By Jill Winsor
We’re still hard at work thinking about Children’s Savings Accounts and how we can design something that directly addresses the needs and desires of the communities we are most interested in reaching – communities with low and moderate incomes who need support to prepare for and save for educational opportunities after high school.
We are in conversation with Oregon State Treasury and the Oregon College Savings Plan; and we are grateful to our Steering Committee and our Technical Advisory Committee for their help lifting up our goals and values in those conversations. Some of our top level goals are to serve and invest in ALL kids, design an universal and automatic account structure, and build a savings platform that is easy to use and understand.
We are also staying on top of all of the research and data we can get our hands on. This week, we’ve been reviewing Prosperity Now’s Scorecard to catch up on the most recent collection of data about the financial well-being of Oregonians. We’re also gaining insight from the Brandeis Institute for Assets and Social Policy recent report: Cultivating CSAs: The growth and spread of Children’s Savings Accounts in New England.
As we move forward, we will continue to ground truth our ideas by looping back around with community members with low incomes to see how they think Children’s Savings Accounts for Oregon should work. That’s what this effort is all about, building something designed with the input of the intended users so that we know we’ve got it right.
To learn more about this effort, contact Jill Winsor at jwinsor@neighborhoodpartnerships.org.