Presented at the 2017 TEDxUNC event at Memorial Hall: CEF’s Co-Founders / Co-Directors sharing the transformative story of a group of college students and shelter residents who built a community organization and financial tools that support sustained transitions out of homelessness. The CEF Advocacy Choir sings to close out the talk, with an original song about the joy of finding a home after experiencing homelessness.
Archive | Research + Publications
CEF’s TED Talk: Homeless, and Outsaving Half of the United States
photographs by TEDxUNC
#28 – CEF TED Talk – April 2nd! Members Join Together
This Issue:
- CEF on the Radio
- Durham Members – Let’s Get Hope
- We #CelebrateSavers with Behavioral Economics!
- Advocate Training Courses at UNC and DUKE
CEF Highlighted in Common Cents Lab Annual Report
“We are honored to have partnered with CEF in this effort to improve Americans’ financial decision making.”
— Dan Ariely, Common Cents Lab Founder
“Community Empowerment Fund is an innovative and thoughtful partner that is creating real, meaningful improvements in the financial well-being of the most marginalized members of the community.”
— Mariel Beasley, Common Cents Lab Co-Director
“With Community Empowerment Fund, we redesigned goal-setting for clients who are homeless or in transitional housing, creating a process to recommend savings goals and monthly contributions based on the client’s housing and income circumstances. Additionally, we used punch cards to track deposits toward their savings goals. Clients who received the punch-cards saved, on average, 49% of their savings goal in 6 months or less.”
Yvette’s Challenge to the OC Commisioners
Yvette sings a challenge to the OC Commissioners—repping CEF & this community’s need for affordable homes #makeroomorange
WCHL – Non-profit Showcase : CEF & Maggie West
If you were looking forward to our TED Talk at UNC, and are can’t wait to hear more about CEF—Co-founder and Co-director Maggie West was featured this month on WCHL’s non-profit spotlight! If you’ve ever wondered how and why CEF got started and what keeps all of us motivated to ‘show up’ each and every day click above to listen in!
Show notes
CEF From the Start
01:00 – How did CEF start as a student organization?
01:36 – How micro-loans turned into an opportunity to saving!
02:40 – Why some people can’t or don’t have bank accounts
03:15 – Match Savings Accounts = over 700K Saved!
03:55 – From student org into a Non-Profit!
Relationships: Members and Advocates
04:40 – How is CEF’s work really about relationships?
05:20 – How do Members choose their own goals?
06:23 – Are our volunteer Advocates trained to be experts?
06:50 – How we train 200+ volunteer Advocates?
07:20- What do we train Advocate to be able to do what they do?
Nate’s Story about Saving and Housing
09:00 – Maggie shares a story about Nate, a member working with a member to save and find housing in Chapel Hill
10:00 – Nate saves and finds a $325 studio apartment!
11:00 – What happened next after Nate moved in?
11:11 – Why the landlord didn’t immediately screen Nate out?
12:40 – “We don’t rent to homeless people”
13:40 – Why Safe Savings Account works for Nate.
Students Learning ‘A Real Big Lesson’
14:00 – What do students learn by working with members?
14:40 – What do systemic barriers look like on the ground?
15:10 – What are future doctors are learning by being an Advocate?
16:55 – What else gets students prepared for this work?
17:23 – “I don’t know how to do that but I think we can figure that out together”
17:45 – Advocates are connectors!
Getting involved: Now and the Future!
18:30 – What does Maggie see herself doing in the future?
19:08 – What can a someone do to help CEF’s work?
19:20- How does CEF stay so flexible/adaptable?
19:38 – How can you reach CEF and volunteer?
Member Story: Lindsey
Meet Lindsey
Lindsey is instinctively hospitable and welcoming, but if you really want to get her talking, just ask about her son. “That, I could talk to you about for hours! ” Josh has played the saxophone since he was 6 years old and “got a scholarship for music at the University of South Carolina. He’s amazing, he’s one of the best people I’ve ever met, and of course I’m a little biased, but not much.”
