About Us
The Global Assets Project was launched in 2006 as a joint effort of the Center for Social Development (CSD) at Washington University in St. Louis and the Asset Building Program of the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.
The Global Assets Project aims to advance public policies that build savings and assets for poor, low- and moderate-income persons around the world. The Project hopes to serve as a bridge across the key elements of microfinance, financial education, social policy and commercial financial services, as these seemingly diverse areas increasingly integrate. It aims to inform and stimulate innovations to achieve this integration.
For more information on the program, please see the project's backgrounder.
The Center for Social Development
George Warren Brown School of Social Work
Washington University
Campus Box 1196
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899
Phone: (314) 935-7433
Fax: (314) 935-8661
The New America Foundation
Asset Building Program
1630 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., 7th Floor
Washington, D.C. 20009
Phone: (202) 986-2700
Fax: (202) 986-3896
Staff
Michael Sherraden (Co-Director)
Center for Social Development, Washington University
sherrad@wustl.edu
Ray Boshara (Co-Director)
Asset Building Program, New America Foundation
boshara@newamerica.net
Fred Ssewamala (Senior Research Fellow)
Asset Building Program, New America Foundation
Associate Professor, Columbia University
fs2114@columbia.edu
Jamie Zimmerman (Associate Director)
Asset Building Program, New America Foundation
zimmerman@newamerica.net
Li Zou (Project Director)
Center for Social Development, Washington University
Lzou@wustl.edu
Jeff Meyer (Program Associate)
Asset Building Program, New America Foundation
meyer@newamerica.net
About the Center for Social Development and the New America Foundation
The Center for Social Development (CSD) is a unit of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work (GWB) at Washington University in St. Louis. CSD began in 1994 with Michael Sherraden as the founding director. CSD specializes in creating and testing policy innovations, often drawing on lessons from US history and the experiences of other countries. CSD is the leading academic center of theory and research on asset building, i.e., strategies that promote saving and investment (not merely income and consumption).
The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, post-partisan, public policy institute whose purpose is to bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation’s public discourse. Relying on a venture capital approach, the Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy solutions to domestic and international problems that transcend the conventional political spectrum. The Global Assets Project is housed within New America’s Asset Building Program, whose purpose is to significantly broaden the ownership of savings and assets in the U.S. and abroad. The program directs its policy efforts at the bottom half of the income spectrum, who presently save and own very little.
