RuFES-Rural Family Economic Success
The Opportunity: An Action-Learning Exchange to Advance Rural Family Economic Success
Working together, the Washington Horizons Program, the Northwest Area Foundation (NWAF) and the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) are offering Washington’s Horizons 1 & 11 communities the opportunity to strengthen your Horizons action by advancing local efforts to improve the economic success of low-income families in your communities. The opportunity is to participate in a Rural Family Economic Success Action-Learning Institute that will bring you ideas that work to help low-income rural families get ahead – from your peer communities in Washington and others across the country.
This Rural Family Economic Success (RUFES) Action Learning Institute will be tailored to the needs and opportunities of the local, action-ready Horizons leadership teams that commit to participate. This is not a typical “conference” – rather, it is a structured working session in which your team will both learn about key RuFES strategies and policies and develop an action plan to take back home. The Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group (CSG) will work with your team and the sponsoring partners to design and facilitate the Institute.
Horizons, NWAF and AECF are partnering to sponsor this Institute because they share both passion and goals to help reduce family poverty and to help rural communities thrive. Horizons, with the support of NWAF and the assistance of Washington State University Extension, has engaged and organized hundreds of people in Washington’s rural communities in building their capacity to examine issues, lead, work together and pursue a new vision for their communities – always toward the end of reducing poverty. AECF’s RuFES Institutes engage action-oriented community-based teams – like Horizons teams – in learning about and adapting the best available strategies to help low-income working families in their communities do better – today and into the next generation.
The Content: Strengthening Rural Families
The Institute will engage each team in understanding AECF’s Rural Family Economic Success framework in depth, and in using it to make more – and more strategic – progress in improving outcomes for rural children and families back home. Specifically, the framework will address how communities can help low-income and low-wealth rural families get ahead by pursuing three outcomes:
- Earn It: Working families earn a living that allows them to survive, thrive and raise their children in their community. This means that a family’s working members can qualify for a job in the region, they can find and land that job, they can keep it, they can create their own businesses locally, their jobs produce enough income to meet at least a basic family budget, and they advance in careers and income over time.
- Keep It: Working families have access to and make good choices that safeguard their family income and lower their cost of living, forging stable and predictable financial lives. This means that a family sets financial goals, builds a mainstream banking relationship, improves its credit record, obtains affordable financial services, accesses available tax benefits and public and private support to close the gap between income and expenses, and obtains their family’s essential goods and services at reasonable prices.
- Grow It: Working families accumulate and maintain assets that gain value and advance family and community prosperity over time. This means that family members are saving, advancing their education, buying homes and acquiring other assets that improve their financial prospects over generations; they are caring for and maintaining those assets; and that civic engagement and local investment increases the value of family and community assets over time.
Dates: Monday, November 2, 2009 (starting at 10:00 a .m.) thru Wednesday, November 4, 2009 (4:00 p.m. wrap-up)
Location: Cedarbrook Center, SeaTac, WA.
Expectations:
- Attend a short, locally held orientation, prior to the 3-day conference
- Participate in a phone interview lead by the Aspen Institute
- Attend the 3-day conference
- Network with the local Horizons Leadership team
- Following the conference, carry out plans established at the conference
AECF/NWAF/WSU Washington Horizons RuFES Institute
The final PowerPoint presentations from the AECF/NWAF/WSU Washington Horizons RuFES Institute are now available to downlaod.. They are filed in order based on the day of the presentation, and have the name of presenter and general presentation topic in the title of each file. The final agenda is also available to use as a decoder.
Washington 2009 RuFES Agenda
SUNDAY
Topolsky: RuFES Intro
MONDAY A.M.
1. Shark: Overview
2. Molinaro: Siamese Twins
3. Molinaro: EITC Overview
4. Bryce -Laporte: MOL Rural EITC
5. Brar - Myntti: EITC State Help
6. IRS- EITC Help
7. CSG - EITC Platform
MONDAY P.M.
1a. Molinaro: Nasty Nine
Rural Family Economic Success: Earn It, Keep It, Grow It -by Terri Elders, Stevens County
Rural Families Economic Success: Combating the Nasty Nines - Part 2 in a Series, by Terri Elders
Rural Family Economic Success: Another day older and deeper in debt - Part 3 in a Series, by Terri Elders
1b. Molinaro: Nine Online Title Lending Example
2. Goulet: Bank On
3. Bryce - Laporte: BeOntter Bunch Financial Product Inovations
4. Friedman: Combating the "Nasty Niners"
5. Molinaro: Financial Education
6. Goldendale PUD: Money Smart Program
7. CSG Beehive
TUESDAY A.M.
1. Kilde: Jumpstart and Community Jitney
2. Wake: Wheels to Work and MCTC
3. Scalf: Transportation Development
4. Hanson: State Transit Help
5. Babine: Broadband
TUESDAY P.M.
1. Palmer: Rural Entrepreneurs Overview
2. MAPP Team: Rural - Latino MAPP
3. Sharp: State Help
4. Lemmons: Micro Association
5. Gromoko: Mercy Corps
6. CSG Entrepreneurship Resources
WEDNESDAY
Knox: WA Asset Building Coalition & Policy
Rural Family Economic Success (RuFES)
The Annie E. Casey Foundation belief -
“Children do well when families do well and families do better when they live in supportive communities.”
NEW: The final PowerPoint presentations from the AECF/NWAF/WSU Washington Horizons RuFES Institute
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