal Child Development Accounts on August 23, when Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed legislation to open a 529 college savings plan account with deposits for every child born or adopted in Illinois after Dec. 31, 2020.

Awareness about voter suppression is gaining momentum, in part through screenings of “Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook.” Building on a positive response to the first screening on Washington University’s campus, the Center for Social Development’s Voter Access and Engagement (VAE) project collaborated with community partners to host a second screening on August 3, 2019 at […]

The Centre for Social Development Africa—CSD’s sister center at the University of Johannesburg—recently published the Siyakha Youth Assets Study. It examines whether the combination of a youth employability program and a financial capability intervention can have an impact on young people’s job outcomes.

Nebraska’s legislature today approved a universal Child Development Account (CDA) policy that will cover every resident born in the state on or after January 1, 2020.

More than 100 guests turned out Wednesday afternoon for a screening of the documentary “Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook.” “Voter suppression is wrong, and it’s real,” Mac Heller, the documentary’s executive producer, said before the show. The event at the Brown School was a joint effort between the Voter Access and Engagement (VAE) initiative and […]

Listen to an excerpt from Lisa Reyes Mason’s interview on the inSocialWork podcast. In it, she describes how climate change is connected to social, economic and political contexts, which is why it is such an important issue for social work.

FSU has launched a new research institute aimed at advancing science, policy and practice to improve the well-being of individuals, families and communities impacted by the criminal justice system. The Institute for Justice Research and Development was founded and is directed by Carrie Pettus-Davis, Associate Professor at FSU and CSD Faculty Director of the Smart Decarceration Initiative.

Robert Motley Jr., manager of the Center for Social Development’s Race and Opportunity Lab, has received a two-year $60,936 grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and a $5,000 grant from the Fahs-Beck Fund for Research and Experimentation.

Assistant Professsor Molly Metzger, faculty director of Thriving Communities at the Center for Social Development, discusses three myths about the causes of segregation during the keynote speech at the 2019 Fair Housing Conference.

Experts from the Center for Social Development traveled to Asia in mid-April to advise Taiwanese leaders about social policy and social work education.

More than 225 people from various parts of the country gathered at the Brown School for the Collaboration on Race, Inequality, and Social Mobility in America’s inaugural conference March 28-29. The event, entitled “Race at the Forefront: Sharpening a Focus on Race in Applied Research,” brought together scholars who are working toward the elimination of […]

Washington University’s Molly Metzger and Hank Webber took to the airwaves on April 9 to discuss segregation.

Brown School doctoral student Aytakin Huseynli has received a national award in recognition of her contribution to the development of social work in Azerbaijan, her home country. The Ministry of Women, Family and Children Affairs in Azerbaijan gave her the award on March 7. Or, rather, the ministry presented it to her mother in Aytakin’s […]

Child Development Accounts take center stage in a newly released special issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Social Work and Development. The sweeping, seven-article issue shows the global context of the emerging asset-building policy. “Many countries are exploring new policy innovations that encourage asset building,” said Michael Sherraden, who co-edited the issue and co-authored […]

The Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy hosted its fifth annual Social Work Day on the Hill on March 20 in Washington, D.C.

Michael Sherraden will discuss potential federal policy for inclusive and progressive Child Development Accounts (CDAs), so that all U.S. children can accumulate assets, on March 20 at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C. Several states have already enacted statewide CDA policies, and a nationwide policy is possible. Sherraden is the George Warren Brown Distinguished […]

With financial support from philanthropists, the Center for Social Development is conducting a third wave of research on Child Development Accounts (CDAs) in the Oklahoma 529 College Savings Plan. Wave 3 of the SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK) experiment expands the original CDA with an automatic, progressive deposit and extends the research to examine […]

The new book “People and Climate Change: Vulnerability, Adaptation, and Social Justice” now may be ordered in advance of its April 1 release. Edited by Lisa Reyes Mason and Jonathan Rigg, the 256-page book explores how climate change threatens the well-being, livelihood and survival of people in communities worldwide.

Inspired by HomeGrown STL’s “strong track record of working to improve life outcomes for boys and young men of color,” the Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance has named HomeGrown STL a “Community to Watch.”

The Center for Social Development has received the Silver certification as a “Green Office” for the second year in a row.

Center for Social Development Policy Director Margaret Clancy testified Tuesday before the Nebraska Legislature’s Education Committee. The subject: Child Development Account policy and research results.

The editors of “Facing Segregation: Housing Policy Solutions for a Stronger Society” have compiled a collection of essays that “lay out the reality that segregation is not a periphery problem for cities like St. Louis or for the country,” according to a book review in the St. Louis American.

​Clark Atlanta University has launched an internship program for MSW students built on the Center for Social Development’s pioneering work in Financial Capability and Asset Building.

This fall, the Brown School began encouraging organizers to open public events by reading a Native acknowledgment statement.

In “Five Dimensions of Climate Science Reductionism,” Jonathan Rigg and Lisa Reyes Mason assert that science tends to extract climate change from its social and environmental contexts, making climate change a “detached physical process.”

Fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing and Civil Rights Acts, a new book ̶ “Facing Segregation: Housing Policy Solutions for a Stronger Society” brings together influential scholars, practitioners and policy analysts to reflect on how to use public policy to reduce segregation.

Millions of families in the United States are financially unstable, and they have few places to turn for guidance and support. Margaret Sherraden hopes to change that by marshalling a largely overlooked resource: The professionals at thousands of community-based organizations who deliver services to low-income people.

Murli Desai, a Brown School alumna, has received the Life Time Achievement Award from the National Association of Professional Social Workers in India.

The Center for Social Development’s Voter Access and Engagement initiative trained and dispatched 38 researchers to 20 polling places in St. Louis City and County on Election Day, November 6.

The Center for Social Development at Washington University’s Brown School is once again engaged in partnership for development of social work in mainland China. The focus is on financial capability.

The Azerbaijan Minister of Labor and Social Protection Sahil Babayev and Social Policy and Services Department Head Himalay Mamishov met with Center for Social Development Director Michael Sherraden, International Director Li Zou and Research Associate Aytakin Huseynli.

Center for Social Development Director Michael Sherraden and International Director Li Zou represented Washington University in St. Louis during a conference on “The 30th Anniversary of the Re-establishment of Social Work in China.”

Michael Sherraden delivered the keynote address at the Grand Challenges for Social Work event “Economic Equality and Financial Capability” in October at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Social Work.

​Soon after a landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change came out in October, Lisa Reyes Mason, Center for Social Development faculty director for Environment and Social Development, wrote an opinion piece and spoke on television about what people can do.

In St. Louis and St. Louis County, voter registration and voting are lower in ZIP codes with more black residents, according to a new study from researchers at the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis.

​A delegation from Washington University in St. Louis including Brown School Dean Mary McKay and Center for Social Development leaders participated the celebration of Washington University Day at Xi’an Jiaotong University on October 15.

​About 50 people participated in Election Protection training on October 23 at the Brown School. Denise Lieberman, senior attorney and co-program director for the Voter Protection Program at the Advancement Project, led the nonpartisan training to prepare volunteers for the November 6 election. She also updated them on a new change in Missouri election law. […]

The Social and Economic Development grant from the Administration for Native Americans will fund asset-building services and programs in one of the most densely populated areas of Indian Country.

The article is the first in Chinese to describe U.S. social workers’ growing view about the importance of policy changes and institutional arrangements for financial inclusion and capability, and to emphasize the unique role of social workers in achieving this goal.

Are you a dream hoarder? If you’re in the “favored fifth” of income distribution, the top 20 percent, you may be, says Richard V. Reeves.

​Michael Sherraden will deliver the keynote address at the Grand Challenges for Social Work event Economic Equality and Financial Capability on October 25 at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Social Work.

Global environmental changes affect people worldwide, with impacts that are not just physical, but also social and economic. These changes affect family and community stability, social relationships, health and sometimes survival.

Students, faculty and staff crowded into Brown Hall on Sept. 17 to hear Professor Sheying Chen deliver the lecture “Building Social Work in China.”

HomeGrown STL Director Sean Joe and St. Louis American Managing Editor Chris King have teamed up to produce a yearlong series called “Homegrown Black Males” to change the narrative for local black teens and men.

Guo, the Frank J. Bruno Distinguished Professor of Social Work Research, is the research director at the Center for Social Development.

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke at the August 24 launch of the book “Critical Issues in Asset Building in Singapore’s Development.” Professors S. Vasoo and Bilveer Singh at the National University of Singapore (NUS) edited the book. The lead chapter is by Michael Sherraden, director of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Li Zou, the Center for Social Development’s international director, participated in two high-profile events this summer in Beijing.

Representatives from St. Louis universities and community organizations gathered for the first Campus and Community Voter Engagement Summit, on August 9 at the Brown School.

The head of the Republic of Azerbaijan’s Office of the State Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs was the Center for Social Development’s guest recently.

More than 65 invited guests from 18 states and the District of Columbia attended a lively Child Development Account Forum in late July at the Brown School of Social Work. CSD and Missouri State Treasurer Eric Schmitt, who oversees Missouri’s 529 college savings plan, hosted the event.

​Volunteers tie communities together because they are active in every major shock and stress communities experience, from earthquakes and flooding to climate change and local conflicts, finds the new 2018 State of the World’s Volunteerism Report.

With bipartisan support, Pennsylvania is launching a statewide policy to provide college savings accounts for all newborns with a $100 scholarship grant. The universal, automatic-enrollment Child Development Account policy will affect many families: Pennsylvania averages 140,000 births a year.

A national Child Development Account policy is emerging in Taiwan. President Tsai Ing-wen in June signed into law the Act on Savings Accounts for the Education and Development of Children and Teenagers.

Please join us for the event Black Wealth, Black Health: The Power of the Black Vote, from 2-4 p.m. June 30 at Schlafly Library, 225 N. Euclid Ave.

“A Toolkit for Expanding Financial Capability at Tax Time” is now available and free to download. The 70-page book presents the current evidence underpinning various tax-time efforts to expand financial capability among low- and moderate-income households.

