Mapping the road toward increased accessibility to the child tax credit
Last year, the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) helped to lift nearly four million children out of poverty and provided economic relief to millions of struggling households. However, many first-time and lapsed filers from underserved and vulnerable populations missed out on these critical benefits. Locating and serving eligible low-income youth, formerly incarcerated individuals, people experiencing homelessness, immigrants, survivors of domestic violence, and isolated tribal populations has presented a challenging opportunity to free tax prep service providers across the country.
This research highlights the key findings and recommendations to increase the accessibility to the CTC.
Responding to Client’s “Now, Soon, & Later” Needs
This is a three-part webinar series exploring how practitioners, policymakers, and product developers are supporting the diverse savings needs of LMI households during the ongoing crisis. Solutions that help families save flexibly for short, intermediate, and/or long-term goals that address their current and future needs are discussed.
Virtual VITA Toolkit: Program Strategies
Program strategies grounded in an understanding of your community can increase the likelihood of engagement and follow-through. The following resources are intended to support VITA programs with implementation strategies at key program stages, like outreach and intake, and offer examples of how other virtual VITA programs have addressed critical challenges.
2019 Financial Coaching Network Bi-Monthly Peer Call Series
These calls, featuring guest practitioners, cover a variety of topics most pressing to the financial coaching field, provide useful tips and resources and serve as a peer-learning platform.
Topics include:
Prosperity Now Scorecard Cost-Of-Living Profiles by State
Prosperity Now has created state-level Cost-of-Living profiles as new features on their Scorecard website. The Prosperity Now Cost of Living profiles provide a comprehensive look at the financial stability of every person living in the United States. Each state profile can be downloaded and used to determine the true cost of living is in the state, based on median monthly income and discretionary spending left at the end of each month after expenses. These values determine what is left over for emergency expenses and long-term aspirational expenses.
This video presents the cost of living in Georgia.
Human Insights Tools & Resources
Human insights are used when designing programs and improving services through understanding clients’ hidden preferences, environment factors and behaviors. The Human Insights Tools from Prosperity Now are intended to take you through the process of discovering opportunities for innovation from clients’ point of view, designing solutions to meet those needs, and testing your ideas to ensure they bring about the needed change.
Tools and resources are presented for each of the discover, design, and test phases.
Prosperity Now Scorecard
The Prosperity Now Scorecard is a comprehensive resource featuring data on family financial health and policy recommendations to help put all U.S. households on a path to prosperity. The Scorecard equips advocates, policymakers and practitioners with national, state, and local data to jump-start a conversation about solutions and policies that put households on stronger financial footing across five issue areas: Financial Assets & Income, Businesses & Jobs, Homeownership & Housing, Health Care and Education.
Giving Savings Advice
This is one video in a series of videos catered to Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program volunteers on how to introduce the savings conversation to tax filers during the tax filing process. This video shows what the savings conversation could look like at a specific point in the tax preparation process: when entering dependent information. The video also includes examples of commonly heard reasons tax filers give for not wanting to save, and possible responses.
Talking About Savings
This is one video in a series of videos catered to Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program volunteers on how to introduce the savings conversation to tax filers during the tax filing process. This video discusses why promoting savings at tax time is a critical component of VITA volunteers.
Why Community Foundations Make Perfect Partners for Children’s Savings Account Programs
In this brief, we articulate why collaboration between community foundations and CSA programs is in their mutual interest. We describe the variety of roles that community foundations can play in promoting the growth and success of CSA programs, and then identify the primary challenges encountered by community foundations in supporting CSAs. The brief concludes with key lessons learned about collaboration between community foundations and CSA programs.
This brief was designed primarily to educate CSA practitioners and community foundation staff about the benefits of collaboration. It may also be of interest to a wider audience in the fields of asset building and philanthropy. The ideas and findings in this brief are based primarily on in-depth interviews and in-person meetings with board members, executives and senior staff from three community foundations.
Analyzing the Landscape of Saving Solutions for Low-Income Families
To address challenges around savings, the asset building and financial services fields have developed an array of solutions that attempt to support savings and wealth accumulation. However, the landscape of savings solutions is complex, difficult for households to navigate, and full of solutions that are not designed specifically for low-income and low-wealth households.
This brief examines the savings challenges that households face, their underlying causes, and a vision for new solutions.
More Than Just Taxes
Tax time financial capability services offered at Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites range from encouraging taxpayers to save a portion of their refund to free credit reviews, to referrals to financial coaching, and others in between.
This report from Prosperity Now summarizes research findings on VITA programs offering asset-building and financial capability services. Specifically, findings address barriers to be overcome, facilitating factors, and the opportunities for targeted outreach, tailored messages, and policy improvements to move the needle on Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) take-up rates.
Financial Coaching Program Design Guide: A Participant-Centred Approach
This comprehensive resource from Prosperity Now supports organizations in developing a participant-centered financial coaching program. Grounded in a field survey, over 100 interviews, expert advice and beta-testing with six new financial coaching programs, the Coaching Guide highlights the strengths and limitations of financial coaching, offers designs tools, showcases promising models and practices, and includes resources from program leaders and financial coaches.
A Growing Movement: The State of the Children’s Savings Field 2016
The Children’s Savings Account (CSA) movement has taken off in the past few years. These programs provide long-term savings or investment accounts and savings incentives to help children build savings for their future. In 2016, CSA initiatives started in a diverse range of locations, such as Durham, NC; Boston, MA; and Worcester, MA. In 2017, we expect several more program launches, including in places like Oakland, CA, and Milwaukee, WI. Based on a recent survey, this document offers a snapshot of this growing field, illustrating the range of program models being customized to meet the needs of the communities and states these programs serve.
Cities and States Developing Creative Approaches to Fund Children’s Savings Accounts
Children’s Savings Accounts (CSA) are proving to be a powerful tool for growing college funds and building children’s aspirations for their future. CSAs are long-term, incentivized savings or investment accounts for post-secondary education that help promote economic mobility for children and youth. Advocates have found that the idea and goals of CSAs can be appealing to policymakers from across the political spectrum. However, while able to generate initial interest from policymakers, advocates often find that their efforts can stall when it comes to the question of how to fund a program.
This paper provides advocates and policymakers with several funding options—including examples from the city and state-levels—for establishing publicly-supported CSA programs. For more information about CSAs in general, please visit savingsforkids.org.
