After more than 25 years, the Brown School’s Center for Social Development (CSD) continues to play an influential role in the national conversation about building assets for all people, starting at birth.
The center was founded in 1994 by Michael Sherraden, spurred by policy attention to his book Assets and the Poor. “There was more work than one person could do,” explained Sherraden, “so we started an academic center and have been busy ever since.”
While its asset-building work has continued, the center has expanded to include a diverse array of topics, including civic service, productive aging, environment and social development, financial capability, desegregation of housing, decarceration of prisons, and voting rights. Those efforts are chronicled in the center’s recent In the Community, a wide-ranging report on the center’s progress over the years, as well as its current work.
“Our goal is to try to make the world a little better place, and sometimes we have been a little successful, which makes it all worthwhile,” said Sherraden, the George Warren Brown Distinguished Professor, who remains the director of one of the longest-running research centers at the school.
The CSD’s asset-building work today focuses on Child Development Accounts for all children starting at birth, with both public and private funding, in order to build assets for education and other life goals. With the leadership of Margaret Clancy, the center’s Policy Director, several U.S. states have created CDA programs for their children, as well as several other countries. Ongoing research by the Center has shown the accounts improve family well-being even before the funds are put to use. The center’s long-standing commitment to asset building has been supported over the years by a variety of funders, most prominently the Ford Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. This work has been influential in similar proposals, such as “Baby Bonds,” which have been introduced by policy makers and civic leaders.
The Center’s work has adapted to changes in social development issues, Sherraden said. The response to climate change is one example. “People are being displaced in low-lying areas, and they have to prepare and adapt. At the same time, they have to organize new ways of living, and use different technologies. Climate change, like most everything else, is very much a social challenge.”
The Center’s role in training students for important work is a growing and lasting legacy. Among former PhD students are leaders such as:
- Deborah Adams, MSW program director, University of Kansas
- Gina Chowa, director of Global Social Development Innovations at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- William Elliott, a center director and chair of the doctoral program at the University of Michigan
- Michal Grinstein-Weiss, Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor at the Brown School and director of Washington University’s Social Policy Institute
- Amy Locklear Hertel, chief of staff to the Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Jin Huang, national leader in Financial Capability and Asset Building, at St. Louis University
- Lisa Reyes Mason, a national leader in environment and social development, now on the faculty at Denver University
- Amanda Moore McBride, dean of the Graduate School of Social Work at Denver University
- Trina Williams Shanks, chaired professor and director of a new center at the University of Michigan
- Fred Ssewamala, William E. Gordon Distinguished Professor and director of the International Center for Child Health and Development and SMART Africa Center at the Brown School
“This is only a partial list. We have trained dozens of scholars and they are doing amazing things,” Sherraden said. “Many are scholars of color. Surely this next generation of applied scholars is our best contribution.”
What’s in store for the Center in the coming years?
“We will continue the long-running experiment on Child Development Accounts and taking that knowledge to policy development in the U.S. and abroad,” Sherraden said.
“This is a foundation for lifelong asset-building policy that includes everyone. We will continue the large project of re-introducing financial capability into social work practice, which requires curriculum design, research, and adaptation to new contexts — now focusing on East Asia and Africa. We are likely to continue our work on electoral democracy. When possible, we’ll continue to work toward civic service, housing availability and desegregation, decarceration of jails and prisons, and social dimensions of environment change. In all of these areas we work in partnership with many applied scholars in the U.S. and abroad.
“There is never a shortage of interesting work to do!”
Often, an innovative idea starts with filling a need for one person and then extending that help to a wider audience. That’s what happened for three Brown School MSW students who took part in this year’s BIG IdeaBounce® competition.
Chase Breimeier started a mental health blog at the start of the pandemic to share his mental health experiences. He thought it might encourage other people on their journeys. He also enrolled in the Social Entrepreneurship class taught by Heather Cameron, Michael B. Kaufman Professor of Practice in Social Entrepreneurship. Cameron encouraged him to expand on his idea.
“I realized I could build out my blog to create a mental health platform for college students,” said Breimeier. That’s when he decided to enter the contest.
Olin’s BIG IdeaBounce® is a 2-minute-video elevator pitch contest open to all WashU students that encourages them to pursue original business ideas. Once contestants enter, they receive personal feedback from an experienced panel of judges on both their business proposal and pitch video. Winners can receive up to $2500 to fund their idea.
