Financial Services

Originally posted on youthsave.org.

By Lissa Johnson and Julia Stevens, The Center for Social Development

Are YouthSave accounts attracting low-income youth? Are youth making deposits into their YouthSave accounts? Are there adjustments that would help youth to save more? These are questions we’re beginning to answer in YouthSave using data from the savings demand assessment in Ghana, Kenya, and Nepal.

Originally posted on youthsave.org.

By Rani Deshpande and Zebedee Mkala, Save the Children

Democracy: A Journal of Ideas is a quarterly publication that strives to "serve as a place where ideas can be developed and important debates can be spurred."

On May 1st and 2nd of 2012, the Asset Building Program at the New American Foundation hosted a symposium and ideas summit in Washington, DC to commemorate the 21st anniversary of the publication of Michael Sherraden’s seminal book, Assets and the Poor. Published in 1991, the book challenged the prevailing approach to welfare policy which focused on income maintenance and immediate consumption and as an alternative articulated a perspective which emphasized the role assets play in promoting social development over the life course.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the latest on poverty data, health and financial security.

Editor's Note: This edition of Asset Building News Week was authored by our new fall intern, Elliot Schreur. Elliot is a Master's of Public Policy student at the George Washington University here in D.C. Please join us in welcoming Elliot!

Yesterday, the FDIC released a new report detailing the results of the 2011 Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households (“Households” Survey). The first survey was done back in 2009. The FDIC is required by legislative mandate to survey banks’ efforts to serve the unbanked and will continue doing the Households survey every two years. Key findings from the report, as summarized by the FDIC, are:

• 8.2 percent of U.S.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include childcare, food security, housing and foreclosures, and financial products.

New York City's Department of Consumer Affairs (NYCDCA) released the second report in its "Supervitamin series." (Read more about the first report in the series here.) From the press release, the new report "examines the efforts of New York City’s Office of Financial Empowerment (OFE) to standardize the delivery of financial counseling, set ambitious client outcome measurement standards, implement a rigorous data tracking system, and professionalize financial counselor trainings." New York has been a leader of efforts to incorporate financial empowerment and asset building perspectives into public programs citywide: their "supervitamin" approach. This work has served as a model for innovation in city government efforts across the country.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the declining middle class, housing, the perils of lending, and connections between health and wealth.

A series of recent articles from the St. Louis Dispatch has been documenting a disturbing trend in Missouri: the return of the debtors’ prison. Debtors’ prisons are technically illegal in all states, and largely regarded as a relic of the past. Still, Missouri and other states are increasingly jailing people for failure to pay private debts by relying on a technicality that permits incarceration when the debtor misses a court date. The Dispatch’s most recent installment focuses on the role of payday lenders in enforcing debts through the courts, resulting in additional fees and deep humiliation for customers who end up spending time behind bars. Payday lenders, however, are not alone in enforcing such serious penalties for an inability to repay a debt; moreover, this trend can be understood as but one facet of the larger criminalization of poverty.