Cities For Financial Empowerment Fund Inc

Programs: Summer jobs connect (sjc):through sjc, the cfe fund works with 16 city governments to develop a national model for using the scale and infrastructure of municipal summer youth employment programs to integrate financial empowerment strategies and achieve greater impact. In addition to directly funding over 2,000 youth job slots each summer, the cfe fund is supporting municipalities in developing targeted financial education and banking access strategies that take advantage of the paycheck opportunity.

bank on:bank on supports local efforts to ensure that everyone has access to safe, affordable banking. Program accomplishments include: the release of the first-ever bank on national account standards, and the accompanying movement of the market to meet the standards; the creation of an infrastructure to evaluate and validate accounts that meet the standards; the creation of a platform to facilitate and aggregate financial institution reporting of data about bank on accounts; the launch of the bank on capacity grant fund to support local coalitions, and the awarding of 34 grants; the establishment of the bank on fellowship in five cities to demonstrate what full-time coalition leadership can accomplish; and additional technical assistance efforts aimed at helping financial institutions and municipal leaders upgrade and reinvigorate local bank on programs.

financial empowerment center (fec) replicationthe cfe fund works with cities to offer professional, one-on-one financial counseling as a data-driven, free public service. After supporting replication of the model for three years in five cities (where partners served close to 30,000 clients who reduced $34 million in debt and built $4. 4 million in savings), the cfe fund is now working to scale this model to up to 50 local governments. The cfe fund is supporting rolling cohorts of partners to plan for, launch, and implement the fec model as a public service, while also working to further professionalize the field of financial counseling and coaching.

additional cfe fund programs include: supporting the cfe coalition, an invitation-only group of 15 cities on the cutting edge of municipal financial empowerment; promoting efforts to professionalize and expand financial counseling as a public service; developing consumer financial protection agencies within local government; and providing intensive technical assistance to help cities and other government leaders embed financial empowerment strategies into programs and infrastructure.