Service integration – Prosper Canada Learning Hub

The Pivotal Role of Human Service Practitioners in Building Financial Capability

This report shares remarks by Mae Watson Grote, Founder and CEO of The Financial Clinic, at the Coin A Better Future conference in May 2018.

The journey from financial insecurity to security, and eventually, mobility—what we conceptualize and even romanticize as the quintessential American experience—is one that far too often ensnares people at the insecurity stage, particularly those communities or neighborhoods that have historically been marginalized and deliberately excluded from the traditional pathway towards prosperity. Fraught with debt and credit crises, alongside a myriad of predatory products and lending practices, to a sense of stigma and shame many Americans feel because of their economic status, financial insecurity involves navigating a world on a daily basis where everyday needs are at the mercy of unjust and uncontrollable variables.

Overcoming Poverty Together 3: The New Brunswick Economic and Social Inclusion Plan 2020-2025

The new Economic and Social Inclusion plan for New Brunswick builds upon progress accomplished over the past 10 years. It includes nine priority actions divided into three pillars:

Income Security: includes actions addressing improvements to social assistance, changes to the Employment Standards Act and an increase of the capacity and sustainability of social enterprises.
Co-ordination of Programs and Services: includes actions towards a review of government programs, services and tax policies targeted to low-income individuals, and the implementation of a One-Stop-Shop service to help New Brunswickers access information and navigate government and community programs and services.
Inclusion and Healthy Communities: includes actions bringing improvement to mental and addictions services, the development of regional transportation plans, work with partners to provide inclusive opportunities for recreation activities for New Brunswickers on a low income, and the development of food programs in all schools.

The objective of the plan is to reduce income poverty by at least 50 per cent by 2030, in line with the objectives of Opportunity for All, Canada’s first poverty reduction strategy, and those of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainability of the United Nations.

Wealth and Health Equity: Investing in Structural Change

Building on the Asset Funders Network’s the Health and Wealth Connection: Investment Opportunities Across the Life Course brief, this paper details:

What we know about the health-wealth connection for adults.
Why investment in integration is important.
How philanthropy can contribute to improving health-wealth outcomes for adults.

On September 29th, AFN hosted a webinar to release the paper with featured speakers:

Dr. Annie Harper, Ph.D., Program for Recovery and Community Health, Yale School of Medicine
Joelle-Jude Fontaine, Sr. Program Officer, Human Services, The Kresge Foundation
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chief of Race, Wealth, and Community, National Community Reinvestment Coalition

Meeting the Emergency Moment: Key Takeaways from Delivering Remote Municipal Financial Counseling Services

Local governments across the United States are working to help their residents weather the health and financial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In many cities and counties, that means deploying their Financial Empowerment Centers (FECs), which provide professional, one-on-one financial counseling as a public service. Local leaders were able to offer FEC financial counseling as a critical component of their emergency response infrastructure; the fact that this service already existed, and was embedded into the fabric of municipal anti-poverty efforts, meant that it could quickly pivot to meet new COVID-19 needs, including through offering remote financial counseling.

This brief describes how FEC partners identified the right technology; developed skills to deliver counseling remotely; messaged the availability of FEC services as part of their localities’ COVID-19 response; and shared lessons learned with their FEC counterparts around the country.

Youth Reconnect Program Guide: An Early Intervention Approach to Preventing Youth Homelessness

Since 2017, the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness and A Way Home Canada have been implementing and evaluating three program models that are situated across the continuum of prevention, in 10 communities and 12 sites in Ontario and Alberta. Among these is an early intervention called Youth Reconnect.

This document describes the key elements of the YR program model, including program elements and objectives, case examples of YR in practice, and necessary conditions for implementation. It is intended for communities who are interested in pursuing similar early intervention strategies. The key to success, regardless of the approaches taken, lies in building and nurturing community partnerships with service providers, educators, policy professionals, and young people.

Building Sustainable Communities

The Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC) developed the strategy Building Sustainable Communities to tackle pressing need through an expansive network of Financial Opportunity Centers (FOCs) in dozens of communities nationwide. FOCs help clients find and maintain good jobs, stick to realistic budgets, improve their credit and save for the future. And they are located in the same neighborhoods where LISC is investing in housing and health, reducing crime, strengthening schools and re-energizing commercial corridors.

