How can we ensure anti-poverty programs are doing the most good for those who need them? One important step is to invest in scaling successful innovations within these programs. With government-led poverty alleviation programs reaching millions of people worldwide, these programs can model how...

A large majority of American households live in a state of financial vulnerability. Across a range of incomes, people struggle to build savings, pay down debt, and manage irregular cash flows. Even modest savings cushions could help households take care of unexpected expenses or disruptions in...

The link between economic equity and financial and economic inclusion has long been the focus of community development financial institutions (CDFI). In this brief, we first examine what scale means for CDFIs and note participants’ focus on scaling impact and their concerns about conflating size...

As city-regions across Canada continue to grow, the need for some municipal services, such as mass transit, is shifting from a local to a regional basis. This transformation is giving rise to regional servicing challenges, placing greater pressure on city-regions and their municipalities to provide...

These worksheets are to be used in conjunction with the ExpandNet/WHO document entitled Nine steps for developing a scaling-up strategy. For more extensive guidance on scaling up, see Practical guidance for scaling up health service innovations. These and other scaling up tools are available on the...

Calls for scaling up successfully tested health service innovations have multiplied over the past several years. Many acknowledge that pilot or experimental projects are of limited value unless they have larger policy and programme impact. Moreover, there is increasing recognition that prove...

This guide contains 12 recommendations on how to design pilot projects with scaling up in mind, as well as a checklist that provides a quick overview of the scalability of a project that is being planned, proposed, or in the process of implementation. Based on a combination of a comprehensive...

Aboriginal individuals, entrepreneurs and communities have been affected by financial literacy challenges in many of the same ways that lower-income people and remote populations in Canada have. However, there is the additional weight of specific cultural and structural barriers and the additional...

For the past 15 years, I have had the privilege of working at the Tamarack Institute, where we observe, document, and teach collective action to individuals and communities seeking to improve their social and economic conditions. We have landed on five core ideas to explain and teach this community...

Approaching anti-poverty work from this view point asks that we re-think the social compact between government and its constituents. It demands that we think beyond reactive policies focused narrowly on crisis intervention and preservation of the safety net, to policies that aim to proactively help...

Strategies for Transformative Scale. In their quest for answers, pioneers such as Year Up and the organizations that follow are experimenting with ways to help far more people while keeping a lid on the growth of their own organizations. Reviewing their efforts to date, we can identify nine...

As we hurtle towards a human community of 9.7 billion people by the year 2050, coupled with new technologies and the growing challenges of our planet’s carrying capacity, there is more and more discussion of systems and how they change or are created. The post-war era has witnessed an...

This System Brief describes the credit union financial literacy project. It explains the five criteria that were chosen to determine best practices, namely, targeted, interactive, accessible, scalable, and effective. Based on the analysis that came from a scan of over 60 programs, the research...

With so many households struggling to stay afloat following the recession, financial health advocates stopped to consider a critical point: How do we help consumers adopt financial behaviours that lead to improvements in their financial lives? To tackle this question, the Citi Foundation partnered...

Over the last decade, initiatives to enhance the financial stability of the economically vulnerable population have multiplied and shown promise. But there is as of yet no strategy on a national scale that addresses the unique consumer financial product and service needs of low-income and...

As evidenced by the rich array of activity documented in the course of conducting this field scan, OCS is to be commended for the amount of innovation, excitement and experimentation it has catalyzed through the various ASSET Initiative projects over the past several years. Because of this effort...