Building Family Financial Capability Through Community Partnerships: Helping Families Build Wealth

Building Foundations for Economic Mobility: Webinar 7

Kiersten Beigel: Greetings, welcome to the next webinar in the Office of Head Start's Building Foundations for Economic Mobility series. Glad you can make it today. I know many of you are still coming in the door, so to speak. My name is Kiersten Beigel; here's me and I work at the Office of Head Start and I'm excited to see so many of you that are continuing to take the time from your busy lives to join us and participate in these conversations we've been having over the last many months. Last month, we focused on community partnerships to help families build financial literacy skills using the Money Start and Your Money, Your Goals resources from the FDIC and Consumer; it stands for Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.

Today's conversation will continue along this theme of community partnerships such a central aspect of this work and we will focus on ways that Head Start grantees can partner with some local organizations to help families achieve financial security and build wealth. That's by maximizing their income, increasing their savings and protecting their assets. So, today we're going to be joined by some guests from CentroNia and Capital Area Asset Builders. These are two community organizations with a long history of supporting low-income working families in the District of Columbia.

So, we're really excited to hear their stories and their work and we're really grateful that they can be with us today. As always I do hope that you will use the Chat Box to post your questions and comments to the presenters and to each other. We really, really love the level of engagement, interaction we've been seeing on these webinars. So, please chat away and we know it's a really valuable part of coming together in this forum for you kind of to learn from each other and get ideas from each other. So, I'm going to turn things over to the folks who are going to be engaging us more intently around the topic, Anna Lovejoy from the National Center on Parent, Family and Community Engagement, take it away.

Anna Lovejoy: Thanks, Kiersten. Hi everybody welcome back to another of our monthly webinars. I'm just really excited to be here today. I just wanted to take a quick moment to thank everybody for indulging us in our gardening metaphor. We got a kick out of all of the answers that we saw come through. It was amazing; everybody saw themselves in different roles from being the seeds, to the planter, to the rain, to the soil, to the, you know, all kinds of. And Kiersten, I loved your response was that you see so many of us as the sunshine that helps everything grow so I just, we just thought that might be a fun way to set up the conversation, get our creative thinking flowing and have a little bit of fun as we head into this important topic today.

So we have an exciting program for you. As Kiersten said, please feel free to use the Chat Box as you all are always so good at doing, to introduce yourselves to each other and to share resources and to react to the ideas that you hear and we’ll enjoy each others' learning from each other throughout the day today.