Laura Cordisco Tsai teaches the Economics for Social Workers and Microfinance courses at CUSSW. Ms. Tsai is a social worker who works in the field of international development, focusing primarily on economic interventions for formerly trafficked women. Ms. Tsai has lived and worked in ten countries in Asia since 2001, largely in Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines. Her work includes the co-management of an IFC-GBI grant for the development of social enterprise job creation programs for women formerly trafficked into forced prostitution in Vietnam, Laos, India, and Nepal. Ms. Tsai has worked as a social impact advisor for Insitor, a social venture capital fund based operationally in Cambodia that provides equity and equity-like funds, technical advising, and management support to social entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia. As a consultant, she also spearheaded the development of a community-based economic self-sufficiency program for formerly trafficked women in the Philippines.

Ms. Tsai currently oversees the management of a couples-based financial education, financial advising, and savings program for new parents in the Philippines in collaboration with a local maternity health clinic. She also presently serves as the Project Director for an NIH-funded feasibility study to test a savings-led microfinance intervention combined with HIV prevention on reductions of sexual risk behaviors among women engaging in sex work in Mongolia. Given the economic foundations of human trafficking, her dissertation research focuses on the economic survival strategies and financial management practices of formerly trafficked women who have reintegrated to their home communities in the Philippines. She holds a BA in Education and Human Development from Brown University, MSSW in Social Enterprise Administration from Columbia, and is currently a doctoral candidate at CUSSW. She is also proficient in Thai.

Last updated December 02, 2011.