Fellows

Margaret Sherraden, PhD

Active | Inducted in 2020

Bio

Margaret Sherraden’s research focuses on advancing household economic well-being in the United States and abroad. Her other areas include international volunteering and service, microenterprise, and birth outcomes among Mexican-American women. She is co-leader of one of the 13 Grand Challenges for Social Work on “Financial Capability and Asset Building for All.”

Sherraden is professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she taught for 25 years and chaired the master’s program in social work. Professor Sherraden received the UMSL Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2004. During her two terms as president of the Missouri Association for Social Welfare (now Empowerment Missouri), it celebrated a centennial, invested in a headquarters, and grew its endowment tenfold. She has conducted research in Mexico, where she was a Fulbright Fellow, and has lived and worked in Puerto Rico and Singapore.

She is author of numerous journal publications and is author or editor of 7 books, including the first textbook on Financial Capability and Asset Building in Vulnerable Households (with Julie Birkenmaier and Michael Collins, Oxford University Press, 2018). Other books include: Financial Capability and Asset Holding in Later Life (with Nancy Morrow-Howell, Eds., Oxford University Press, 2015), Financial Capability and Asset Building: Research, Education, Policy, and Practice (with Julie Birkenmaier and Jami Curley, Eds., Oxford University Press, 2013), Striving to Save: Creating Policies for Financial Security of Low-Income Families (with Amanda Moore McBride, University of Michigan Press, 2010); and Kitchen Capitalism: Microenterprise in Poor Households (with Cynthia K. Sanders and Michael Sherraden), State University of New York Press, 2004.

Visit her faculty page.

Education

AM, University of ChicagoPhD, Washington University in St. Louis