“I would definitely recommend the contest to anyone who is interested in creating a startup and looking to develop an idea beyond its infancy stages,” said Breimeier. He plans to use the $2500 grand prize to make his idea a reality.
MSW students Dani Ellis and Oluwabukola Apata also placed in the competition, earning $250 each for their ideas.
Ellis caught the judges’ attention with All Bass. “I wanted to use drumlines to strengthen unity and connections in communities of color,” she said. The project will also help participants be expressive and cope with their lives. The drumline in a band, also known as a battery, is a percussion section of a marching band usually consisting of a snare line, tenor line, and a bass line. Ellis stated that the idea came from her own time as part of one.
Apata, MSW ’21, wants to take her project global and provide job mentorship for at-risk youths in Nigeria. “The ripple effect of flourishing businesses and stable jobs can create a reinforcing loop that develops low-income communities,” Apata noted.
All three students were nervous about entering. “I had never participated in any form of a business competition,” Ellis said. “The process allowed me to consider different models for my program as well as realizing all the resources available to assist me in launching my program.”
“I knew the competition would be quite strong,” Breimeier admitted. However, all three found the mentorship and feedback from the judges to be invaluable.
The student’s ideas reflect a mix of social entrepreneurship and enterprise that Cameron seeks to foster in her students. “I hope seeing the variety of projects that can win encourages students across campus to develop ideas that make a difference in people’s lives,” she said.
Anyone interested in entering the Spring 2021 competition by March 31 is encouraged to contact Cameron “We are going to work together to help many more Brown School first-timers explore social business ideas and continue our winning streak!”
Visit the website for more information on the next round of competition. The prize pool is sponsored by NSIN, Olin’s Entrepreneurship Program, Skandalaris Center, and the Holekamp Seed Fund.
Diana Parra Perez, a researcher at the Brown School’s Prevention Research Center, has been awarded a grant to develop programs to address high-risk populations for COVID-19 in St. Louis. The Center in St. Louis will work with the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services in the Building Resilient Inclusive Communities (BRIC) program to boost existing efforts of partners and communities with a focus on health equity in nutrition security, access to safe physical activity and social connectedness.
“African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, aging adults, and people with disabilities have been disproportionally affected by COVID-19 across the United States,” Perez said. “With this funding, we will develop and support partnerships with key community organizations to address some of the underlying risk factors as well as some of the consequences from the pandemic. Health equity and sustainable change will be at the center of our work.”
The Center will provide one-on-one technical assistance to local partners, like health departments. PRC will also help set up monthly training programs, virtual learning webinars and share additional resources from the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACDD), which provides the BRIC grants. Other partners may include Area Agencies on Aging, planning and public works agencies, local economic developers, and local nongovernmental organizations that support the social and emotional needs of older adults, particularly those living in long-term care facilities.
The team will also help develop activities in up to five communities to improve nutrition security, access to safe physical activity, transportation alternatives and social connectedness.
NACDD is providing funding for the BRIC program to 20 states to promote healthy living and reduce social isolation during the COVID pandemic. The initiative is part of a collaboration with the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a team of nationally recognized experts. NACDD supports state health departments and other organizations as they work with local communities on improving safe access to physical activity, promoting healthy eating through improved nutrition security, and reducing isolation and loneliness. All of these actions focus on improving people’s lives during the pandemic and on reducing health equities and promoting social justice for people who are impacted the most.
President Joe Biden has nominated Brown School graduate Andrea Palm to be deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Upon confirmation by the Senate, she will assume a key role in the department after several years in top public health positions, most recently heading the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
“Andrea Palm is a public servant through and through,” Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers told Wisconsin Public Radio. “She’s been a critical part of our administration and a consummate professional who has done an extraordinary job helping lead our state during an unprecedented public health crisis.”
The Washington Post said HHS will be one of the most highly visible Cabinet agencies as it rolls out the Biden administration strategy to defeat the pandemic. It noted that deputies at large federal departments like HHS often have key responsibility for managing day-to-day operations, functioning as the department’s leader while the secretary travels or speaks to various constituencies on behalf of the department. Biden has nominated Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, to be the Secretary of HHS.
Palm was acting assistant secretary for legislation, chief of staff and senior counselor to the HHS secretary during the administration of President Barack Obama. She was also a senior advisor at the White House Domestic Policy Council during the implementation and rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Before joining the Obama administration, she was the senior health policy advisor to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, working on healthcare and public health issues.
