Webinar | Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund

The Skyline: How Two States Are Leveraging Their Unique Powers to Boost Financial Empowerment

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Katie Plat

As the federal government has stepped back from local support, state governments have made exciting inroads to support residents’ financial stability. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul and the Department of Financial Services issued innovative guidance around low-cost banking, deploying creative ways to modernize and advance banking access through regulatory infrastructure. And in Colorado, Attorney General Phil Weiser oversaw the establishment of a state Office of Financial Empowerment to centralize and expand collaborative financial empowerment initiatives and consumer financial protection awareness.

Click here to read the Skyline and learn about this important work.

And click here to subscribe and get the next issue of the Skyline in your inbox.

FEC Public: The Movement to Date

Posted on September 13, 2024October 1, 2025 by Katie Plat

The CFE Fund has spent more than a decade supporting and enhancing financial counseling as a public service, resulting in a sustainable, proven program model that works in a range of local contexts.

Click here to read more about the FEC public movement.

New Research: What Counts as Saving in Financial Counseling Approaches and Outcomes

Posted on March 5, 2018August 15, 2018 by Katie Plat

This webinar discusses data results from a two-city pilot that looked at how Financial Empowerment Center (FEC) clients are saving, to ultimately inform new savings indicators for financial counseling success.

In 2017, financial counselors at Financial Empowerment Centers (FECs) in Nashville and Philadelphia tested an innovative approach to defining, discussing, and tracking their clients’ efforts to build savings, using new savings outcomes. The CFE Fund combined counselor and client experiences with academic and policy research to operationalize the field’s thinking about how people with low incomes save, to tell a more complete story about the impact of financial counseling on savings, and to learn whether changing a program’s data system affects the way financial counselors work and the results their clients achieve.

Watch the webinar here. View the presentation here.

Read the full report on this new research here.