We're sharing what we learn as we go. Read our latest blogs along with reports, new and old, to find out how we're working with partners through community-centered design and Family-Centered Coaching.
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Beginning in 2016, GST Michigan Works and SEMCA Michigan Works participated in research with ABT Associates, Mathematica, and the Office of the Administration for Families and Services to understand more about the impact and implementation of a coaching approach for people receiving cash assistance. The Prosperity Agenda trained selected staff at both agencies on an approach that was called Michigan Goal Progress Success (MI-GPS), which combined the Career & Life Coaching model (see report below) we developed and some supplementary tools, like the Bridge of Strength. Following the the research, we returned to SEMCA and …
Emerging Research: Optimizing Coaching for Family Experience at GST Michigan Works Read More »
It is often implied that families experiencing poverty make bad financial decisions–that if they were better money managers, they would not be in poverty at all. This harmful narrative underlies too much of the financial education offered (sometimes mandated) to these same families. Financial education can better help people achieve their financial goals by prioritizing social connection, creativity, and confidence. Financial education optimized for these experiences can counter the shame and embarrassment that often accompanies talking about money when you don’t have any. We learned these lessons as part pf three year project in Washington …
Evaluating Money Powerup Packs in 7 TANF Sites in Washington State Read More »
We know that money is already often weighing on the minds of people experiencing poverty. And during these times of extreme uncertainty, people’s main financial concerns become even more immediate rather than long-term. The National Endowment for Financial Education found that 7 out of 10 people are concerned about their finances during COVID-19 and nearly half described themselves as very or extremely concerned. The list is long, but people are especially worried about job security and having enough emergency savings to weather this storm. To better understand how organizations could deepen their conversations about money …
Taking Action on Financial Wellness in Times of Stress Read More »
Employers have the responsibility and opportunity to protect worker and customer safety, create pathways to wage growth, and invite employees to use their full set of talents at work. Based on three years of extensive research and testing with over 200 frontline workers, their managers, and organizational leaders, The Prosperity Agenda developed this Working Together – A Strategy Brief for Employers. We developed this for employers who want to foster personal, organizational, and economic resilience. Leadership, Human Resources, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion teams can apply these strategies to create healthy and resilient workplaces and …
We are excited to announce that our work to co-design Money Powerup Packs with guidance of low-income families is featured in the inaugural issue of Journal of Participatory Research Methods. This new journal is committed to showcasing interdisciplinary practices related to participatory research methods in the poverty alleviation field. When we started the Savings Initiative Project in 2016, we had some thoughts on why families in poverty may have low savings. Most obviously, they don’t have enough income to save money. This remains true for millions of families in the U.S. who face underpaid and …
Family-Guided Innovation: How We Made Money Powerup Packs Read More »
By Sylvia Raskin Most traditional goal setting methods, such as SMART goals, overvalue the importance of setting goals without offering a reliable process to make progress. These tools or programs also tend to overemphasize goal-achievement as the ultimate marker of success. Even for someone who regularly completes goals they set, the time spent accomplishing goals is very small compared to the time spent working towards them. While tools similar to SMART goals help think about what might happen, they do not incorporate what does happen: surprises or roadblocks along the way. Without offering ways to …
Practice is Progress: Moving To Strengths-Based Goals Read More »
By Franceria Moore Traditional case management has sometimes viewed the family as something to be fixed or a problem to be solved. This minimizes or forgets that every family brings strengths to the table and that families know best what they need. Because of funding requirements or organizational mission, coaching approaches can also sometimes focus on only one aspect of a parent’s life. To support families holistically, human services must put participants in the lead and hold a wide view of family interests. Family-Centered Coaching is an approach to coaching families towards goals that are …
By Franceria Moore There is no doubt that the current COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the way that many human service providers are approaching the work that they do with families. In many cases, the crisis only exacerbates the current financial challenges of families. Despite this, communities continue to exhibit ingenuity and resilience in how they navigate financial choices. We are all experiencing, at varying degrees, a collective trauma. Collective trauma happens when an event has a traumatizing psychological effect on a group of people of any size, up to and including a whole society. These …
By Daan de Jong The Prosperity Agenda believes that taking a systems approach to poverty alleviation creates better outcomes for those experiencing poverty. Conversations with people connected to this system as either social service providers or recipients uncovered a trend: spending time with peers who share common goals builds valuable relationships. FSG’s “Water of Systems Change” framework defines relationships as “quality of connections and communication occurring among actors in the system, especially among those with differing histories and viewpoints”. FSG acknowledges that “transforming a system is really about transforming the relationships between people who make up …
Immigrants and refugees are an important segment of the population to include in financial opportunity on a moral and ethical basis. Many financial capability programming have focused on increasing engagement and inclusion of these communities into mainstream financial resources. However, this has often been done by focusing on the individuals’ knowledge, skills, and ability to access resources. By engaging communities in a design-process, we learned that their challenges with engagement are steeped in strained relationships with these institutions and don’t necessarily have to do with individual knowledge or the products they are offering. We determined …
Trust Is Worth Investing In: Financial Inclusion for Immigrant and Refugee Communities Read More »
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