Team One

Assignment: A Day in the Life - Infrastructure

For a network to be successful, many diverse players with varying goals and objectives must find a way to work together. It is important to have excellent communication, usually with an agreed upon language, an ability to stay on course toward your own goals as well as the flexibility to accommodate the needs of others in the system. To develop these good relationships it is helpful to be able to convey clearly your own objectives as well as understand the concerns and desires of each constituency and what they have to offer.

In this round of work, you will take on the role of one of the major constituencies involved in the IDA field. From this perspective, imagine how you would spend the day using your network. How do you impact the network? How does it serve your purposes? Work with your team to develop a story of how the network functions.

Use the whiteboards to capture key considerations and issues. Illustrate the points of contact, flow of information, and any gaps that must be filled in order to be successful. Identify the top 3-5 priorities in developing the network.

Use words and images to develop your story. If there are issues that cannot be resolved please identify them so we can work them in another round of work later in this process.

You are a(n):

• Funder
• Practitioner
• Financial Institution
• Researcher
• Account Holder

You will have approximately 1 hour for this exercise and then will be asked to present your work to the other teams.

Report Out

Amanda Feinstein, Andrea Levere, Bob Friedman, Carol Watson, Carolina Reid, Eric Weaver, Gabe Mello

We were tasked to develop this network further. Why would we want to be part of this network? Why would we take our valuable time to find ways to become part of this network? What gets us excited is the idea of money. It allows us to do more and to be more efficient.

The network would be a lot stronger if there was a unifying element that we could all work on together from the get go. I'd be willing to devote some time to something if I knew it would help me build a match fund.

If we had a national match fund, we could do whatever we wanted to, because the money would be there. It's magical, i know.

There are several steps to put in place to make the match fund a realization.

Build a strong proposal.
Get input and buy-in from practitioners.
Need 10 names with big amounts of money.
Build coalition and strategy - get word out to local communities.
National branding and marketing - linking donors to success stories.
Pay attention to core competencies of the umbrella entity.
We'll need technical infrastructure.
Standards and process for membership - this is where you'll be able to share best practices.
Anticipate two million accounts. We must plan for this. We definitely don't have the infrastructure for this if we happen to get two million accounts.

Our next board is some detail around what different groups would have to do to make the match fund happen. We've noted detail for funders, researchers, practitioners, account holders and financial institutions.

If you could get investors into the national match fund, and give them a reduced return, then they would be giving back some of what they make into the fund. We did something like this at the National Credit Union.

We need some permanent sources for match. It seems like we leave out individual sources for match, even though those are 80-90% of the amounts of donations we receive.

When we start this, what is the need that is going to drive us all together? Match. That's what stymies us from getting together as a field.

Getting to two million? Don't worry about the money. There's a lot of infrastructure that we have to work out. But if the money is there, I don't' think we'll have a problem with building an infrastructure.

We need to think about beyond match funds, too. There's the operational costs to consider. I can get funds to go to matching, and get someone's education paid for. But it's really difficult to get those funds to pay for resources to make all of this happen.

This match fund is really a way to provoke the market and get more capital into the system altogether.

OCS is increasingly the source of funding. They have an online data base system. Somehow, as we move this into reality, we need to get them to be partners with us.

As an aside, there are other parts of Aspen that are working with folks in NYC. This could be really appealing to the Merrill Lynch's and other big companies that are looking at asset building.

Team Two

Greg Nelson, Irene Skricki, Kim Pate, Kirsten Moy, Marc Eisenberg, Mark McKeag

We first went through and looked at the ways the network was serving our status. Right now it doesn't have a lot of contour. It can give us updates on account holders. It can help us raise money.

For the researcher, we think it would be great for them to have access to cumulative data. That research could be cut in different ways, making research in the field easier.

Account holders are trained in financial education. They could read success stories about organizing for collective action.

Financial institutions want to be able to continually expand the program and negotiate with one entity regarding accounts.

What is our mission? Is there any willingness to expand our model that was laid out earlier today? And what is the killer application or hook that brings people into the network that they simply cannot live without?

Once we figure out what "it" is, we'll need to get buy in, and define who needs to provide it. Then we need to figure out funding and structure.

