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Center for Working Families
- General |
From the foreclosure crisis to the current recession, the Twin Cities is seeing new gaps and challenges in our collective work of revitalizing communities. The Twin Cities is home to a diverse community with large immigrant populations and historic communities of color where there is a high percentage of working families that are unbanked and live at or just above federal poverty guidelines. These families are at greater risk of using wealth depleting tactics such as check cashers, payday lenders, and pawn shops.
According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s, “Building Family Economic Success” fact sheet,
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Up to 20 percent of all American households do not have an account with a bank or credit union, meaning they must pay for services like check cashing and bill paying, and they are unlikely to accumulate savings.
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Take-up rates for work supports, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, Food Stamps and child care, are well below 100 percent, and many are below 50 percent.
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Forty percent of all white children and 73 percent of all black children grow up in households with zero or negative net financial assets.
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Few low-income workers are advancing to higher paying jobs: one study found that only 27 percent of workers who earned less than $12,000 a year from 1993–95 were consistently earning more than $15,000 six years later.[1]
To address this gap and to help families build assets, the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, MD developed the Center for Working Families (CWF). The CWF is a convenient neighborhood location that helps low-income families who are already attached to the workforce increase their earnings and income, reduce their financial transaction costs, and generate new wealth for themselves and their communities through a comprehensive coaching strategy.
Since 2006, Nexus Community Partners and Twin Cities LISC have been supporting CWF models in the Twin Cities located in South Minneapolis with Project for Pride in Living and on the East Side of St. Paul with Lutheran Social Services (Common Bond Communities also operates a CWF site in the Cedar-Riverside area of Minneapolis).
By investing in long-term relationships, providing strong financial coaching and access to a bundled set of financial services and education, these organizations have been able to provide individuals a new set of supports and resources to increase economic stability and independence.
Going forward, these organizations, Nexus and Twin Cities LISC have come together to begin a strategic conversation about how we might work together to create a collaborative and regional approach to providing a new model of financial services that better meets the needs of Twin Cities residents. This network will expand and increase the impact of the CWF model, working together to increase the asset building skills and wealth of Twin Cities residents in East St. Paul, North Minneapolis and South Minneapolis.
[1] “Building Family Economic Success: Centers for Working Families”, Annie E. Casey Foundation http://www.aecf.org/upload/PDFFiles/FES/fes_cwf.pdf, 2005.