Reflecting and Planning Using a Community Wealth Building Lens
Over an organization’s 25 years in existence, how do staff and volunteers measure impact and build off of lessons learned to guide their next steps forward?
Income Is How You Get Out of Poverty, Assets are How You Stay Out
In our work to build communities of opportunity where low-income people and people of color can thrive, we must acknowledge that income is how you get out of poverty, assets are how you stay out.
Can Using a Racial Equity Lens Increase Capital in Communities of Color?
If CDFIs adopted traditional appraisal standards to determine loan amounts, they'd make very few loans in the communities they were founded to serve.
Is Financial Unsteadiness the New Normal?
A yearlong analysis of 200-plus households suggests that we should add a third leg to the financial security stool along with income and assets: cash flow.
CDFIs Led By People of Color Face Financial Disparities Too
A lack of access to capital, capacity-building resources, and technical assistance significantly constrains the ability of CDFIs led by people of color to achieve greater impact.
Is Rags to Riches the Right Measure?
Comparative income quintiles don’t tell us very much about the material conditions of people’s lives. When someone rises into the top fifth, someone else falls into the bottom fifth.
Discouraging the Voter
We’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again, but, in Michigan—which is shaping up to be a crucial swing state in the presidential...
College Bound: A Look at Children’s Savings Accounts
Children's savings accounts for higher education, even those that have accumulated only small amounts of money, can change expectations for low-income students and they might also provide a vehicle for larger wealth transfers.
Why Giving Up on Homeownership Is Giving In
These ideas aren’t new, but pulling them together in a collective, coherent way will push back against those who, like their predecessors of 80, 70, 60 and 50 years ago, would deny long-term stability to those for reasons more than just the color of their money.
Building Prosperity—A Review of ‘The Making of a Democratic Economy’
A review of "The Making of a Democratic Economy: Building Prosperity for the Many, Not Just the Few," by Marjorie Kelly and Ted Howard
Does the Current Reliance on Credit Scores Deny Deserving Applicants?
Last week, we asked readers if credit scores were too much of a driver in home loan approval. You answered overwhelmingly that yes, credit...
Border Patrol
The U.S. Census Bureau recently released Income, Earnings, and Poverty Data from the 2007 American Community Survey, and with it announced a new class...
Can Estate Planning be Used to Help Preserve Economic Assets in Low-Income Communities?
Estate planning should be employed as part of a broader plan of preservation of wealth and assets in communities of color.
In Which a Skeptic Is Won Over to Child Savings Accounts
While I am a firm believer in equal access to higher education for all, it’s over-emphasized in our individualistic culture as a solution to society’s woes.
Financial Coaches, Let’s Be Upfront About Economic Structural Racism
Financial education messaging is too often presented as if individual behavior and attitudes are the cause of our growing economic challenges rather than our social, economic, and political systems.
Homeownership Without a Net
Despite some new reforms, low-income households buying homes outside the traditional mortgage market are still at tremendous risk—and often legal limbo.
The Reports are In: Homeownership Rising, Renters Suffering, Income Gaps Growing
City Life, Homeownership, and the American Dream
Americans' impressions of cities are improving, according to Fannie Mae's 1997 National Housing Survey, City Life, Homeownership, and...
Unstacking the Deck for African-American Entrepreneurs
The truth is most entrepreneurs’ firms don’t grow quickly, employ people, or earn much money. And, more importantly, entrepreneurial success has far less to do with exceptional skill than with one’s ability to weather repeated failure and financial loss.
Shelter Shorts, The Week in Community Development—Sept. 21
News from—and affecting—the community development world.
In LA, a New Resource to Pull Families Back From the Financial Brink
Regardless of income level, a family that is just getting by is locked in a state of stress and vulnerability.