Fellows Michael Sherraden, Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, Harold Pollack, and Jin Huang pictured left to right.

NYC to Seed $1,000 Scholarship Accounts for Every Kindergartener

August 2026 — Starting this fall, New York City public school kindergarteners will receive NYC Scholarship Accounts seeded with $1,000, as part of a major expansion of the NYC Kids RISE Save for College Program announced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Council Speaker Julie Menin. The program’s design is grounded in Fellow Michael Sherraden’s decades of research on Child Development Accounts and the SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK) experiment led by his Center for Social Development at the WashU Brown School. It offers an example of universal, progressive asset-building policy at the city level.

Read more from Newswise.

A Nurse’s View: Latino Health at America’s 250th

July 2026 — At America's 250th anniversary, Latino Americans are contributing more than ever to the nation's economy and future — but a widening health crisis threatens to leave them behind. Fellow Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, PhD, RN, the first tenured Latino endowed professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, laid out that argument in a new Nurse.org op-ed connecting his ongoing research on Latino health disparities to the current national moment. Discrimination, fear, and exclusion, he writes, are not only social concerns — they are health concerns. He calls on nurses to lead the response through expanded access to mental healthcare, culturally responsive care models, and deeper partnerships with Latino communities.

Read more from Nurse.org.

What Today’s Billionaires Can Learn from Julius Rosenwald

August 2026 — What can today's billionaires learn from a Sears executive who died nearly a century ago? In a new Chicago Tribune op-ed, Fellow Harold Pollack, PhD, the Helen Ross Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, argues that they fall short of the standard Sears executive Julius Rosenwald set. The University of Chicago founding benefactor's philanthropy funded more than 5,000 schools for Black children across the American South and helped shape a generation of civil-rights leaders.

Read more from the Chicago Tribune.

Jin Huang Appointed to Kendall Institute Advisory Board

July 28, 2026 — Fellow Jin Huang, the Irving Louis Horowitz Professor in Social Policy at the WashU Brown School, has been appointed to a three-year term on the advisory board of the Katherine A. Kendall Institute for International Social Work within the Council on Social Work Education. The Kendall Institute prepares social work educators, researchers, students, and practitioners for an increasingly global community and promotes standards of excellence for international social work.

Read more from WashU.