In 2016, the Brown School presented Palm with a Distinguished Alumni Award, citing her “20 years of experience working on critical health care, public health, and human services.”
“Of all [the jobs] that I’ve had, it’s the most fulfilling,” Palm said of her work in HHS.
Palm received her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1990 and earned her Master of Social Work degree from the Brown School in 1996.
The Brown School has two exciting milestones to mark at this year’s annual program meeting for the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW), an honorific society of distinguished scholars and practitioners dedicated to achieving excellence in the field of social work and social welfare.
Mary McKay, Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School, was elected as the organisation’s incoming president; Associate Professor Renee Cunningham-Williams was inducted as an Academy Fellow.
“As I take up the mantle of president from my friend and colleague Dean Sarah Gehlert, professor at the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, I will strive to uphold the mission and vision of this institution,” said McKay.
This year’s virtual AASWSW New Fellows Induction Ceremony on Friday, January 22 at 6:15 pm EST. The ceremony takes place during this year’s Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) 25th Annual Conference Anniversary Celebration, January 19-21, 2020. Another Brown School scholar, Professor Sean Joe, was elected as president of SSWR this year.
Renee Cunningham-Williams Chosen as Class of 2021 Inductee
Cunningham-Williams is one of twelve scholars in the AASWSW Class of 2021 inductees. She is a leading expert in the epidemiology and comorbidity of problem gambling, substance use/abuse, and mental and behavioral health, particularly among African-American youth and emerging adults.
She began her career in the Washington University School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. At the Brown School, Cunningham-Williams continued her research focused on the epidemiology and comorbidity of problem gambling, substance use/abuse, and mental and behavioral health, particularly among Black youth/emerging adults. Her social work experience includes work with teen mothers, adult probationers and parolees, and adult survivors of abuse.
Cunningham-Williams has worked seamlessly across disciplinary boundaries in social work into public health, psychiatric epidemiology/nosology, and biostatistics. Her diverse experience has led to award-winning, high impact, NIH- and privately-funded research, including work to develop diagnostic assessments for gambling disorder.
A dedicated teacher and mentor, Cunningham-Williams’ publications have recently shifted into the area of doctoral education quality, capacity development, and experiences among doctoral students and faculty of color. The NIH and private foundations have supported her research portfolio to date, which also includes a NIDA-funded pre/postdoctoral transdisciplinary training program in addictions research nearing its 20th year of continuous operation.
In addition, she serves on the editorial boards of several journals in the field and has served on national and international scientific committees such as those convened by the NIH, National Academy of Sciences, and the Singapore Ministry, and among others. She also served as founding co-chair for the Research and Capacity Development (RCDC) Committee of the Society for Social Work and Research.
Cunningham-Williams joins fellow current and former Brown School faculty inductees: Wendy Auslander, PhD; Brett Drake, PhD; Sarah Gehlert, PhD; Michal Grinstein-Weiss, PhD; Shenyang Guo, PhD; Sean Joe, PhD; Melissa Jonson-Reid, PhD; Shanti K. Khinduka, PhD; Nancy Morrow-Howell, PhD; Enola Proctor, PhD; Mark Rank, PhD; Margaret Sherraden, PhD; Michael Sherraden, PhD; Fred Ssewamala, PhD; and Dean McKay.
The theme for the annual program meeting of the Society for Social Work Research (SSWR), now in its 25th year, is ‘Social Work Science for Social Change.’ The virtual event takes place January 19-24, 2021.
Sean Joe, Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development, has been elected as the new president of SSWR. His role will be formally announced during the membership business meeting on January 22, 2:30 p.m EST.
In addition, Brown School faculty, students, staff and alumni have a robust presence at this year’s event with 40 presentations and over 75 posters. Review the program, presenters, and register at sswr.org.
New Leadership Role in SSWR
Joe is a nationally recognized scholar on suicidal behavior among Black Americans, and is expanding the evidence base for effective practice with Black boys and young men. His research focuses on Black adolescents’ mental health service use patterns, the role of religion in Black suicidal behavior, salivary biomarkers for suicidal behavior, and the development of father-focused, family-based interventions to prevent urban African American adolescent males from engaging in multiple forms of self-destructive behaviors.
Working within the Center for Social Development, Joe launched the Race and Opportunity Lab, which examines race, opportunity, and social mobility in the St. Louis region, working to reduce inequality in adolescents’ transition into adulthood. The lab’s leading community science project is HomeGrown STL, which hopes to improve the social mobility of the region’s 60,000 black boys and young men, ages 12-29, in one generation—by the year 2039. Social mobility is defined as the ability of black boys and men to move upward and attain a better life than their parents.