Right before Thanksgiving, Lindsey moved into her own apartment after staying in transitional housing for nine months.
For as long as she can remember, Lindsey has identified as “Josh’s mom.” Now an empty-nester, she is glad to actually have her own nest in order to continue to form her future as her son continues to build his own.
Working with CEF
Lindsey connected with CEF while she was living in the Dove House, a transitional housing program run by Housing for New Hope in Durham. She was living with her parents prior to the Dove House, but when her parents moved into assisted living to support her aging mother’s dementia their family home was in foreclosure. For the first time in her life, she found herself facing homelessness.
While at the Dove House, Lindsey worked with her CEF Advocates to accomplish a whole list of goals. “Literally everything that I could have wanted, they figured out a way for me to do it. I don’t know of any other organization that could probably claim that.” Lindsey detailed a quick list:
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Making resumes and submitting job applications. “We went from having no prospects of employment to 3 at one time!”
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Expunging a dismissed felony charge from her record through connections to legal assistance, which enabled her to get the apartment where she now lives and opening up additional employment opportunities in the future
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Saving successfully to attend her son’s graduation and to move into housing. “Working with CEF has actually gotten me to build up a savings account so when I did move out, I had the money to do it.”
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Finding housing by searching all around the city and ultimately finding a great one-bedroom near her work, and getting furniture for her new home through community resources
And more! “These are resources that I didn’t even know were out there, but thanks to CEF I was really fortunate to be able to pull things together… And as a result, I have everything I need.”
Saving Early and Often
Lindsey is a big fan of the CEF matched savings account. Lindsey works as a waitress, and shares that “I come home with tip money, and it’s a good and a bad thing, because you’ve got your money right on you if you need it, but it makes it that much easier to go through it .” Yet she is a steadfast saver, quickly reaching her first goals with CEF!
Her advice for other CEF members? “Yes. Save. That’s all I can tell you, even if you think you just might take out a little just to order a pizza. That adds up.” Lindsey’s first savings goals helped her to decorate her house to really make it a home, hanging photos to “remind me of the support network that I have, and that whenever I get flustered I’m not alone, that I have people I could reach out to.”
And she is still saving even after her move! “My savings goals are to make sure that I can live day to day, and cover what my power bill is going to be and what my water bill is going to be so I can estimate and budget for that amount. But short-term I’m saving for Time Warner which will be $150, and I’ve got about $125.”
Goals and Confidence
We are delighted to see Lindsey in her own home, but we are even more thankful to hear her talk about the self-confidence she built while working with her advocates. “Your confidence gets eroded over an amount of time, especially if a lot of bad things continually happen… I became more confident!”
Janet and Yuliya work with Lindsey as her CEF Advocates, and shared what a delight it continues to be. The team would set up on the couch in the living room of the Dove House with their laptop to work with Lindsey through all the steps of her proactive plan during each weekly meeting. Yuliya, a senior at Duke, reflected, “We just learned to break it down into smaller goals because those are much more manageable and easier to accomplish, and that kind of helps build confidence. Because once you reach the first goal, you’re like, okay, that was doable, and I can reach the next step and the next step.”
The whole CEF community shares Lindsey’s joy in gaining a job, securing housing, and building savings, and given how much progress this trio made together in under a year, we know Lindsey is only just beginning to build her future with CEF!
CEF Receives GSK Impact Award!
The Triangle Community Foundation and GSK honored CEF and 9 other amazing Triangle nonprofits at the GSK Impact Awards last week! The CEF Advocacy Choir performed “Smile” to open the ceremonies and CEF Staff Member, Yvette Matthews, received the award on behalf of all of CEF.
The award comes with $40,000 to deepen CEF’s work in Orange and Durham Counties, working together with communities to transform financial and housing opportunities! CEF was recognized for our innovative work in “making homes and neighborhoods safer, connecting families to support services, and preparing people of all ages for successful careers – all important factors to improve health outcomes in underserved neighborhoods.”
#27 – Empo-Word-ment: What’s in a CEF meeting?
