My posts from the recent Children & Youth Savings Conference can be found over at the conference blog. I didn’t take pictures, so you’ll just have to imagine the scene. Thanks to the CFED staff for a great conference.

CFED promised to post the slides from each session on their website eventually. Keep an eye out for that.

Made it to Brooklyn today, with the family in tow, feeling like country bumpkins as we left behind the dirt road in Vermont for a few days in the big city. The girls can’t stop singing “NYC” from Annie. My older daughter is a fan of The Apprentice. She looked out the hotel window, saw a limo go by on Adams Street, and screamed “There’s Donald Trump.”

The conference kicked off with a nice reception tonight. Some of the welcoming remarks came from Jonathan Mintz, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs. His words really resonated for me. He noted how the unfortunate tragedy that has been unfolding with our country’s economic crisis has made this a time of tremendous opportunity for people working in asset building and financial empowerment. New ideas and initiatives at all levels of government and civil society are taking root and gaining traction thanks in part to the urgency that people feel about our broken economy. It felt almost as if he knew all about SaveTogether and could have been referring to our project specifically.

I’ve already had the chance to talk up SaveTogether to a number of interesting people at the conference. They all seem really excited about what we’re doing. And I was able to meet a few CFED people face-to-face whom I had talked with on the phone and by email these past months but had never actually met in person. I can tell it’s going to be a busy and exciting few days.

Less than 48 hours until the start of CFED’s National Children & Youth Savings Conference. Should be a hoot. That is, if your idea of a hoot is learning about the latest in financial education and matched savings strategies for children and youth, which happens to fit within my definition of a hoot.

As conference blogger, I’ve been able to read the bios and aspirations of some of the other “scholars” who will be attending thanks to the generosity of conference scholarship sponsors including the College Success Foundation.

It’s an inspiring array of visionaries, from a woman who developed a children’s savings account program in a community in Puerto Rico serving “every child born within the municipality’s boundaries ” to another woman who was the “project leader for launching the Texas Saves YouTube Build Wealth Video Competition…where high school teens were encouraged to create 60-second PSAs on why savings is important.”

Representatives of some long-time leaders in the asset-building and youth services fields are among the scholars, including Southern Good Faith Fund in Arkansas and CASA of Oregon. But there are also emerging leaders of much younger organizations such as Bik’eh Hozho Community Development Corporation serving the residents of native American reservations in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, and Jr.Finance Literacy Academy in Grand Prairie, Texas.

As usual, I’m sure I will feel it’s far too little time to connect with all the people I would like to introduce myself to at this conference. But even meeting a fraction of them will make the trip tremendously worthwhile. Hope to see you there on Sunday.

My little artist IDA program that could is still huffing and puffing up the mountain toward sustainability: I think I can. I think I can. (If you don’t have young kids, this classic children’s book reference is probably lost on you and I just sound weird.)

State funding for IDAs is looking precarious for next year (this has been my program’s main funding source so far), but even with that door closing another may be opening. A municipality in my region is kind of enamored with this concept of serving low-income artists through matched savings accounts. They’re also working aggressively on a consortium proposal for a massive grant (by the standards of our region) from the National Stabilization Program, a HUD initiative responding to the foreclosure crisis.

Putting two and two together, they reached out to me to discuss how my matched savings program for artists could somehow be simultaneously scaled up and geographically targeted to support artists in the re-use of land-banked property. My head is spinning with the possibilities and complications, but I’m intrigued and I do think there would be a way to make it work. Such a tight geographic focus on a specific set of properties would probably require sweetening the match, loosening the financial eligibility criteria somewhat, and implementing a distance-learning curriculum for the financial education so as to be able to cast a wide net for low- to moderate-income artists who may be living outside of our region but would be interested in this opportunity to move here (with appropriate preparation beforehand) thanks to the combination of a generous savings match, financial education, and related assistance. Ideally, it would not just target first-time homebuyers, but could also be open to renters who will make business-related investments that benefit the productive re-use of the land-banked properties.