We have a schematic with the network in the middle showing which communications would happen directly, and which ones would happen through the network. There are quite a bit of things that will be centrally run through the network. The network will make use of uploaded information that can be accessed as needed by the practitioner.

The actual financial product would probably have to be standardized so that it could be run through the network. This model is started, but we did not have time to finish it.

Team Three

Megan O'Neil, Pat Sterner, Rita Bowen, Susie Smith, Wynne Lum, Zuri Ruiz

All the folks in our group color coded ourselves, then we answered the questions according to our role/vantage point. Then we moved on to find some guiding principles based on our answers.

Our key purpose is to provide a one-stop-shop for expertise for all players in the field. Is this something that you pay for? Yes - because you are a member.

We need a very clear give/get for all the players. It needs to be very obvious to all that are involved. For example: research. Research needs to move upward as well as downward.

The network needs to build capacity for the field. For example: financial institutions. Sustainability is not only a goal, in the sense of sustaining, but it's a challenge. What role will the financial institution have in making that happen, or not making that happen?

Support interactive peer learning. Players will influence each other. As a funder, I'm interested in bringing together policy, practice, and research. The whole point around this was that practitioners don't feel like their research is affecting policy, and so on through the triangulation.

Advocacy for continued public policy. Whether or not individuals think their stories are meaningful, they are to someone. Lawmakers and policy makers want to hear everyone's story. We need to find ways to extract those stories from people that have good stories to tell.

Is there really something that is changing my work, and making it easier? Or is being a member of this network just a way to go to a conference and see people that I don't see regularly?

Discussion

What are some similarities of your work?

It all needs to be worthwhile, and meet a core need in the field. We all seem to need money to feed the accounts in a large scale way. We need to identify what those needs are, and gather all these creative ideas together.

Increasing the bottom line. Two groups talked about this. It's about more than just sharing best-practices.

The money thing is interesting to me. I think there's a phenomenon in groups that are trying to do a collaborative thing. Things that are obvious are often (oddly) the most difficult to do. We know how to do policy and research, but do we really? Do we really know how to raise a billion dollars?

Hands down, there's no debate - we need some money to do this (national match)! A lot of the other ways require a lot of dissipated energy in different places to make it happen. This gathers it all in one place.

What do you lead with? Money. And not just money, but money tied to this larger purpose that we talked about this morning. The other stuff just tends to follow.

Getting the financing, and getting the infrastructure in place to be able to deliver tomorrow and to deliver a year from now. We want to be able to grow and develop financing and financial products down the road. I do think it is leading with money and financing with that larger view in mind.

You have to be careful, though. There's many a field with lots of money that has extremely poor infrastructure. You just have to be careful that it's incentivized in the right way. You have to tie money to standardization pieces to ensure that you get the right quality with each piece of the infrastructure. Tie it to infrastructure, and infrastructure can drive the product.

In a lot of other fields, big players drive change. What drives change in our field, because we have no big players, is policy and funding.

We need to get enough money so that we can do the job right the first time. We don't what to have to change and then ask for more money to do those changes later on. I'd like to push back a bit on the funding piece. The plan is going to change, and you want to be able to respond to contingencies very fast, so you need to make sure you get enough money up front.

Partnership development is something that I think should be part of infrastructure.

People who put money into this pool need to come and help us make decisions about what to do with that money.

There are a lot of opportunities that we might miss if we don't seek out all of the great "human design" that there is out there. It could be hard - the best data management company might be some small outfit in Missouri, and no one knows they are there because they just haven't bubbled up yet.

What are some differences or divergences of your work?

What do we do first? None of us really know. Eventually we've got to line this out. There's a lot to do with all of the pieces.

Individual donors are largely untapped. And they are the largest suppliers.

We really haven't begun to market this. It may not be the second step, but it's kind of what we need. It's not so much a conflict among the group, but I think it leads us to where we might go first.

Putting together a concept and testing it. Let's take it to the field and get some feedback. Maybe it's done in a more broad-brush approach. It's really critical to test, no matter who the customer is.Who would we check in with, and what would we ask them? Would they join an association like this? Does it provide the value add that they might be looking for?

Would foundations be willing to fund to national match fund?

There is some fundraising on behalf of the field to support the match fund. Are we going to a consolidated fund of money, or is it still held privately? For many practitioners - what we have is a third resultant option - and this will end up petering out to be what we have right now.