Dennis Matthews’ life is unrecognizable since he enrolled in the IDA program. In 1999, Dennis was $10,000 in debt, had lost his job and had taken a new job with a 45% salary reduction. “I was in so much trouble,” he says. “The cost of living was so high.”

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In 2006, CFED supported a Duke University masters student, Mark McKeag, in conducting a survey of IDA practitioners to determine their priorities for service delivery and their interest in participating in a network to receive such services. We learned that practitioners ranked fundraising assistance, public awareness, and operations support as their top priorities. Practitioners' preferred methods of service delivery are internet-based and in-person methods, such as the 2006 Assets Learning Conference. Mark McKeag then summarized the findings from the survey in a report, Expanding IDA Participation Through Collective Action, that explored two main ideas for development: a nationwide network to bring together key stakeholders and provide needed services, and a national match fund to match the savings of low-income asset-builders. As CFED delves further into these ideas, we will be in close communication with the asset building field.

The IDA field has grown tremendously in the past decade. Escalating demand, scaled back resources, and growing specialization among stakeholders now require all of us to lend our best thinking to how essential field support services can be provided, improved, and sustained.

In September and October of 2005, CFED hosted a series of online discussions on building a comprehensive strategy to meet the needs of the IDA field. The practitioners who joined in these conversations gave CFED, and by extension, other IDA intermediaries, ideas and parameters for resources and structures to shape the future of the IDA field.

In 2004, CFED convened a group of IDA stakeholders to research, analyze, and present options for a long-term support strategy for the IDA field. The Steering Committee developed an Options Paper to spark thinking and elicit insight from the broader field. This paper briefly sets forth the needs of the field, outlines some key components of current services, highlights some known gaps, and explores two options for creating a long-term and representative support strategy for the IDA field.

While CFED's role is evolving and will continue to do so, we are committed to asset-building for the long haul. In the policy arena, we will continue to develop and advocate large scale, tax-based, progressive asset-building policies that build on the existing field.  This will include Savings for Working Families Act or a next generation version which will build upon and extend existing field delivery capacity and move us closer to the dream of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of accounts.  In the meantime, we support reauthorization and improvement to the Asset for Independence Act.  And in preparation for the next wave of universal, progressive, asset-building legislation focused on an inclusive system of children's accounts, we will be laying the foundations for new policy at both federal and state levels.

We will continue to connect to and work alongside private institutions and others to develop sustainable and affordable products and services that open up mainstream asset building to poor individuals and families.  We will build on our rigorous research including the Assets and Opportunity Scorecard and an extended analysis of federal and state asset-building subsidies, a conversation begun in our Hidden in Plain Sight publication.

We will continue to convene diverse actors in the field to share lessons and develop the next generation of innovations not only in the national Asset Building Learning Conference to be held September 19-21 in Phoenix, Arizona, but also through the Federal Reserve Bank System and CFED Asset-Building Forum Series and other opportunities to bring the broad asset-building field together. And we will lay the groundwork for a universal, progressive system of children's accounts through the Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED) Policy and Practice Initiative.

Thank you for being part of a critical shift in social policy that has the potential to dramatically change the lives of so many low-wealth people across the country.  Please let us know how we can serve you and the field we have created together. Feel free to contact any member of the team guiding our work: Kim Pate, Field Development Director; Jennifer Brooks, Policy Director; Dave Buchholz, Applied Research and Innovation Director; and Carl Rist, SEED Director.