CEF at the 2016 Asset Learning Conference in DC
Highlights of our lessons learned, big ideas, and big takeaways!
CEF’s Program Coordinator and Operations Coordinator, Maggie West and Jon Young, rode the Megabus up to DC last month to attend the Assets Learning Conference, hosted by our friends and partners at CFED. Here’s a peek at what got us excited and where we’re taking those ideas next!
Ideas for Better Safe Safe Savings Accounts
- The Five Friday Month: A simple but catalytic idea from JPMorgan & Chase Institute on Income Volatility! During a month with five Fridays, many households have more expendable income than they do in a typical month. How can we leverage that in CEF’s matched savings programs to encourage increased savings during that time in the calendar?
- Gamifying Savings: Simple immediate incentives like congratulatory and animated texts can go a long way to reinforcing positive savings behaviors. Gamification of savings is a hot topic too, with exciting work by Commonwealth. Let’s implement these simple incentives!
- Multi-Generational Saving: So many spaces lifted the importance of whole-family, multi-generational supports, and so many spaces talked about the promise of Children’s Savings Accounts, which got us thinking. What if we could collaborate with fellow providers locally to be able to connect members to Children’s Savings Accounts
- Kickstarting Savings: We were inspired by CFPB and Earn.org’s exploration of saving account structures that incentivize deposits in the initial opening months. What if we explored adding in savings account structures that encourage initial deposits towards a ‘starter’ or monthly goal. Habits of savings could be kickstarted by a goal CEF members can reach in a short amount of time (1-3 months).
Models for Collaboration that improve the financial well-being of lower-resource households:
Financial Empowerment through Municipalities
- Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund — emphasizes that financial empowerment services should be provided as a public service by municipalities. Financial counselors one-on-one supports available writ-large, and the city contracts with nonprofit organizations to implement the program. Evaluation results coming shortly, but all signs point to fantastic outcomes!
- Credit Building through Rent Reporting:
- AHC, Inc. of Greater Baltimore has integrated financial coaching, incentivized savings, incentivized automatic bill-pay, and rent reporting for their tenants
- Partner with Public Utility companies to offer credit and cash-flow coaching!
- In the LIFT-UP Model utility companies worked closely with financial empowerment centers to refer customers who were behind on their water bill specifically in order to avoid late fees, reconnect fees, or other fees. Evaluation showed a reduction in overall debt and an increase in on-time payments from participants.
CEF’s Maggie West presented on a panel for “From Crisis to Financial Stability” at the conference!
Financial apps are “in,” and CEF has some cool tools to add to the mix!
- Lots of apps (#fintech) are being rolled out to make financial coaching and saving more accessible to providers and consumers alike. In the context of the larger, nationally scaled world of apps, CEF’s ability to create technological solutions that are hyper-relevant to our local community (like OCconnect.info) is rare and valuable.
Invaluable research and analysis about :
- According to a Federal Reserve Survey, about 46 percent of Americans said they did not have enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense. Our Safe Savings Accounts and Renter’s Savings Accounts have even more relevance than we could have guessed! Almost half of households in the country could benefit from this targeted and structured opportunity to save towards both short-term and longer-term goals.
- 60% of US households receive their income not on a monthly schedule (e.g. weekly or bi-weekly) while 60% of household expenses are billed on a monthly basis. This fundamental mismatch exacerbates household financial insecurity. This mismatch leads to opportunity in our financial coaching in terms of how we support members in cash-flow budgeting. For example, if members receive their income bi-monthly, bi-monthly payments of bills might make more sense for their cash flow.
- The Ever-Growing Gap details the need for transformative policy change in order to truly end the racial wealth divide, showing that if we continue at similar rates to date, “Black families would not reach wealth parity with White households until the year 2241.” 228 years! Read the report to learn more about CFED’s policy recommendations.
So many ideas, sessions, and conversations inspired us to deeper reflection and thoughtful action…. far too many to name here! Moreover, the opportunity to connect with groups from all over the country who share our commitment to improving financial well-being through creative and responsive strategies was reinvigorating and exciting!
