Oregon Asset Builders’ Conference 2011

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in the 2011 Oregon Asset Builders’ Conference, which convened a range of practitioners working in the field. Topics ranged from applying behavioral economics to poverty reduction to developing a youth targeted IDA program. I was perhaps most excited about a hands-on session I attended on financial education and children where I used glitter glue and construction paper for the first time since elementary school.

While there, I presented “Recovery and Resiliency” at a plenary exploring the landscape of policy options to expand savings opportunities among lower-income households from the local to the national level. In the presentation, I give a federal policy perspective and argue that helping households build financial resiliency through savings should be a core part of the economic recovery agenda. Policies like The Saver’s Bonus and ASPIRE would do just that, and since versions of these approaches have been tested at the local level, we know that they’d work at a national scale. Hearing what’s working and what’s not by people who are working closely with the families that our work is intended to benefit is always a valuable contribution to developing sound policy, so I look forward to continuing to follow the experiences of our asset building colleagues in Oregon!