Oklahoma Assets will host a 60-minute webinar on promoting savings in Oklahoma on Thursday, March 24 from 2:00 to 3:00pm CDT.  The presentation, ‘Taking it to the Bank: Promoting Savings in Oklahoma,’ features expert speakers via conference call and on-line content exploring policies and programs that promote savings for low-income individuals and families.  Register for the webinar here.

This event is the first in a series of webinars produced by Oklahoma Assets, a coalition that aims to identify and strengthen programs and policies that help Oklahoma residents achieve economic security.  For more information about this event and the continuing series click here or email info@oklahomaassets.org 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 »

Last week, the Census Bureau released new data showing that one in seven Americans, including one out of every five children, are now living in poverty. This week, some one thousand advocates, program directors, community organizers, business owners, policy analysts and researchers are gathering in Washington for CFED’s biannual Assets Learning Conference to discuss emerging ideas for helping children and families achieve economic security and stability.

As part of the conference kick-off, several organizations that are leaders in the asset building field came together yesterday to release a new report, Lessons from SEED, a National Demonstration of Child Development Accounts. The SEED project is a comprehensive initiative, combining policy, practice, and research, designed to explore a national system of savings and asset-building accounts for children and youth. Child Development Accounts, or CDAs, are intended to give children in low-income families a “financial head start” towards economic opportunity by beginning savings from as early as birth. CDAs are generally “seeded” with an initial deposit from public or private funds, after which children and parents are encouraged to contribute to the account, often with the incentive of matching contributions. The accounts provide savings that can later be used as productive investments that provide the pathways to opportunity and security, by paying for college, buying a home, starting a business, or for retirement. Read the rest of this entry »

The Obama administration recently announced a series of measures aimed at making it easier for Americans to save.  As the New York Times article on the initiative noted, the measures are all rooted in research from the field of behavioral economics:

One key finding in that research is that people are more likely to contribute to a retirement savings account, like an employer-sponsored 401(k) plan, if they are enrolled automatically. Workers have usually had to sign up for the plan, something that large percentages of people either postponed or never did at all.

The Administration’s measures will: Read the rest of this entry »