Financial empowerment efforts best achieve high-quality scale and impact when they are integrated into, and led by, local government. Across the country, city and county leaders have turned to financial empowerment strategies to build their residents’ financial stability, with a number of localities moving beyond a single program or policy to a dedicated Office of Financial Empowerment.
Across more than a decade of work and 100+ city and county partner experiences, the CFE Fund has seen the importance of dedicated leadership to catalyze other opportunities, like connecting financial empowerment to Mayoral priorities, fundraising opportunities, and policy efforts. With generous support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the CFE Fund is supporting cohort of local leaders to launch and lead a newly established local Office of Financial Empowerment through our Financial Empowerment Cities (FE Cities) initiative.
Through the FE Cities initiative, the CFE Fund supports cohorts of local leaders, trained in a two-year training program. Each OFE Leader will work with the CFE Fund to launch and lead a newly established local Office of Financial Empowerment, managing existing and launching new financial empowerment programs and initiatives. OFE Leaders will also serve as the local government’s internal financial empowerment consultant; bring a financial stability lens to a range of related issues; and leverage their leadership role to ensure financial empowerment is central to local anti-poverty efforts. OFE Leaders also will be well-positioned to bring financial empowerment services and expertise into local racial equity efforts.
If you have any questions, please contact Kant Desai, Senior Principal.
Thank you to our many municipal and funding partners for making this pandemic-era program such a bold and nimble success. Across 31 cities and counties, trained navigators helped thousands of residents identify and then access public resources targeted to address their individual needs.
This program also has informed the CFE Fund’s new Emergency Financial Empowerment program. To learn more about either program, please contact Sol Vilera Ramos, Manager.
The Financial Navigators initiative helped residents deal with the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, providing remote assistance in navigating critical financial issues and making referrals to other social services and resources. With support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Citi Foundation, JPMorgan Chase & Co., and the Wells Fargo Foundation, the CFE Fund partnered with 31 local governments across the country, providing them with technical assistance and funding to launch a new public Financial Navigators program.
Trained Financial Navigators provided structured guidance over the phone to help people strategize around supports for disruptions to their income and other financial concerns. They helped residents triage financial issues, identify immediate action steps, and make referrals to other services. Assistance included managing expenses through prioritizing payments and when to make them, as well as maximizing income through ensuring receipt of federal payments, unemployment benefits, and other resources. In partner cities and counties across the country, helping residents navigate the financial impact of COVID-19 through the Financial Navigators initiative was a critical part of front-line emergency response efforts.
The CFE Fund’s CityStart initiative, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, offers local governments a structured approach to identify financial empowerment goals, convene relevant stakeholders for sustainable success, develop actionable strategies, and ultimately craft a blueprint that is rooted in local insights and opportunities – all with a deliberate racial wealth equity lens.
This two-phase action engagement connects critical insights about the impact of financial instability on municipal governments with tangible, sustainable strategies to improve families’ financial lives. The first phase of the initiative is a learning phase, where the CFE Fund and municipal partners look to analyze the local landscape, including systemic wealth extraction and accumulation impacting racial wealth equity; collect relevant data; and engage in intensive stakeholder roundtables to identify key challenges and opportunities. This also includes a deliberate resident engagement effort. Based on issues identified in the learning phase, as well as administration priorities, the CFE Fund works with local government partners on a design phase to craft a comprehensive, government-led financial empowerment blueprint. Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Greenwood Initiative, whose mission is to accelerate the pace of Black wealth accumulation in the U.S., is advising the CFE Fund and municipal partners on the design and execution of the CityStart program using a racial wealth equity lens.
The CityStart initiative stems from the CFE Fund’s extensive work with local government leaders, and connects critical on-the-ground insights about the impact of financial instability on families, communities, and municipal budgets with tangible, measurable, and sustainable municipal strategies to improve residents’ financial lives, especially those of Black residents. CityStart cities have historically leveraged their engagement with the CFE Fund to further their commitment to this work. The CFE Fund recently selected the third cohort of CityStart grantees with a specific racial wealth equity focus; grantees are Buffalo, NY; Chicago, IL; Indianapolis, IN; Little Rock, AR; and Philadelphia, PA.