The White House hosted a high-profile summit meeting on federal prison reform on May 18, and Carrie Pettus-Davis, who helped to organize it, sat among cabinet members. The summit “was a message to the world that the United States is ready to change how it does incarceration,” she says.

The first textbook to focus on financially vulnerable households is now available from Oxford University Press. “Financial Capability and Asset Building in Vulnerable Households: Theory and Practice” teaches about financial capability and asset building through the stories of four families whose lives unfold over 23 chapters.

Our faculty and staff are committed to advancing racial equity, and one of the most important vehicles is the national Grand Challenges for Social Work. We’ve created four webinars to highlight this initiative.

​About 50 researchers, practitioners, policymakers and funders met this month in Washington, D.C., to discuss how to advance the field of Child Development Account programs by making them sustainable and scaleable to reach millions.

​​To celebrate Financial Capability Month, the Center for Social Development and the Center for Household Financial Stability at the St. Louis Federal Reserve convened a forum, “Coin a Better Future: Reaching Out to Financially Vulnerable Families.”

​A new 115-page community-driven report on segregation and housing in St. Louis was released this week by numerous local partners in the fields of public health, law, fair housing and community development.

The annual cost of childhood poverty in the United States is more than $1 trillion, according to a new study by Michael McLaughlin and Mark R. Rank.

Brown School alumna Charita L. Castro-Gonzalves, MSW ’99, will return to St. Louis as the featured speaker for the Brown School Recognition and Hooding Ceremony on Thursday, May 17.

Michal Grinstein-Weiss, PhD, was installed as the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor on April 2 before an audience of colleagues, collaborators, supporters and family members, including many from her native Israel.

​Growing up in war and chaos, Aytakin Huseynli knew she wanted to help others, but the profession of “social work” didn’t exist in Azerbaijan. Later, she would go to great lengths to change that.

Voter Access and Engagement is a nonpartisan partnership that connects public, nonprofit and private-sector organizations in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

A new CSD brief aims to advance Child Development Account policy by identifying 10 elements for universal and progressive CDAs at scale.

The Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy will hold the fourth annual Social Work Day on the Hill on March 21, in Washington, D.C.

More than 120 people working to improve the lives of black boys and young men in St. Louis participated in the second annual HomeGrown STL Summit on February 8.

A new paper by Molly Metzger, assistant professor at the Brown School, and Nay’Chelle Harris, masters research fellow in housing policy, analyzes “Team TIF St. Louis.”

On February 8, Fred Melch Ssewamala, PhD, a renowned social and economic development scholar, was installed as the William E. Gordon Distinguished Professor at the Brown School of Social Work.

Benjamin J. Lough, faculty director of International Service, received the Sheth Distinguished Faculty Award for International Achievement from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Illinois International Programs.

A new book about financial capability and asset building will be released next month. The 144-page book — “Financial Capability and Asset Building with Diverse Populations: Improving Financial Well-being in Families and Communities” — is aimed at policymakers, researchers and practitioners who assist financially vulnerable people.

As economists float the proposal to give every newborn in the United States a “baby bond” account with between $500 to $50,000 in cash, Michael Sherraden, director of the Center for Social Development, says a solution already exists — Child Development Accounts.

Michael Sherraden, PhD, received the Society for Social Work and Research’s 2018 Social Policy Researcher Award, which is “in recognition of Dr. Sherraden’s record of accomplishment that demonstrates distinguished achievement across an extended career of research in social policy.”

The book “Asset-Building Policies and Innovation in Asia” – a valuable resource for students and scholars of Asian social policy – is now available in paperback.

Luther Tyus, an ex-police officer, is now a graduate research assistant with our Race and Opportunity Lab. “I got here,” he says of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, “and it feels like the world opened up.”

Writer and activist Shaun King and U.S. Senator Dick Durbin spoke at the Smart Decarceration Initiative’s second conference.

James Jaccard, PhD, a well-known theorist in applied social science, spoke about theory, program design and evaluation in a lecture November 9 at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work.

The event “Social Justice and the Environment” commemorated what would have been Barry Commoner’s 100th year on November 2, 2017.

​In a joint appearance, the authors of “The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty” headlined an October 24 event co-sponsored by the Center for Social Development and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

About 65 people participated in the October 17 event to celebrate the new book “Smart Decarceration: Achieving Criminal Justice Transformation in the 21st Century,” led by co-editor Carrie Pettus-Davis, PhD.

​HomeGrown STL is close to putting its strategy for collective impact to work in St. Louis. The project, part of the Center for Social Development’s Race and Opportunity Lab, aims to support the social mobility of black boys and men between the ages of 12 and 29 in St. Louis City and County.

The Global Social Development Innovations research center will focus on developing community-driven initiatives that address economic security, workforce development, financial inclusion, social protection, health and education.

Shapiro and his team have spent 12 years following the lives of 187 families in St. Louis, Boston and Los Angeles.

JPMorgan Chase, Prudential and Staples were among the companies that sent representatives to a conference about financial wellness programs for employees, hosted by the Center for Social Development at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work.