I’d love to find out if others are contemplating how to incorporate matched savings and other asset-building tools into National Stabilization Program funding streams.

CFED has done me the honor of naming me a “Scholar” for the 2009 National Conference on Children and Youth Savings, June 14-16, in Brooklyn. That means I get in for free and CFED pays my lodging and travel. Rock on, CFED! This redeems me just a little for all those college scholarships I didn’t get while slacking off back in the day.

But like many a budding scholar seeking financial aid, I have to put in some work-study. This scholar will be blogging like mad to earn his meals and a seat during the plenary sessions. If you see a guy feverishly typing away on a laptop while everyone else is refilling their coffee between sessions, that will be me.

And you’ll notice some shameless pre-conference plugs from me during the coming weeks, like this reminder about the clock running out on discounted lodging (for all you non-Scholars out there):

Less than one week remains for the room block at the Marriott New York at the Brooklyn Bridge. Register and make your room reservation before Monday, May 18 in order to secure the great rate of $229/night. You won’t get a better rate at this beautiful, state-of-the-art hotel! Please note that all participants must register for the conference before making hotel reservations. Lodging information will be provided to all registrants as part of their confirmation materials.

Don’t wait to make those room reservations. This is going to be a great conference, for scholars and slackers alike.

I like CFED’s moxie. During quite a few sessions of Congress, CFED has pushed for the Savings for Working Families Act, which would provide a funding vehicle to greatly expand and transform the matched savings field. Every time, the legislation has failed to be enacted. I believe it did come up for a vote in the Senate twice and actually passed there, but has never been voted on in the House.

Not to be deterred, CFED is pushing it again in the 111th congress, and now it has ballooned from a 900,000 account program to a 2.7 million account program (with $120 million for financial education). Perhaps it needed to be a bit more ambitious to get the attention of congressmembers.

I received an email from CFED today urging supporters to take action:

Request Cosponsors!

Click on TAKE ACTION to send an email to your legislators requesting they cosponsor the bill.

The effort to enact The Savings for Working Families Act (SWFA) in the Senate is being led by Senators Lincoln (D-AR), Lieberman (I-CT), Kerry (D-MA), Bunning (R-KY), Snowe (R-ME) and Collins (R-ME).

In the House, the original cosponsors are Representatives Pomeroy (D-ND), Schwartz (D-PA), Pitts (R-PA) and Brady (R-TX).

Last Congress, SWFA garnered a record level of bipartisan support with 127 cosponsors in both chambers, including 27 Senators and 51 Republicans! The Senate passed the IDA Tax Credit bill twice. Many national organizations, financial institutions and businesses support the IDA Tax Credit.

CFED has put together a helpful overview of the program to describe the benefits from the point of view of nonprofit organizations with existing asset-building programs. This version of the bill provides enhanced opportunities for nonprofits in the asset-building field to benefit, which I hope will increase the number of citizens advocating on its behalf. CFED claims that the bill has an excellent chance of passing in this session of congress.

I hope my Vermont congressmen will get on board as co-sponsors. In the 110th congress, Rep. Peter Welch was a co-sponsor, but I’d like to see Vermont’s Senators, Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy, support this effort as well.

It will be interesting to see whether the current economy helps increase the appreciation of congressmembers for the importance of savings incentives, financial education, and restoring the practice of thrift.

It’s great to see that CFED is organizing a conference around the burgeoning interest in matched savings accounts for children and youth — also known as children’s development accounts. Great speakers like Dr. Michael Sherraden (godfather of the asset-building field) and Gary Stangler of the national Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative are on the schedule.

And best of all, the conference is in New York (Brooklyn), so it would be relatively easy for me to attend and there are people I could stay with.

I don’t have direct experience with matched savings accounts for children and youth, but youth savers will certainly be among the target market for SaveTogether, so I need to get more familiar with this ground-breaking work.

