The Howard University Center on Race and Wealth is supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation. Dr. Kilolo Kijakazi is the program officer for the grant. The objective of the Center is to enrich the dialogue on asset building and to increase the number of scholars doing work on asset building and racial wealth disparities. In particular, because the Center is housed in an economics department, and is in Washington, DC, the Center will bring economists and a broad set of public policy advocates into the debate.

The Center will have three key components. First, to increase the number of scholars trained to work on solving racial wealth disparities the Center will continue its Summer Institute, a program aimed at undergraduate and graduate students who have done their own research in the area. The Center will bring them together, with public policy advocates, to translate research into policy solutions. Second, the Center will support a set of Center Associates who will be university based scholars, creating a virtual “think tank” researching racial wealth disparities in the five core specialty areas for the Center. Third, to support the research of these Associates, the Center will support three graduate students in economics at Howard University to act as the research assistants for the Associates. The Center Associates will come to give individual presentations of their research at Howard, and will meet twice a year together on the Howard campus where public policy advocates will also be invited, again to insure turning research into practical policy solutions.

One of those meetings will take place during the Summer Institute. And, to encourage and increase dialogue on racial wealth disparities, the Center Associates will put together panel proposals for professional economists meetings such as the Allied Social Science Association meetings, the Southern Economic Association meetings, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management meetings and the Eastern Economic Association meetings where their joint presentations on a panel will constitute two more meetings of the Center Associates as a group; for a total of four meetings a year.

In the past year, the Center has recruited students for a Summer Institute where they will be under the tutelage of a master instructor and interact with scholars and advocates addressing racial wealth disparities. The students all completed a research paper on an aspect of racial wealth disparities and asset building.

During the Summer Institute they will polish those papers, and gain insight on broader research areas and in translating their research into policy solutions. A lesson learned is that the Center will have to increase efforts to recruit students who can do research in the core specialty areas of the Center, and to increase the number of students who will be served. So, an important component of the grant is to actively recruit students, creating a pipeline for the project.