Municipal Financial Empowerment: A Supervitamin for Public Programs
Strategy #2: Professionalizing the Field of Financial Education and Counseling

About the Report:

This Report, the second in a series about the “supervitamin effect” of improved social service outcomes when integrating financial empowerment and asset building strategies into public programs, details New York City’s efforts to provide high-quality, effective financial counseling at scale and professionalize the field itself. The Report further highlights the City’s understanding that to realize the supervitamin effect of integrating financial counseling, such counseling must be of consistent, demonstrable, and superior quality.

The need to professionalize this field is critical given widespread variability in the quality and consistency of current financial education and counseling programming, the importance to recipients of counseling services, and the supervitamin effect that financial empowerment programming can have when successfully integrated. Efforts toward professionalization undertaken by the Department of Consumer Affairs Office of Financial Empowerment (OFE) include establishing standardized client outcomes with a rigorous data tracking system, developing intensive financial counselor trainings, standardizing the approach to financial counseling, and developing a professional network of practitioners.

My Role:

As a Financial Education Associate at the OFE, I conducted background research to understand already existing trainings and courses for financial counselors in other municipalities around the nation. I was also a co-author of the report.

 

Read the full report: Supervitamin Report 2