Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the 2010 Assets Learning Conference that brought together over 1,000 participants for three days of plenaries, workshops and sessions exploring approaches to building an economy in which all Americans, including those of limited means, are provided opportunities to achieve household financial security through savings, investment, and entrepreneurship.

As I noted in my blog post reporting on the opening plenary, a major theme of the conference was the notion of “scale” – the need and opportunity to take policies, programs, and products that have been introduced and tested in modest ways up to now and expand them to serve a much greater number and range of individuals and families. In session after session, I learned about innovative practices that are already working at the local level or in pilot programs and that community organizations, government agencies, and financial institutions are gearing up to expand.  Here are just four of the policies, programs and products from the asset building field that seem poised for a larger impact:

• The Bank On Initiative: According to a 2008 FDIC survey,  one in four U.S. households is unbanked or underbanked, which means they do not have a checking or savings account, or rely on high-cost alternative financial services. In 2006, the city of San Francisco, in partnership with banks, credit unions and non-profit organizations,  launched the Bank on San Francisco project to make it easier for the unbanked to get into mainstream banking by providing consumers with  starter accounts and financial education. Building on the success of the San Francisco program and with the active involvement of the National League of Cities, the program has spread to over a dozen cities. The Administration has now proposed $50 million for a national Bank on USA initiative “to promote access to affordable and appropriate financial services and basic consumer credit products for households lacking such access.” Read the rest of this entry »

This week I am participating, along with over 1,000 other delegates from around the U.S. and a dozen foreign countries, in the biannual Assets Learning Conference hosted by CFED in Washington, DC (Click here to follow our Twitter feed from the conference). The conference brings together a genuinely broad range of participants – including community practitioners, policymakers, researchers, public officials, entrepeneurs, and businesspeople –  united by a shared interest in the ways that assets can help create prosperity and expand economic opportunity for all Americans.

In her opening State of the Field address, CFED President Andrea Levere laid out the case for why the assets movement  has reached a defining moment. She argued that an array of programs, policies, products, and financial strategies that the asset-building field has pioneered over the past 30 year are ready to be scaled and to lay the foundation for a more just and inclusive economy. Read the rest of this entry »

An front-page USA Today article last week reported that government anti-poverty programs – including Medicaid health insurance coverage, food stamps, unemployment benefits and welfare cash assistance – are now assisting one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.  Anyone who has been following the monthly releases of our Numbers You Need bulletin is unlikely to be surprised by the trends reported by USA Today.  Oklahoma continues to see ongoing growth and record caseloads for Medicaid (just under 695,000 recipients) and food stamps (over 585,000), with fewer individuals receiving cash payments for unemployment benefits (weekly average of 36,000 initial and continuing claims) and TANF (21,640).

It so happened that USA Today published its report the day before the Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition held the first of five regional meetings around the state. These gathering are bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders to talk about  challenges facing low- and moderate-income Oklahomans and strategies for achieving economic security. The meeting began with a presentation on the Oklahoma Self-Sufficiency Standard, a tool for calculating the amount of income that families of different sizes and compositions need to meet their basic household expenses – housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, taxes and miscellaneous – without public or private support or subsidies. For a single working adult with one infant and one preschool child, the hourly self-sufficiency wage is $16.43 an hour in Cherokee County and over $21.63 an hour in Tulsa County. For a two-parent family with kids that age, each working adult would need to make $10.28 an hour in Cherokee County and $12.39 an hour in Tulsa to meet its basic needs. It’s worth mentioning that this is a basic family budget with an austere set of assumptions – it includes no meals out or entertainment, no one-time purchases, no loan payments or money put aside for savings. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition is hosting a series of regional meetings on asset building strategies for increasing the financial security of families and communities throughout Oklahoma. Anyone working in the private sector, public sector or a non-profit with an interest in how building assets can expand and strengthen economic security is invited to attend these meetings that will be held from 10:00 AM to 2:00 pm, with lunch provided, on the following days:

• Broken Arrow, August 31st;
• Durant, Sept. 14th;
• Oklahoma City, Sept. 28th;
• Lawton, Sept. 29th;
• Woodward, Sept. 30th Read the rest of this entry »

How much does an Oklahoma family have to earn to meet its basic needs? What are the major costs of a family budget, and how do these vary for different family types and in different parts of the state? How much of an impact can work  support programs like food stamps and SoonerCare have in bridging the gap between what families earn and what they need to get by?

The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Oklahoma [3 MB PDF], released last week, provides new data that can help answer these questions and many others. The Standard was developed by Dr. Diana Pearce of the Center for Women’s Welfare at the University of Washington for the Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition. The new report updates the original Oklahoma Self-Sufficiency Standard released in 2002. Over the years, the Standard has been used for a wide range of purposes, including career counseling, workforce development, grant-writing, research, and advocacy. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition(OkABC) convened a gathering of some 75 individuals from the non-profit sector and from state, local, and tribal government agencies for a day-long meeting on “Economic Security for Oklahomans: Asset Building Approaches for Assisting Families with Low Incomes”. The meeting flowed out of a series of regional listening sessions held over the past month, which brought people together in Tahlequah, Enid, Lawton, Hugo, Oklahoma City, and Shawnee to discuss the major challenges that individuals, families, and communities face in achieving economic security.

While the Coalition has a particular focus on how assets – whether tangible, financial, or personal – can help move people towards economic security, the barriers identified as standing in people’s way to being economically secure were far-ranging. Educational attainment, unstable families, lack of jobs, and substance abuse were most frequently cited over the course of the listening sessions as creating obstacles to success. Looking at existing programs and policies, the most significant gaps were seen to be in the areas of housing, system coordination and communication, and asset accumulation policies. Education, employment, substance abuse, and prisoner re-entry were also identified by many participants as areas where current programs and policies fell short.

Read the rest of this entry »