Over the next two weeks, Next City will unroll short profiles of 77 people, places and ideas that have changed cities this year. Together, they make up our 2012 Disruption Index. Forefront subscribers can download the Index in full as a PDF, complete with beautiful designs and graphics by Danni Sinisi. Readers who make a $75 donation to Next City will have a full-color printed copy of the Index mailed to them.
Sometimes it seems like the only way to make money is to already have money. Asset building may be one of the most effective financial strategies, but if you don’t have assets to start with, it’s hard to build on them. It was this dilemma that led to the creation of the Doorways to Dreams Fund. Think of a financial advising firm for low-income people, one that helps those with few assets make savings without breaking the bank.
D2D has certainly taken a creative approach to addressing that need. Its focus has been making technologies that keep the costs of financial advising and saving not only low, but also comprehensible. One way to achieve this is through video games. In 2008, D2D created Celebrity Calamity, a game that helps adults understand credit and spending by making them the manager of a celebrity’s credit cards. Another game, Groove Nation, combines dancing and budgeting. It’s an unconventional approach, but mainly because financial advisers have ignored the low-income population for so long. Through its innovative use of technology to communicate with people with few assets, D2D is helping to engender a culture of saving among those who never thought they could.
Nate Berg is a writer and journalist covering cities, architecture and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Metropolis, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, the Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many others. He is a former staff writer at The Atlantic Cities and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen.
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