The research shows a direct relationship between the number and type of services accessed and the FOC clients’ ability to grow their earnings and secure their finances. For instance, those who spent the most time on all three bundled services offered by the FOCs (employment, coaching and public benefits) had the highest job placement rates and the highest job retention rates.

The Collaborative to Advance Social Health Integration: What We’re Learning About Delivering Whole-Person Care

The Collaborative to Advance Social Health Integration (CASHI) is composed of a community of 21 innovative primary care teams and community partners committed to increasing the number of patients, families and community members who have access to the essential resources they need to be healthy. CASHI focused efforts to improve social health practices, spread them to additional sites, and work toward financial sustainability plans.

This report discusses the key learnings and successes as a result of this 18-month collaboration to spread social health integration.

A Scan of Municipal Financial Capability Efforts

As the connection between financial capability and social mobility is made evident, both public and private actors are increasingly interrogating the drivers of personal financial health and investing in the innovation of products and services designed to improve the condition of economically vulnerable individuals.

This high-level scan of existing U.S. financial capability initiatives and the ways they fit together lends insight into the role that cities and their core institutions can play in promoting residents’ personal economic growth. This study, funded by JPMorgan Chase & Co. and executed by Urbane Development (UD), leverages
primary and secondary research to explore features of the broad range of programs and policy efforts that make up the financial capability landscape of the U.S. This examination focuses particularly on programs deployed by and within municipalities.

Consumer Perspectives on Fintech

This brief raises consumer perspectives on financial technology (fintech), and offers guidance for fintech developers on how to best serve low- to moderate-income clients.

Spurring Savings Innovations: Human Insight Methods for Savings Programs

This brief uses the experiences of participants in a service design process called the Savings Innovation Learning Cluster (SILC) to gather key insights into client perspectives and how it can be used to better program design. Four human insights research and design methods are explored—client interviews, client journey mapping, concept boards and prototyping—which can be used to develop more effective savings programs.

Financial Empowerment for Newcomers: Evaluation insights from pilot project

This fact sheet provides insights from Prosper Canada's Financial Empowerment for Newcomers pilot project conducted with three newcomer-serving organizations, Saskatoon Open Door Society (SODS), AXIS Employment Services (AXIS), and North York Community House (NYCH), who implemented and integrated financial coaching into their existing services for newcomers. The project objectives were to provide newcomer-serving front-line staff with training and resources to enable them to accurately assess newcomers’ financial literacy and connect them to appropriate information and resources and to coach newcomers to achieve successful financial independence.

Coaching and Philanthropy: An Action Guide for Nonprofits

The Coaching and Philanthropy Project was created by CompassPoint in collaboration with Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, BTW informing change and Leadership. This guide uses the data collected during the project to answer a few questions including: What is coaching? How can coaching contribute to my development as a nonprofit leader? What kind of coaching is right for me and my organization? How much is coaching? to assess and advance coaching as a strategy for building effective nonprofit organizations.

compasspoint - coaching and philanthrophy guide

2017 Bank On Data Pilot: Accessing Local Data

Bank On coalitions are locally-led partnerships between local public officials; city, state, and federal government agencies; financial institutions; and community organizations that work together to help improve the financial stability of unbanked and underbanked individuals and families in their communities. The CFE Fund’s Bank On national initiative builds on this grassroots movement, supporting local coalitions with strategic and financial support, as well as by liaising nationally with banking, regulatory, and nonprofit organization partners to expand banking access. This tool details the 2017 Bank On Data Pilot and includes instructions for accessing the local Bank On data at the city and zip code level.

Service design done right

This one-hour webinar shares insights on why service design is so valuable for organizations and businesses, and what is involved in the service design process. The purpose of this webinar is to introduce you to what service design is, how it works, and what elements of service design you can take and apply to your own work.

The speakers are:

Minyan Wong and Bonnie Tang from Bridgeable
Trisha Islam from Prosper Canada

Click 'Get it' below to access the video link, and scroll down to access handouts, slides, and video timestamps for this webinar.

