Berkshire County Assets for Artists

Well, after nearly two years of planning and preparation to launch an asset development program for artists in Berkshire County, I can now actually talk about real live people in the program instead of just “Berkshire County artists.”

Nine artists are about to start their training and have opened individual development accounts (matched savings accounts) to save for the down payment on a home or for small business investments to grow their artistic enterprises. I’m delighted with the group we’ve assembled:

Julia Britell is a jewelry designer based in Pittsfield whose work is sold through the Sundance catalog and many galleries and craft shows. Her work may be found locally at the Hoadley Gallery, 21 Church Street, in Lenox.

Otha Day, a Berkshire-based team-building and communications facilitator, organizes drum circles in both corporate and community settings throughout the northeast. His clients range from the multi-national enterprise SABIC Innovative Plastics, to Williams College, to Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester Vermont and Oakhill Day Care in Vermont.

Martha Flood, a Surface Pattern Designer based in North Adams, creates designs for manufacturers of wallcoverings and fabrics for the home fashion industry. This summer she is launching a newly created line of fabrics called ELEMENTS. The designs, HOOSIC WATER and BLACK CHERRY BARK, were inspired by the beautiful patterns found in Nature here in the Berkshires. Martha commissioned the fabrics to be digitally printed (in the US) on a new fabric made of 100% recycled plastic bottles. Wall hangings, Pillows and custom orders are available through the North Adams Artists’ Co-op Gallery at 107 Main Street in North Adams, Thurs. – Sun., 10-6.

Anna Kronick, a visual artist producing papercuts, stained glass, and paintings, has exhibited work all across the country, including recent exhibitions at the Lancaster Museum of Art in Lancaster, PA, and the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA. She operates the Suncatcher Glass gallery and studio at 63 Main Street in North Adams, open Thurs. – Mon., 10 – 5, except she will be closed August 7-10 for the Berkshire Crafts Fair at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington.

Deirdre McKenna is a visual artist and graphic designer working in downtown Pittsfield. She earned her BFA from The Art Institute of Boston, and has shown her works in fiber, painting and collage both with the 311 North Street artists group and during the city’s “Third Thursday” events. She is currently working on a 3-panel art quilt to be displayed in the lobby of Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield.

Robin O’Herin, a Lee-based acoustic blues and gospel musician, specializes in historically rich, often interactive concerts that include original and traditional American music. She was a finalist for the 2006 Memphis Blues Challenge and performs widely at festivals and other venues. She can be heard at numerous locations in and around the Berkshires this summer.

Monika Pizzichemi is a visual artist with a studio in Pittsfield that she shares with her husband, painter Michael McKay. Monika’s work is currently on view at the Berkshire Museum’s gift shop at 31 South Street in Pittsfield, and at her studio — empty set project space, 150 South Street in Pittsfield.

Jackie Salvaggio, a Lenox-based ceramics artisan, designs and sells clay, text-based, decorative plaques intended to uplift or inspire. Her work is available locally at Berkshire Fine Handcrafts at 431 North Street in Pittsfield.

Erica Spizz, a documentary filmmaker in North Egremont, co-directed the award winning short film Sweet Soil: Local Farmers and the Berkshire Co-op Market, which has been screened at many film festivals and was broadcast nationally on PBS. She is currently working on Judith Monachina’s Paper Mills documentary project on the history of paper making in Lee, Maurice Peterson’s improvisational short Rumpy’s, and The Model Room about the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.

Thanks to all the partners who participated in the recruitment and selection process: Berkshire Creative, MASS MoCA, MCLA’s Berkshire Cultural Resource Center, Pittsfield’s Office of Cultural Development, IS183, the Massachusetts Small Business Development Center, and Berkshire Community Action Council.

We’re now raising funds for a second round of artists to join the program in early 2009, so fingers crossed that all goes according to plan and the program continues to expand.

Home Buyers Abuzz Over Housing Bill

Who said no one’s looking to buy a home right now? 

In the last few days, over 1,200 people have visited my blog (which typically gets 20-30 readers a day) to see what I had to say about the benefits for first time home buyers in the new federal housing bill in my post on Friday. That’s practically a tidal wave considering the somewhat obscure interests of my blog.

Okay, so 1,200+ web searches on the benefits in the housing bill for first time home buyers can’t be seen as a turning point in the U.S. housing market, but at the very least it’s a reminder to me that large numbers of people are seeking home ownership but concerned about how to afford it: that dream and that concern represent an opportunity to open up a larger conversation about all the tools and steps necessary to achieve financial security.

