Demos Welcomes New Fellows Teresa Ghilarducci and Christopher Rabb
New York, NY — Demos, a national, non-partisan public policy research and advocacy center, is pleased to announce the addition of two new members to its fellows program.
Teresa Ghilarducci joins Demos as a Distinguished Senior Fellow working on issues of retirement security and social policy. Ghilarducci is the Irene and Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research. Her 2008 book, When I'm Sixty-four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them (Princeton University Press) investigates how to restore the promise of retirement for all Americans. A previous book, Labor's Capital: The Economics and Politics of Employer Pensions (MIT Press) won an Association of American Publishers award in 1992. She co-authored Portable Pension Plans for Casual Labor Markets in 1995.
Ghilarducci is a frequent contributing writing for reference journals and often testifies before Congress on retirement security issues. She is the WURF fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and serves as a public trustee for the Health Care VEBAs for UAW Retirees of General Motors and for the USW retirees for Goodyear and served on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation's Advisory Board from 1996-2001, and on the Board of Trustees of the State of Indiana Public Employees' Retirement Fund from 1996-2002.
Her research has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, US Department of Labor, the Ford Foundation, and the Retirement Research Foundation.
Christopher Rabb joins Demos as a Fellow working on issues of race, media and technology, civic engagement and entrepreneurship. Rabb is a long-time consultant, writer and speaker on the confluence of these issues, and is also the founder of Afro-Netizen, a pioneering online enterprise established in 1999, providing news, information and commentary on race, politics and society for and by people of African descent.
Rabb is a graduate of Yale College with an M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania. Over the past 15 years, he has worked on small business issues from multiple vantage points including as a legislative aide in the U.S. Senate, as a writer/research at the White House Conference on Small Business, a serial entrepreneur, a small business consultant, and a former director of a nationally recognized urban business incubator.
In 2001, Rabb was awarded the American Marshall Memorial Fellowship by the German Marshall Fund of the U.S., which placed him in Europe to study the social, political and economic systems of five countries. In 2006, he was elected as a Democratic Committee person in his neighborhood of Mt. Airy in northwest Philadelphia where he lives with his wife, author and scholar Imani Perry, and their two sons, Freeman Diallo and Issa.
Rabb currently sits on the boards of the Applied Research Center in Oakland, CA, the Bread & Roses Community Fund in Philadelphia, is a charter member of the Save the Internet Coalition, and is member of the Drum Major Institute's Netroots Advisory Council. Presently, he is writing a book for Berrett-Koehler Publishers through the Demos Books Project, tentatively entitled Invisible Capital, which analyzes the often unseen forces that shape entrepreneurial opportunity in America.
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