Collaboration Corner - KY/OH
United Way Hosts Financial Stability Summit
Guest Article by Terry Grundy of the United Way of Greater Cincinnati
A high priority of United Way’s Agenda for Community Impact is that families and individuals should achieve financial stability and United Way invests about $5.8 million per year in an array of financial stability programs. These investments, while important, represent only a fraction of the total support from all sources (public and private) going into financial stability strategies.
In fact, public and private sector funders support a myriad of programs designed to help low-income households achieve financial stability: job readiness and job training programs, career pathways programs, public sector work support programs (food stamps, SCHIP, Medicaid, subsidized child day care), EITC, Individual Development Accounts, some financial services products targeted to low-income households, credit repair programs, microenterprise programs, homebuyer counseling programs, and financial education programs for youth and adults.
Each of these strategies helps those who benefit from it directly but many community leaders believe that our overall approach to promoting financial stability for low-income households is not achieving breakthrough results. There are several possible explanations as to why this is the case:
- Local strategies to helping people reach financial stability do not work together as an integrated, high-performing system;
- We do not have in place some high-impact strategies employed with good success in other communities;
- The public policy framework for financial stability work militates against the success of our efforts.
To test these hypotheses, United Way retained the services of a consultant researcher who has conducted a review of many aspects of our community’s financial stability services effort. The researcher, Mark McDaniel, of the Center for Community Capitalism at the University of North Carolina and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, has focused his investigation on Hamilton, Kenton and Campbell Counties – a more manageable scope than a study of the entire region. It is in these three counties that the region’s poverty population is concentrated.
The goal of his research program is to advise United Way and other key stakeholders on strategies to make local efforts more effective. He is helping us find the way to make our local system more responsive and integrated – calibrated to meeting our region’s economic and labor market realities while meeting the needs of low-income individuals and families in a coherent way.
Mr. McDaniel’s will communicate his findings to key constituencies at an all-day Financial Stability Summit set for June 17, 2008 at Xavier University. The objectives of the Summit include building political will for system integration and the implementation of new high-impact strategies, and aligning the efforts of key constituencies for needed public policy changes at the national, state and local levels. United Way will help to convene a series of meetings by key stakeholders to implement the decisions taken at the Summit.
United Way and co-sponsor Strive invite all stakeholders to the Financial Stability Summit. For details and to register, please contact Deby Davis at 513-762-7225 or deby.davis@uwgc.org. McDaniel’s report – Showing the Way: The Path to a High-Performing Regional System for Family Financial Stability – is available from United Way after June 17, also by contacting Deby Davis.