If you have any questions about the CityStart initiative, contact Sol Vilera Ramos, Senior Associate.
People work hard to provide for their families and improve their financial circumstances. And while community organizations and social services across the country invest heavily in helping them, at the same time vulnerable communities have long been targets of fraudulent, predatory financial products and services. Just as local governments play an increasingly meaningful role in financially empowering their residents, they also can play a unique role in protecting residents’ hard-earned assets.
Building off of work begun by former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray, and NYC Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) then-Commissioner Jonathan Mintz, the CFE Fund was tapped to help local governments across the country develop and enhance their capacity to offer their residents consumer financial protection and empowerment. Local consumer protection agencies can augment financial empowerment gains by protecting consumer assets through licensing, regulation, enforcement, mediation, and outreach and education. Learn more about opportunities for local governments to protect their residents in the consumer financial marketplace on our new mini-site, www.protectinglocalconsumers.org.
In 2017, with generous seed funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the CFE Fund selected four local governments to launch local offices of consumer protection. These cities have each successfully launched their efforts, developing consumer complaint infrastructure, identifying enforcement priorities, and pursuing legislative reforms. The CFE Fund selected a second cohort of local administrations in 2020 to raise consumer awareness of and protect residents from COVID-19 related scams, and continue planning for broader consumer financial protection capabilities within the city, and selected a third cohort in 2021. The CFE Fund recently released a new opportunity for a fourth cohort of municipal partners to join the Local Consumer Financial Protection initiative, with applications due August 14. To learn more about the opportunity, watch our recent informational webinar here (password JdE=+20K).
Please contact Kant Desai, Senior Principal, with any questions or to learn more.
Summer Jobs Connect is an ambitious initiative spearheaded by seed funder the Citi Foundation and the CFE Fund to support young adults seeking summer employment, enhancing these municipally-led programs by integrating structural linkages to safe and appropriate banking products, services, and education. To date, the CFE Fund has worked with 25 city governments and their local Summer Youth Employment Program partners to provide additional job positions to local residents of predominantly low incomes between the ages of 14 and 24, as well as connect them to appropriate bank and credit union products and meaningful financial education.
The CFE Fund is supporting cohorts of new cities or counties interested in learning how to integrate banking access and financial education into their Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEPs), through Summer Jobs Connect Academy. Summer Jobs Connect (SJC) Academy will guide cities and counties through each step of planning out their SYEP programming to improve youth financial outcomes and includes significant CFE Fund technical assistance, access to planning resources and information, and participation in a robust national learning community. Mid-way through SJC Academy programming, partners will have the opportunity to qualify for a grant of up to $50,000 to launch banking integration partnerships in their community.
Through the CFE Fund’s leadership, our city partner’s efforts and the Citi Foundation’s seed support of almost $40 million, Summer Jobs Connect has provided over 15,000 young people with summer work experience and connected financial empowerment services. Other supportive funders include The Skillman Foundation and the PNC Foundation. Beyond a seasonal paycheck, Summer Jobs Connect positions early job experiences as entry points for lifelong success in the financial mainstream.
Bank On coalitions are locally-led partnerships between local public officials; city, state, and federal government agencies; financial institutions; and community organizations that work together to help improve the financial stability of unbanked and underbanked individuals and families in their communities. In addition to connecting people to safe and affordable accounts, Bank On coalitions also work to raise public awareness, target outreach to the unbanked, and expand access to financial education.
The CFE Fund’s Bank On national initiative builds on this grassroots movement, supporting local coalitions with strategic and financial support, as well as by liaising nationally with banking, regulatory, and nonprofit organization partners to expand banking access, including through the first-ever Bank On National Account Standards, updated for 2023 – 2024. The CFE Fund announced an online Bank On account validation and certification process; banks and credit unions across the country, at no cost, can submit for validation products they believe meet the national Standards. The list of financial institutions offering such products continues to expand across the country.