The Equity Factor

5 Mayors Win Awards for Keeping Their Eyes on the Money

The CFE Fund applauds city execs who are prioritizing financial empowerment for citizens.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh launched the city’s Office of Financial Empowerment last October. (Credit: The City of Boston)

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In recent years, local governments have been setting up financial empowerment centers to demonstrate a commitment to educating citizens about personal finance.

But a handful of cities have gone above and beyond to show the connections between financial education and making strides in other areas: homelessness, domestic violence, incarceration and workforce development.

Yesterday, the Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund (CFE Fund) awarded the mayors of five cities (Boston, New Haven, Oakland, San Jose and Shreveport) with the Next Generation Municipal Empowerment Award in recognition of their efforts to expand financial services.

“These five cities showed more than a polite interest,” says Jonathan Mintz, president and CEO of the CFE Fund. “They showed a real, genuine passion for thinking about the ways they could use their power, use their programs, use their politics to advance financial empowerment within their administrations.”

In Boston, Mayor Marty Walsh jumpstarted the integration of financial wellness screening into other social service programs. (The effort will be run through the Office of Financial Empowerment, which I wrote about last fall.) “They’re really thinking about how to structurally ensure that at the various touch points — where people are in need of and consuming social services — that people are able to connect to financial counseling and other financial empowerment opportunities,” says Mintz.

Each award consists of a $20,000 planning grant that comes with technical assistance from the CFE Fund. Mintz acknowledges that on the scale of a city budget, it’s not a lot of money, but notes that “these mayors did not apply for this grant because $20,000 was going to change the face of what they were able to do. … I think the money is about recognition that [they’re doing] something tangible from the start.”

In New Haven, the city will be working with partners from Yale University to develop financial programs for the homeless and former prisoners reentering their communities.

“I think that these are critical and difficult populations who are being transitioned in two cases from one side of the line of instability to the other side of the line,” says Mintz. He says the planning happening in New Haven demonstrates the city will be able to help people “make smart, efficient, cost-effective choices about what to do with income, how to deal with debt, dealing with credit card or identity theft issues and really just be more colloquial about personal finances.”

“This is a great opportunity for New Haven, allowing the city to create meaningful opportunities for low-income residents to build wealth and become more economically secure,” said New Haven Mayor Toni N. Harp in a statement. (The other winners were Oakland’s Libby Schaaf, San Jose’s Sam Liccardo and Shreveport’s Ollie Tyler.)

Financial empowerment isn’t just about education, but about programmatic services, according to Mintz. The crisis of 2008 showed city governments that these issues destabilize families and communities, and eventually catches up to cities as a whole.

“Why we’re so excited about this new mayor’s program is that it represents not only an opportunity to help five brand-new mayoral administrations think about the work, but I think it also represents the mainstreaming of municipal financial empowerment.”

The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Alexis Stephens was Next City’s 2014-2015 equitable cities fellow. She’s written about housing, pop culture, global music subcultures, and more for publications like Shelterforce, Rolling Stone, SPIN, and MTV Iggy. She has a B.A. in urban studies from Barnard College and an M.S. in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Tags: mayorssocial services

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