In 2011, Florida taxpayers claimed a whopping $4.5 billion in federal money that was returned to our state via the EITC. Nearly two million Florida taxpayers received an economic boost averaging $2,260. With a population just over 19 million, this means an estimated 20% of Florida’s citizens were able to take advantage of the EITC last year. This federal support for working families is our government’s main tool in fighting poverty. And yet, many taxpayers are still unaware that the EITC is available to them.
Who is eligible? Among other qualifying factors, you must have:
- Earned income in 2011
- A valid social security number
- No more than $3,100 in investment income
- Joint tax-filing status if you are married
- U.S. Citizenship or Resident Alien status for past year
Income guidelines for 2011 (for Individuals/Married):
- $13,660/$18,740 with no qualifying child
- $36,052/$41,132 with one qualifying child
- $40,964/$46,044 with two qualifying children
- $43,998/$49,078 with three or more qualifying children
You can receive up to:
- $464 with no qualifying child
- $3,094 with one qualifying child
- $5,112 with two qualifying children
- $5,751 with three or more qualifying children
For more information and to check your eligibility, go to www.eitc.irs.gov.
2.15.2012
Making Financial Education Impactful
WorkSquare wants to identify how to make financial education most impactful. Providing educational opportunities for our employees is only valuable insofar as it is the right curriculum, delivered in a way that is convenient, practicable and engaging. For low-income workers, most balancing multiple jobs and family obligations, the immediate opportunity cost of spending hours in a training session is burdensome when the perceived benefits to any training are unclear or, at best, long-term.
So what are the best practices, promising pedagogies, and new innovations in financial education that can conveniently deliver real value for our clients? Well… we’re having trouble identifying them. Our initial search shows a lot more of the same, with web-based versions of the old touted as ‘innovation’. Nevertheless, here is our initial shortlist on orgs and methodologies that we think are pushing the envelope and getting it right.
Jumpstart Coalition
Network of 149 national orgs committed to youth financial education provides a clearinghouse of materials to assist educators on the subject. Yes, this is absolutely the time to reach people and this curriculum should be a requisite for high school graduation. But what can we do when we’re too late? How to effectively access an adult working population?
Financial Entertainment: Video Games
D2D Fund has released five video games in multiple languages to deliver financial literacy education in an entertaining and engaging way. Content is geared for young adults but accessible to all. Check it out here.
Community Games
This past August, Mayor Thomas Menino used the online game “Farm Blitz” to educate teenagers participating in Boston’s Summer Jobs Program on managing personal finances. Winners earned cash prizes, deposited directly into savings accounts. Nebraska Credit Unions sought to stimulate savings with the allure of lottery winnings with their “Save to Win” game offered at nine credit union branches. Depositors opened more than 11,000 accounts and deposited nearly $9 million in savings, often by people with no other savings, in hopes of winning a $25,000 grand prize or dozens of smaller monthly prizes.
Financial Coaching
I was fortunate to be invited to a training on financial coaching for low-income put on by United Way last year with the Santa Fe Community College. Coaching offers a framework in which the participant is empowered to set her own financial goals and make progress toward them, while the coach focus on holding clients accountable in a one-on-one setting and providing relevant educational information as needed. This is the most impactful pedagogy I have seen. Downside? Time- and cost-intensive for participants and providers. Check out “Financial Coaching: A new Approach for Asset Building?”, Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2007.
We are following RAND Corporation’s Financial Literacy Center and others to stay on top of what’s new. If you have other sources or ideas, please send. We have hundreds of low-wage workers in need of your good ideas!
So what are the best practices, promising pedagogies, and new innovations in financial education that can conveniently deliver real value for our clients? Well… we’re having trouble identifying them. Our initial search shows a lot more of the same, with web-based versions of the old touted as ‘innovation’. Nevertheless, here is our initial shortlist on orgs and methodologies that we think are pushing the envelope and getting it right.
Jumpstart Coalition
Network of 149 national orgs committed to youth financial education provides a clearinghouse of materials to assist educators on the subject. Yes, this is absolutely the time to reach people and this curriculum should be a requisite for high school graduation. But what can we do when we’re too late? How to effectively access an adult working population?
Financial Entertainment: Video Games
D2D Fund has released five video games in multiple languages to deliver financial literacy education in an entertaining and engaging way. Content is geared for young adults but accessible to all. Check it out here.
Community Games
This past August, Mayor Thomas Menino used the online game “Farm Blitz” to educate teenagers participating in Boston’s Summer Jobs Program on managing personal finances. Winners earned cash prizes, deposited directly into savings accounts. Nebraska Credit Unions sought to stimulate savings with the allure of lottery winnings with their “Save to Win” game offered at nine credit union branches. Depositors opened more than 11,000 accounts and deposited nearly $9 million in savings, often by people with no other savings, in hopes of winning a $25,000 grand prize or dozens of smaller monthly prizes.
Financial Coaching
I was fortunate to be invited to a training on financial coaching for low-income put on by United Way last year with the Santa Fe Community College. Coaching offers a framework in which the participant is empowered to set her own financial goals and make progress toward them, while the coach focus on holding clients accountable in a one-on-one setting and providing relevant educational information as needed. This is the most impactful pedagogy I have seen. Downside? Time- and cost-intensive for participants and providers. Check out “Financial Coaching: A new Approach for Asset Building?”, Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2007.