Handouts, slides, and time-stamps

Read the presentation slides for this webinar:

Prosper Canada: Webinar introduction / Improving the Benefits Screening Tool
Bridgeable: Introduction to Service Design

Bridgeable’s handouts for this webinar:
Key takeaways for Service Design

Prosper Canada’s handouts for this webinar:
Benefits Screening Tool Phase 2 report
Pathways to benefits
Client Journey Map for ODSP application
Practitioner Workflows

Time-stamps for the video recording:
3:14 – Agenda and introductions
5:51 – Audience polls
9:19 – All about service design (Speaker: Glenna Harris)
11:00 – Bridgeable: Introduction to service design (Speakers: Bonnie Tang and Minyan Wong)
35:00 – Benefits Screening tool design process (Speaker: Trisha Islam)
50:20 – Q&A

Enterprise Communities Plus: A network of financial capability services in low-income housing developments in New York City

In early 2018, Enterprise Community Partners (Enterprise) began a pilot program, Enterprise Community Plus (EC+), to provide financial capability services to residents in two neighborhoods in New York City. Enterprise is a nonprofit housing developer seeking to create opportunity for low- and moderate-income people through affordable housing in diverse, thriving communities. The pilot program seeks to develop a network of service providers dedicated to supporting the housing developments and introduce rent reporting for credit building and matched savings accounts to residents. Prosperity Now joined the implementation process in May 2018.

In this brief, we provide some initial information on the participants that currently are enrolled in the program and some lessons learned to guide other organizations in their efforts to provide financial capability services into housing programs.

Integrating Financial Capability Services into Tribal LIHEAP

This brief is a companion resource to Building Financial Capability: A Planning Guide for Integrated Services (also known as the Guide) and provides real-world examples of financial capability integration efforts. The brief shares lessons and approaches for how tribal-serving organizations can integrate financial capability services into LIHEAP and other emergency assistance services.

The brief highlights the experiences of two tribal serving organizations in Alaska that integrated financial capability services: the Kenaitze Indian Tribe and the Aleutian Pribilof Island Association (APIA). It is organized into three sections: understanding households’ financial lives, deciding which financial capability services to integrate, and assessing organizational and community capacity to plan for how to deliver services.

Partenariat pour l’impact de l’autonomisation financière

Un nombre croissant d’organismes communautaires au Canada offrent des programmes qui aident à améliorer le bien-être financier des familles et des personnes dans leur collectivité. Certains de ces organismes préconisent également des changements aux politiques et aux systèmes pour faire en sorte que l’ensemble de la population canadienne, particulièrement les personnes à faible revenu, soit intégrée dans notre système financier.

Apprenez à accroître l’impact de votre organisation. Joignez-vous à EBO, Union des consommateurs et l’ACEF Montérégie-Est pour un webinaire d’une heure pour entendre Hélène Ménard, Directrice générale, Centre Éducation financière EBO; Sophie Roussin, chargée du Projet national des champions de l’autonomisation financière, Union des consommateurs; et Tanya Brodeur, conseillère budgétaire, ACEF Montérégie-Est, partager des conseils sur la manière dont les partenariats et la collaboration peuvent se traduire par des changements à grande échelle.

Financial Coaching Process Evaluation Report

This report presents the findings of the process evaluation of the Financial Coaching pilot, a part of the Financial Empowerment Collaborative in Calgary. In documenting the procedures and early thoughts of participating programs on the implementation of this pilot project, we assessed how well early goals are being met, documented some promising best practices, identified common roadblocks encountered by agencies, and compiled solutions developed in response to those roadblocks.

An Evaluation of Financial Empowerment Centers Building People’s Financial Stability as a Public Service

This report provides information on the Financial Empowerment Center model, the people it served, the outcomes they achieved, the impact services had on nonprofit and city partners, and lessons learned for others looking to replicate or support this model. The evaluation was designed as a utilization-focused, foundational and exploratory study, aimed at creating an evaluation report that was useful to stakeholders. The report includes both qualitative and quantitative sources