In that spirit, I submitted the previous Housing Bill post to the most recent Carnival of Personal Finance, a weekly anthology of blog posts from the large number of bloggers focused on financial topics.  I hope that gradually more of those bloggers will become interested in directing some of their attention at the asset development field: personal finance bloggers (and their readers) represent a wealth of financial savvy and energy that could potentially help grow the capacity of asset development practitioners.

Housing Bill: New Help for First Time Home Buyers

I wasn’t paying close enough attention to this housing bill. I thought it was all about mortgage re-negotiation and foreclosure prevention (and it certainly offers help in those important areas). But I was surprised to read in today’s New York Times that it also aims at stimulating housing demand among first time homebuyers by offering a tax benefit that is essentially a 15-year interest-free loan (up to $7,500 depending on your tax status) for first time homebuyers purchasing a home between April 9, 2008 and June 30, 2009. The benefit begins to phase out for single people earning more than $75,000 or couples earning more than $150,000.

This loan (officially a tax credit/refund with required repayment over 15 years) will not make a huge difference for the average first-time home buyer, but it could have a meaningful impact on housing affordability and asset-building for lower-income home buyers (especially in combination with more substantial first time home buyer opportunities like those detailed in a previous post of mine).

The critical task will be to make sure that the beneficiaries don’t look at this as a windfall and simply use it to spend above their means without recognizing that it will need to be paid back. What I hope is that asset development practitioners and community-oriented financial professionals can help first-time home buyers set up appropriate savings or investment vehicles that allow them to put the money away, earn investment/interest returns, and have sufficient funds available in future years to make the required repayments.

No-interest loans will surely help grow the pool of capital available for asset-building strategies, ranging from home repairs and maintenance to small business development to retirement savings.

With some creative thinking, financial professionals (especially in the nonprofit asset development field) could play a huge role in helping new homebuyers maximize the value of this opportunity. We could design initiatives in which income-eligible new homebuyers receive an additional financial incentive for putting their refundable credit into a restricted investment vehicle like an IRA or a 529 college savings plan or an IDA-like custodial account. That might only impact a select number of beneficiaries directly, but it could build awareness within the broader population of new homeowners about how to responsibly invest the refundable tax credit. I could imagine some financial institutions being excited to partner on such initiatives.

Does this temporary legislation allow enough time for the field to respond in creative ways? We’ll see.

Gretchen Morgenson, The Debt Trap

Today I joined (by phone) a working group meeting of the Asset Development Commission, gathering input for ways to strengthen public policy that would encourage asset-building.

There was much interest in a New York Times article in yesterday’s paper, “Given a Shovel, Americans Dig Deeper Into Debt,” by financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson.

This is the third most emailed article in the Times at the moment, so people outside the asset development field are certainly noticing it and discussing it. The piece is part of a series called “The Debt Trap,” about “the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible.”

There are some interesting graphics and sidebars, and even a calculator to see how you compare to other Americans in terms of indebtedness, which I suspect will be popular – people like to test their own opinion of just how virtuous or irresponsible they are.

One of the most troubling statistics in those graphics is that 40% of households today are carrying a credit card balance from month to month, compared to just 6% in the 1970s.  Yikes!

After 90 minutes of discussion about public hearings, community engagement, CRA regulations, financial literacy, and savings tools, I had to hang up or my shoulder would have started to convulse (no, I haven’t entered the world of headsets yet — I still cradle the phone between head and shoulder while scribbling notes ignoring the voice of my chiropractor telling me I’m crazy).  So I missed all the solutions to this debt trap we’re in.  Perhaps they’ll be in the minutes.

Asset Development Blogagon

One of the reasons I started this blog was to help stimulate discussion about the asset development field that I find so exciting and full of promise for our country.

I can’t say that my blog has been a venue for tremendous amounts of discussion via reader comments compared, say, to the piling on that occurs at blogs like perezhilton.com (Hollywood’s Most Hated Web-Site!) or, for the tweedier set, the Times’ Freakonomics blog.

In part, that’s because the asset development field is very much a niche product, but it’s also because the field itself hasn’t been quick to adopt blogging tools and encourage a virtual community of bloggers examining the field and paying attention to each other’s posts. I could find no one blogging specifically about asset development when I launched Asset Almanac in March 2007. The Woodstock Institute had been blogging about community economic development in general since late 2005, and there were a few others interested in this kind of community work, but I still felt pretty lonely out there in cyberspace getting all worked up about individual development accounts and financial education.

