The National Credit Union Foundation's mission is to be a catalyst to improve people's financial lives through credit unions. And, one of the gnarliest – a technical word – problems about that mission is how you actually measure improvement to people's financial lives.
Measuring impact and defining how people move from one financial state to a better financial state is a hot issue. Truly the biggest buzz in the financial education space right now is how you define financial well-being or financial capability.
In early January, the CFPB issued a report, "Financial Well-Being: The Goal of Financial Education." The report details the CFPB's initial research into how people acquire financial capability. According to the CFPB, its overarching objective for the report was to determine how to define and measure the success of different financial literacy strategies so that it would have a basis for measuring the effectiveness of different strategies.
To that end, the CFPB defined financial well-being as a state of being wherein people:
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Feel in control of their day-to-day and month-to-month finances;
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Have capacity to absorb financial shock;
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Are on track in meeting financial goals; and
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Have the financial freedom to make choices that allow them to enjoy life.
Hmm, financial freedom. That's a term the foundation is also familiar with. It's the heart of our vision: To make financial freedom achievable through credit unions.
So how do you even start to measure impact and improvement to people's financial well-being? Well, the foundation has been looking back at its work over the last 10 years and came up with some interesting numbers: $35,000,000; 104,000; $5,800,000; and 110,000.
Those are some big honking numbers, right? They represent just some of the impact that your Foundation has had over the years to help credit unions improve their members' financial well-being.
The $35,000,000 represents the total grant dollars the Foundation has provided over the past 10 years. The national impact from these grants includes fostering and scaling savings challenge initiatives, developing and distributing Biz Kid$, which is an amazing and award-winning youth financial education resource, supporting successful Hispanic outreach programs, developing successful non-prime auto lending initiatives and launching high school financial reality fair programs.
The 104,000 is the conservative estimate of the number of high school students reached since 2010 through credit union and league high school financial reality fairs, an experiential learning initiative of the Foundation. To reach that many students, over 1,000 fairs have been held.
The $5.8 million are the funds the foundation has collected for disaster relief efforts. These funds helped credit union employees and members recover from such disasters as Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy as well as floods, wildfires and tornadoes in Colorado, Missouri and North Dakota.
And 110,000? The number of Money Rules books the foundation has distributed to credit unions and their members in the last two years. Money Rules is a powerfully simple, must-have manifesto on money with more than 90 wealth-building rules from the Today show's finance guru, Jean Chatzky.
Thanks to you, we are your national foundation, providing impactful philanthropy to help you help your members' financial well-being.
As the foundation continues to scale its work and bring new financial education opportunities to credit unions, we will be reaching out to you with ideas and opportunities to measure the impact of all that you do and to tell the great story of all you do to be your members' best financial partner.
Gigi Hyland is executive director of the National Credit Union Foundation. She can be reached at202-824-6282 or [email protected].
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