Family & Children

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include housing, women in poverty, access to public assistance, banking, student loan debt and inequality.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the Millennial generation, homelessness, economic mobility, public benefits, and banking innovation.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include taxes, inequality, the impact of demographic shifts on retirement security, education, and housing regulation.

Rebecca Sauer is an affordable housing and community development professional in New York City.

Many people see public housing or a Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher as a crucial means of survival when wages are low and cost of living is high. Few, however, see these options as springboards out of asset poverty. Boston-based non-profit Compass Working Capital has set out to shift a common perception about subsidized housing by providing clients with asset building opportunities through robust financial coaching. Compass has collaborated with a public housing authority in Lynn, Massachusetts to implement HUD’s Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program in a way that brilliantly bridges the gaps between social welfare policy, philanthropy, and bootstrap capitalism. Six months into the program, 48% of participants had already increased their income by at least $6,800.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include our new Assets Report, welfare reform, food security, veterans, housing, tax time, alternatives to mainstream banking, economic security for the working poor, and student loan debt.

The Asset Building Program’s analysis of the President’s FY 2013 budget reveals two key trends about the accessibility of homeownership and its relationship to overall wealth over the past few years. First, the benefits of the2013 federal budget’s investment in homeownership, which are delivered primarily through tax deductions, accrue chiefly to those who already have high incomes and substantial assets. Second, the housing crisis disproportionately affected black and Hispanic families, significantly widening the racial wealth gap and creating further barriers to savings and economic mobility.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on the The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include housing, inequality, banking options, welfare, and jobs.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on the The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include young adult unemployment, student loan debt, banking products, asset building at tax time, and the racial wealth gap.

This week, host Pamela Chan talks with Schwartz Fellow Brigid Schulte and Global Assets Project Research Associate Nicole Tosh to mark International Women’s Day by discussing girl-centered poverty reduction programs and gender equality at work and at home.

Schulte, a staff writer for The Washington Post, is writing a book on the struggle of working mothers to manage the scarcest of all resources – time – in balancing work, family and their own well-being.

It wasn’t that long ago that American parents were gripped with Tiger Mother anxiety. Did we overpraise our kids in the name of promoting self-esteem? Were we forfeiting an Ivy League future for them if we didn’t force them to practice endless hours of violin or rip up birthday cards that weren’t perfect? Were we, as Amy Chua said in her best-selling memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” raising children who were “soft” and “entitled?” Now, though, it’s the French who have it figured out.