Family Finances

Centering the Margins: A Framework and Practices for Person-Centered Financial Security Policy

December 15, 2020  • Financial Security Program & Rachel Black

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As of October, around 12 million people, disproportionately Black and Latinx households, had yet to receive their Economic Impact Payments. Further, less than 60 percent of the 33 million UI claims made by the end of May had been paid. The visibility and scale of these failures have brought renewed attention fixing the longstanding inadequacy, inaccessibility, and unresponsiveness of the nation’s financial safety net.

To change these outcomes, we have to flip the current top-down model of policy design, replacing it with a person-centered approach. In this paper, the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program in partnership with Springboard to Opportunities identifies a set of practices for applying a person-centered framework to the design and evaluation of financial security policy.

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Download the paper today to read about how Springboard to Opportunities, a Black-women led, community-based organization, implemented its “radically resident-driven” ethos — and what policymakers can learn from this model.

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What does it look like when policy is accountable to those the policy is intended to serve? NEW @AspenFSP & @SpringboardToOp report makes the case for a people-centered approach to financial security policy that is holistic, systemic, and power building.