Indeed, more than a year later, the asset development field still can’t claim to have generated its own blogosphere (not enough points to call it a sphere), but I can start to see the outline of a blogagon — with at least half a dozen blogs pitching their voices out into the ether on a semi-regular basis with commentary that’s directly relevant to the asset development field.

Credit Slips, the musings of seven academics on all things credit- and bankruptcy-related, is not dedicated to the asset development field specifically, but in this time of financial crisis the credit and bankruptcy woes of low income Americans are getting major attention from our field, making Credit Slips feel closely tied to our everyday work.

The Community-Wealth.org blog is less packed with analysis, but it does offer links to asset development-related news from around the country.

A great new addition to our blogagon is The Ladder, providing commentary from the Asset Building Program of the New America Foundation:

The primary goal of our program is to ensure that assets–broadly conceived–become a permanent feature of how social policy is conceived, developed, and delivered in the United States and around the world. In our view, broadening access to asset ownership is just a means for enabling people to fulfill their aspirations, achieve their goals, and reach their full potential. {You get it, right? The ladder is the means for going up to where you want to go, reach for the stars, clean the gutter, etc….

We plan to use this space make these connections and offer our commentary. As you will see, we take an expansive view of the asset building field and offer a wide range of perspectives. What we will strive to offer across the board is being on the lookout for concrete and creative ways to show how opportunity and ownership go hand in hand.

The Asset Policy Initiative of California (APIC) has created a blog that’s keeping a good eye on asset development issues, with a particular emphasis on the scene in “our country’s largest laboratory,” as I heard someone describe California.

And last but not least, I’ll mention Dylan Higgins’ blog Hear My Echo, which shares many of my own eclectic interests: we both bring more of an individual perspective than an institutional or academic voice.

All in all, I’m excited to see this explosion growth of blogging about the asset development field. I hope it picks up speed as our field continues to mature.

Speak Truth to Power

The “Power” I’m referring to is the Asset Development Commission, made up of movers and shakers in government, finance, and the nonprofit sector in Massachusetts.

The “Speak Truth” part refers to you. The Commission is holding a public hearing on Monday, July 14, from 2:00 – 6:00pm, in Room B-2 of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. This is an opportunity
for individual citizens to provide testimony (up 3 minutes each) about how they think policy makers could better support the asset-building aspirations of low- to moderate-income people. What works? What doesn’t? Which policies are changing lives, and which ones are a joke as far as ordinary people are concerned?

Not so easy for us country folk out in the Berkshires to attend such a hearing, so we’re invited to submit written testimony by July 28, 2008, which will also be considered by the Commission:

…to submit written testimony, contact the office of co-chair Representative Eldridge at 617-722-2060 or at Rep.JamesEldridge@hou.state.ma.us, or the office of co-chair Tina Brooks, Undersecretary for Housing and Community Development at 617-573-1441 or at karen.bresnahan@state.ma.us.

So testify away, in person or in writing, and please mention that individual development accounts (IDAs) are a terrific way to build opportunity for low-income people, and that our state should lead the country in its commitment to continued strong growth in funding for IDA accounts.

It’s the truth, people; speak it.

Opportunity Fund’s “Saving for Citizenship” Program

I love it when asset development practitioners come up with innovative ways to tie IDA accounts to specific social challenges beyond the generic categories of home ownership, small business development and higher education.  From refugee resettlement to the needs of people with disabilities, asset development tools are so fascinating to me for how they can be shaped to serve such a wide range of purposes.  For social innovators, the possibilities are endless.

Another great model just came to my attention through the national IDA list-serve managed by CFED: the Opportunity Fund has announced Saving for Citizenship, “a new program that will help 500 low-income legal immigrants in Silicon Valley save money to apply for naturalization and become US citizens.”

Defining citizenship as an asset with tremendous lasting value makes perfect sense, and yet it’s a leap that no one else seems to have made.  Kudos to Opportunity Fund, and to the Knight Foundation for putting $1.85 million behind that little idea.

What’s the next big sector to be drawn into the asset development vortex in a significant way?  How about IDAs for energy efficiency upgrades in homes?  I know some IDA programs allow for home improvements, but are programs already developing strategies specifically around energy efficiency in homes?  Or energy efficient vehicles?  I think some major foundation money would be interested in that model.

By the way, to join CFED’s IDA network list-serve, email idanetworklist-request@lists5.cfed.org and ask to subscribe.