The conference wraps up on June 16, better known (although not widely known) as Bloomsday, after Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which takes place in the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. Perhaps the featured speakers at the conference that day will deliver their remarks in stream of consciousness. I don’t see any Joycean bar-hopping on the program, but I’m sure impromptu toasts will be encouraged.

I think I need to get in touch with CFED and ask if they’d like me to blog the conference in exchange for free admission.

The other day I decided to reach out to a couple of sustainable agriculture organizations in western Massachusetts to encourage them to think about a beginning farmer IDA program.

Living out in the sticks (rural Vermont, that is), I’m particularly intrigued by the idea of matched savings accounts to assist start-up farmers. I’ve written a couple of times on this blog about the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Individual Development Account Program funding in last year’s Farm Bill, which was included as a $5 million per year item, although the actual dough has yet to be included in an appropriations bill, which is required before the Department of Agriculture can launch the program.

I haven’t heard back from either of the people I emailed, so perhaps they don’t find it such an interesting idea. But today I came across an organization called California FarmLink, and they seem to like the idea enough that they went out and started a farmer IDA program back in 2003 before the recent federal Farm Bill program was even a glimmer in some congressman’s eye. Indeed, it sounds like the success of their program (and their advocacy efforts) played a significant role in convincing congress to include the beginning farmer IDA program in the Farm Bill.

Now they’re organizing an advocacy effort around getting the $5 million program into the 2010 appropriations bill. I plan to put in a call to my congressmen, and I urge others to do the same.

Click here to get the details from California FarmLink.

It’s tempting to think about re-naming my blog “Did You Hear What They Said Over at the Ladder?” and just have all my posts be rip-offs of the New America Foundation’s blog on asset-building.

I resist that temptation, mostly because I assume that most anyone interested enough in asset-building to read my blog has probably been a reader of the Ladder for a while. But I can’t resist noting their recent pointer to a CNN opinion piece by New America staffer Alejandra Lopez-Fernandini. It’s a great piece on how we shouldn’t misinterpret the need for fiscal stimulus in a recession and assume that individual households should be discouraged from saving too much (which is a message that many people hear in the media today). Alejandra explains how saving helps vulnerable households reduce risk and increase the probability of their solvency at a time when the last thing we need is more bankruptcies and foreclosures. It also makes funds available for investment by businesses that can put those funds to productive use.

She was able to articulate so well what many of us in the asset-building field have been struggling to explain to ourselves and others during the past half-year of economic crisis.

In so many ways, the world is discovering what advocates of asset-building have preached for the past decade: that we need to encourage saving and investment, not consumer debt and personal spending; that financial education and home buyer education are critical to success in making home ownership more accessibile; that a strong economy is built on the foundation of small businesses and human capital, not wall street wizardry.

The latest example comes from no less an authority than Time Magazine in their recent feature, “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.” Time’s first world-changing idea: “Jobs are the New Assets.”

The cognition you’ve got up there in your head — your education and training — it’s worth something. We can extract value not just from our homes and our portfolios but from ourselves as well. The mechanism for extracting that value? A job. “The income you earn from working is like the stream of interest income you might get from owning a bond,” says Johns Hopkins University economist Christopher Carroll. “Think of it as a dividend on your human wealth.”

Human capital is worth quite a lot. Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist, figures that in a modern industrialized economy, 75% to 80% of a person’s economic output comes from human capital (as opposed to, say, land or machinery). Of course, during the bubble years (first stocks, then housing), the noneconomists among us didn’t exactly think about it that way. “People became mesmerized by how rich they were,” says Becker, “and didn’t realize the crucial asset they had in their earning power.”

I’ll admit, I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with post-secondary education as one of the major “asset goals” for individual development accounts (IDAs). The hard assets (home ownership, small business) are a bit easier for me to wrap my head around.

In just 10 paragraphs, this article in Time makes the most convincing case I’ve heard for why Michael Sherraden and the other architects of asset-building programs were right on the money to include education (human capital) as one of the big 3 asset categories. It’s absolutely worth a read, as are the other nine ideas on the list.