Interview with Bob Friedman: Our asset policies 'reward the rich, miss the middle, penalize the poor'

Last week, I attended CFED’s 2012 Assets Learning Conference, a biannual national gathering of practitioners, researchers, and advocates working to promote economic opportunity and fight poverty for low- and moderate-income Americans through savings, investment and ownership. Following the conference, I… Read more [More...]

Up a Creek: Scorecard shows over a quarter of Oklahomans unprepared to weather financial crisis

In Oklahoma, more than one in four households are “asset poor,” meaning they have little or no financial cushion to rely on if unemployment or another emergency leads to a loss of income, according to a report released today by… Read more [More...]

Upcoming Event: Benchmarking Asset Development in Fighting Poverty, January 12th

Assets mean economic security.  Yet impoverished families frequently lack the means to build assets.  Some are even sanctioned by public assistance programs from accumulating the wealth they need to escape poverty.  Oklahoma earned a “C” grade from the Corporation for… Read more [More...]

College savings plan–time to get serious

We’ve recently joined with CFED, a national organization dedicated to expanding economic opportunity, and the Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition, in releasing the 2009-2010 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard. Our earlier post summarized the Oklahoma results, as did several media reports. One… Read more [More...]

The racial wealth gap

It is widely known that minorities in the United States earn considerably less than Whites – according to the most recent Census Bureau data, the median income for a White household in 2008 was 34.5 percent greater than for a… Read more [More...]