From mattress money to checking accounts: a profile of Bank on San Francisco

Unbanked

Bridging the Gap: Overcoming Barriers to Immigrant Financial Empowerment in Northwest Queens

Every day, immigrants in Northwest Queens struggle to find work, obtain legal status, and manage their finances. While immigrant consumers are an integral part of the New York City economy -- spending and saving money and paying taxes -- many face multiple barriers to financial empowerment. This means that many immigrants struggle to build the kind of wealth that could enable them to buy a home, pay for higher education, save for retirement, and lead to overall long-term economic stability and security. While many immigrant consumers do save money, many do not trust mainstream financial institutions because they do not provide linguistically or culturally competent services. Others are concerned about hidden or excessive fees. As a result many immigrant consumers utilize fringe financial services that tend to be predatory and exploitative

Researching Across Two Cultures: Shifting Positionality

Embodied and creative research methods provoke honesty, emotion, and vulnerability in participants, which add to the richness of the stories they tell and are willing to share. The positionality of the researcher is less of “interviewer” and more “co-producer” or participant in a dialogue. Visual and creative approaches invite participants to share in ways in which they are not able or willing through words alone. The data and outputs they produce, with film, art, or objects, can in turn affect those who see it more than written text and need to be analysed and disseminated along with more traditional transcripts, articles, and presentations. In the context of investigating sensitive issues such as those around embodied identity, these methods, which use embodied methods to explore embodied research questions, may feel the most appropriate. These approaches lie along the boundary of therapy and research, asking much of researchers who are unlikely to have received therapeutic training or ongoing support. Due to this deficit, the researched may find that their experience is not held or contained in a way that the content would demand. Similarly, the data themselves lie on the boundary of art and research, in that they can be seen as more than a tool to facilitate reflection, but as artifacts in their own right. What are the implications in this scenario? Where should we position ourselves and our work along these boundaries? Who holds the space for the researcher and the researched if both are made vulnerable

Building Community Assets: Growing Lower-Income Credit Union Membership through Community and Credit Union Partnerships

This report details the partnership process and lessons learned from a two-year technical assistance program designed to help community organizations partner with mainstream credit unions with the goal of enrolling new lower-income members or expanding an existing partnership. The case studies describing these partnerships identify four strategic areas through which partnerships can be strengthened and the common barriers to developing a successful partnership can be overcome

Creating a Pathway to a Better Financial Future: Developing State Strategies for Asset Development and Wealth Creation for People with Disabilities

Dedicated economic advancement strategies - such as savings and building assts, homeownership, and entrepreneurship -- are increasingly viewed as an important part of public policy efforts to give people with disabilities expanded access to the labor market. While no single program, policy, funding stream, or strategy to build assets has proven to be a universal solution for the multiple challenges encountered by low income individuals and their families, a variety of tools and strategies are being implemented by federal, state and local governments and communities to help lift disadvantaged wage earners - including workers with disabilities -- out of poverty. This brief introduces basic asset development concepts, tools, and activities that states can use as a framework for developing comprehensive, integrated state asset development strategies for people with disabilities and their families

Building the Financial Vitality of Border Families

Highlights community foundations' efforts to implement the Family Economic Success anti-poverty strategies in the U.S.-Mexico border region through partnerships across sectors, benefits to the families and foundations, challenges, and recommendations

Better Together: From Siloed to Relational Organizational Design

The impacts of historical inequities continue to limit access to quality outcomes for all learners in British Columbia. Organizational structures that separate and isolate efforts to create equity persist in BC school districts. Riverstone School District has attempted to disrupt the norm of siloed and discoordinated efforts by merging several central office support departments to offer increasingly wholistic and effective support to schools and the families they serve. However, despite the best intentions and despite now sharing physical space with one another, the departments have not yet merged effectively; isolated, conflicting efforts persist. This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) offers a vision for an interconnected and coordinated support services unit, one better positioned to offer wholistic and effective support and leadership to schools as they strive to create environments where every learner thrives. Through the collective leadership of meso-level leaders, members of the Learning Services Collective (LSC) will focus efforts on increasing their relational coordination—that is their mutual respect, shared knowledge, shared goals, and accurate communication and problem solving. The change implementation plan follows the relational model of organizational change which embeds a monitoring process throughout as members co-construct their way forward, checking in periodically with an evaluation tool. Throughout, LSC members mobilize their knowledge through a collaborative inquiry process. This OIP serves Riverstone School District’s goal of enabling all students to thrive and the district’s core values of collective responsibility, integrity, connection, well-being, and diversity

Building Community Assets: A Guide to Credit Union Partnerships

The purpose of this guide is to help community organizations enable their members to join a mainstream credit union and begin building modest assets. Many credit unions offer financial products and services tailored to the needs of low-income people, but mainstream credit unions have not historically reached this population. Partnering with community organizations expands a credit union's membership while giving community organizations the tools to help their members build assets