We are following RAND Corporation’s Financial Literacy Center and others to stay on top of what’s new. If you have other sources or ideas, please send. We have hundreds of low-wage workers in need of your good ideas!
2.03.2012
Scaling a Social Enterprise? Help please...
Deep dark confessions of a social entrepreneur: Scaling often seems like mission impossible when the required ingredient – standardization – is meant to apply to (1) customers, who – by definition – have non-standard barriers to participation, and (2) operations whose success has required a customized dose of empathy and supportive services to get the job done.
Examples from the world of job placement for the hard-to-employ? Waking up at 3am worried that a skilled Kreyol-speaking Dishwasher scheduled to start a new job at 7am will not be successful if he’s unable to communicate sufficiently with his Spanish-speaking supervisor. Receiving a 6am phone call from an employee who had her wallet stolen last night, explaining that she’s unable to come up with bus fare to get to work unless we can quickly get her a cash advance. These and scores of other everyday scenarios are cause for the frequent forehead slap and lament: “How in the world do we ever scale this???”
Vikram Akula’s A Fistful of Rice had the great insight that scale requires two things – standardization of services and a technology that can enable volume. The first of these means a drastic reduction in the custom-tailoring of solutions that we socially-minded operators like to offer our customers in the name of being helpful. Individualized attention has its place, but McDonald’s did not become McDonald’s by asking customers how they like their burgers cooked. We can’t provide all solutions to all people and need to be ready to quickly refer to other service-providers when a need is outside the scope of our mission. Akula’s second ingredient of scale also requires an intense minimization of variables, lest the technology become so over-complicated that it impedes usability and makes iterative development cost-prohibitive. I’ve made this mistake. Ouch.
As Matthew Forti points out in his Stanford Social Innovation Review blog, Ensuring That ‘Scaling What Works’ Actually Works, much of what makes many social enterprises ‘successful’ are idiosyncratic or qualitative factors that prevent them from scaling cleanly. How to get around this and develop a model that is truly scalable? Please, send ideas…we need them. In the meantime, a few of our best practices and ideas on how we might continue to move toward the goal of scale:
1. Create a financially self-sustaining model that eliminates risk of funder-induced operational and mission creep. As a profitable company, we have few concerns raising capital.
2. Minimize the number of products/services we offer, ideally to ONE. This involves saying “no” and “I’m sorry, we can’t help you” to a lot of people, which most of us are not good at. This is a work in progress.
3. Create partnerships with other service-providers to refer customers quickly and efficiently to other organizations that can address those needs that fall outside our scope (e.g., language training, legal assistance, etc).
4. Find or develop the technology required to provide our one service automatically, remotely, reliably and conveniently, with processes in place to respond quickly to inevitable problems and aberrations.
Examples from the world of job placement for the hard-to-employ? Waking up at 3am worried that a skilled Kreyol-speaking Dishwasher scheduled to start a new job at 7am will not be successful if he’s unable to communicate sufficiently with his Spanish-speaking supervisor. Receiving a 6am phone call from an employee who had her wallet stolen last night, explaining that she’s unable to come up with bus fare to get to work unless we can quickly get her a cash advance. These and scores of other everyday scenarios are cause for the frequent forehead slap and lament: “How in the world do we ever scale this???”
Vikram Akula’s A Fistful of Rice had the great insight that scale requires two things – standardization of services and a technology that can enable volume. The first of these means a drastic reduction in the custom-tailoring of solutions that we socially-minded operators like to offer our customers in the name of being helpful. Individualized attention has its place, but McDonald’s did not become McDonald’s by asking customers how they like their burgers cooked. We can’t provide all solutions to all people and need to be ready to quickly refer to other service-providers when a need is outside the scope of our mission. Akula’s second ingredient of scale also requires an intense minimization of variables, lest the technology become so over-complicated that it impedes usability and makes iterative development cost-prohibitive. I’ve made this mistake. Ouch.
As Matthew Forti points out in his Stanford Social Innovation Review blog, Ensuring That ‘Scaling What Works’ Actually Works, much of what makes many social enterprises ‘successful’ are idiosyncratic or qualitative factors that prevent them from scaling cleanly. How to get around this and develop a model that is truly scalable? Please, send ideas…we need them. In the meantime, a few of our best practices and ideas on how we might continue to move toward the goal of scale:
1. Create a financially self-sustaining model that eliminates risk of funder-induced operational and mission creep. As a profitable company, we have few concerns raising capital.
2. Minimize the number of products/services we offer, ideally to ONE. This involves saying “no” and “I’m sorry, we can’t help you” to a lot of people, which most of us are not good at. This is a work in progress.
3. Create partnerships with other service-providers to refer customers quickly and efficiently to other organizations that can address those needs that fall outside our scope (e.g., language training, legal assistance, etc).
4. Find or develop the technology required to provide our one service automatically, remotely, reliably and conveniently, with processes in place to respond quickly to inevitable problems and aberrations.
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