September 27, 2011
The Credit Builders Alliance hosted a training for financial educators on September 27, 2011 in Columbia, Maryland.
Description: Credit Builders Alliance (CBA)’s asset-based training aims to guide practitioners to improve their delivery of financial education and credit building to people by increasing their financial management knowledge, their financial behavior decisions, and build access to credit for themselves and/or their businesses. For this full-day training, CBA challenged its partners to implement an asset-based approach to credit building through new strategies for financial capability delivery via the Credit Builder 5-Step. This approach will help financial coaches successfully deliver outcomes-oriented financial education and credit building to low-income clients in a workforce development setting.
This training included:
• A review of changes in today’s credit industry with special emphasis on changes in how different lenders use credit data, how different algorithms impact different financial products and how updates to FCRA and FACTA create new opportunities for consumers to build credit and new rights to expect accurate data and dispute errors;
• Reading and understanding credit reports and scoring;
• Helping practitioners convey the importance of credit to the financial and life activities of clients with diverse goals including those in need of employment, education, self-employment, reducing debt, positive net income, and saving;
• Integrating appropriate credit building goals and strategies relevant to a diversity of asset based approaches to financial capability;
• Helping practitioners develop and implement customized credit building action plans with their clients across a diverse set of strategies;
• Identifying relevant credit builder products existing and needed in their community, and;
• Tracking credit outcomes as measurable behavior change of their asset building activities.
September 24, 2011
University of Maryland School of Social Work's 50th Anniversary Kick-off - Bending the Arc Toward Justice
A day-long symposium on a variety of social work topics included a presentation by Financial Social Work Initiative member Branden McLeod. Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP, was the morning's keynote speaker.
Topics discussed included:
Social Work & The Workplace/Employment Issues/Unions - Kickoff Speakers – Financial Social Work Initiative member Branden McLeod, Maryland Budget & Tax Policy Institute and Heather Healy, Flight Attendants Union, Facilitators – Dr. Jodi Jacobson and Peggy Beall, PhD student.
May 17, 2011
Conference sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Social Security Administration and the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Presented by Dr. Jodi Jacobson, PhD, MSW
Assistant Professor & Chair of the Employee Assistance Program Sub-specialization at the University of Maryland School of Social Work.
PowerPoint Presentation
Issue Brief [pdf]
April 28-29, 2011
National Network for Social Work Managers 22nd Annual Management Institute
SMC Campus Center, University of Maryland, Baltimore
Members of the FSWI Steering Committee presented a panel on Building the Capacity of Social Workers to Address Financial Issues at the Individual, Group, Organizational, and Community Levels.
Panelists were:
Rebecca L. Sander, PhD, MSW (Chair)
Research Director, Social Work Community Outreach Services
University of Maryland School of Social Work
Robin McKinney, MSW
Director, Maryland CASH Campaign
Dick Cook, MSW
Executive Director, Social Work Community Outreach Services
University of Maryland School of Social Work
PowerPoint Slides from the Presentation