Overview: Financial Empowerment Center (FEC) Counselor Training Standards

This overview summarizes the Financial Empowerment Center (FEC) model’s Counselor Training Standards. The Standards delineate the breadth and depth of the financial content areas, counseling and coaching skills, practice and experiential learning, and socio-economic and cultural context setting necessary to serve the diverse needs and backgrounds of FEC clients. The Standards also include a Code of Ethics that promotes responsible, professional and ethical financial counseling, furthering the profession of one-on-one financial counseling.

All FEC partners are required to train their financial counselors in accordance with the requirements and competencies detailed in these Standards. To facilitate counselor trainings, the CFE Fund has approved national and regional training providers’ courses that align with the Standards; additionally, the CFE Fund encourages local training providers (partner organizations, training consultants, community colleges, or universities) to submit their trainings for CFE Fund evaluation and approval.

Click here to learn more about the FEC Counselor training process.

An Evaluation of Financial Empowerment Centers: The FEC Counseling Model

This brief summarizes findings about the FEC counseling process in the five FEC replication cities and is excerpted from the CFE Fund’s full report, An Evaluation of Financial Empowerment Centers: Building People’s Financial Stability As a Public Service. This brief details the relationships between FEC counselors and clients, as well as other critical aspects of the model, such as the hiring process and counselor training.

The CFE Fund hosted a 15-minute webinar on this topic; watch the webinar here, and view the presentation here.

Read the full evaluation to learn more about the FEC model.

The Professionalizing Field of Financial Counseling and Coaching – A Call for Essays

The CFE Fund issued a call for essay abstracts related to the importance of a professional approach to the field of low income financial counseling and coaching in an attempt to document stakeholders’ current thinking, their priorities, and their progress towards professionalizing this field. Submissions were included in a journal published in conjunction with a national conference on professionalizing the field held in New York City in 2016.