HomeGrown STL has been awarded $2.5 million from the National Institutes of Health to examine serious disruptive behavioral difficulties, which disproportionately burden Black youth in high-poverty areas, and eliminate racial disparities in child mental health care. The organization has also been named a “Community to Watch” by the Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance (MBK). This summer, Joe co-authored “Accountable Policing: Policies to Advance the Personal Safety of Black Boys and Young Men,” which proposed changes to federal and regional policy to build an equitable, transparent and accountable public safety approach.
Joe’s epistemological work focuses on the concept of race in medical and social sciences. He has been quoted extensively in media outlets locally and across the nation, including the Miami Times, the Atlantic Black Star, and NBC.
He serves on the Steering Committee of the national Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC) and the National Advisory Council of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Forward Promise initiative. In recognition of the impact of his work, Joe was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, the Society for Social Work and Research, and the New York Academy of Medicine.
Below is a partial list of presentations by members of the Brown School community. For poster presentations and a complete program, please visit sswr.org.
| 2:15 – 4:15 PM | Developing Anti-Racist Research from Research Questions to DisseminationDeveloping Anti-Racist Research from Research Questions to Dissemination | Darrell Hudson, PhD |
Wednesday, January 20
Wednesday, January 20 5:15 – 6:15 PM
Wednesday, January 20 6:30 – 7:15 PM
| RCDC I | David A. Patterson Silver Wolf (Adelv unegv Waya), PhD |
| System Dynamics in Social Work: Entry Points for Integration into Research and Practice | Ellis Ballard Jill Kuhlberg Erin Stringfellow |
Thursday, January 21 1:15 – 2:15 PM
| Behavioral Health at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Scoping Review | Autumn Asher BlackDeer, MSW Sara Beeler-Stinn, LCSW, MPA David A. Patterson Silver Wolf (Adelv unegv Waya), PhD Jen Van Schuyver, MSW |
| Blood Plasma Sales and Liquidity in LMI Households | Stephanie Skees, MSW, Washington University in Saint Louis; Stephen Roll, PhD, Washington University in Saint Louis |
| Colored Health: The Consequences of Colorism on African American Woman’s Health and Mental Health Outcomes | Maya Williams, MSW |
| Increasing Substance Use Disorder Treatment Retention: A Pilot Study Measuring the Impact of a Clinical Dashboard Tool | David A. Patterson Silver Wolf (Adelv unegv Waya), PhD Sara Beeler-Stinn, LCSW, MPA Autumn Asher BlackDeer, MSW |
| Neighborhood and Community Influences in AdolescenceNeighborhood and Community Influences in Adolescence | Moderator: Von Nebbitt, PhD |
Thursday, January 21 5:00 – 6:00 PM
| Advancing New Markets: Examining Network Structure in the New Markets Tax Credits Program | Andrew Foell, MSW, MPP Kyle A. Pitzer, MSSW |
| A Qualitative Exploration of Physical and Emotional Wellness Among Middle-Class Black Women | Quenette Walton, PhD Jacquelyn Coats, MSW, MPH |
Friday, January 22 1:15 – 2:15 PM
| 3:45 – 4:45 PM | Changing Sexual and Reproductive Health Narratives of Black Adolescents and Young Adults | Tyriesa Howell, PhD, LMSW |
Friday, January 22 5:00 – 6:00 PM
| Exploring the Nexus of Empowerment Practice and Cognitive Processing Therapy in Rape Crisis Centers | Tonya Edmond, PhD Shih-Ying Cheng, MSW Molly McLay, MSW, LCSW |
| Policy Ideas That Rise to the Challenge of COVID-19 and Reduce Inequality: Learning from the Past to Shape the Future | Michael Sherraden, PhD |
| Sex Trafficking Risk in a Representative Sample of High School Students: Prevalence and Associated Characteristics of Youth Who Trade Sex | Shih-Ying Cheng, MSW |
| Understanding Caregiver Criminal Justice Involvement and the Impact on Child Outcomes | Sara Beeler-Stinn, LCSW, MPA Melissa Jonson-Reid, MSW, PhD Autumn Asher BlackDeer, MSW David A. Patterson Silver Wolf (Adelv unegv Waya), PhD Catherine Cobetto, BA |