A May Day beginning for #CUFinHealth

May Day is a public holiday usually celebrated on May 1. It is an ancient spring festival and a traditional spring holiday in many cultures. Dances, singing, and cake are usually part of the festivities. Sounds good to me! What better day, then, to launch the Foundation’s new efforts to help credit unions make their members’ financial health a key part of their strategic direction.

For the past three years, the Foundation has been on a journey to focused much of its programmatic and funding work around improving people’s financial lives. From funding improvements to high school reality fairs to helping 6 credit unions do financial health check-ups for their members, to measuring the impact of credit unions’ efforts to make a difference in their members’ financial lives, the Foundation is igniting credit unions’ focus on member financial health and well-being.

Why is this so important? After the Great Recession, a variety of research was conducted to evaluate how people are doing with their finances. In the face of several startling statistics – for example, almost half of Americans couldn’t come up with $400 in the case of an emergency – it was clear that people weren’t “bouncing back” financially from the dizzying and monumental downturn of 2009-2012. Rather, they were becoming more and more financially fragile.

In fact, for the last 5 years, there has been increasing focus in the financial institution community to think about how to measure and improve consumer financial health. Work by a diverse group of entities — such as CFSI, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Credit Union Foundation and Prosperity Now — all focus on defining what is financial health, how to measure it, and what it will take to improve it.

 

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