Back to With inflation and economic uncertainty remaining high, many families are struggling to make ends meet and cannot access benefits and resources that may provide relief. The overall financial health of Americans declined last year for the first time in five years of measurement, according to our Financial Health Pulse® 2022 U.S. Trends Report. Stemming from expenses outpacing incomes and reductions in savings, declines in financial health cut across several demographic and socioeconomic groups.
Improving access to public and private benefits is more important than ever. For too many families and individuals, complicated and burdensome benefits systems stand in the way of real relief from economic hardship.
Meet the 2022 Exchange Grantees
To help address these benefits-related pain points, the Financial Solutions Lab has awarded grants to three partnerships that make up our 2022 Exchange cohort. The nonprofit and fintech organizations in the cohort will work to promote financial health by improving access to benefits and measuring the impact of their projects on the consumers they serve.
- Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Houston and Benefit Kitchen, in collaboration with Houston-based civic technology nonprofit Connective, will study how best to embed Benefit Kitchen’s API-based benefits screener into LISC Houston’s Financial Opportunity Center coaching model and software, bridging the benefits knowledge gap for coaching staff and giving clients standardized, up-to-date benefits screening information.
- The Flagstone Initiative and MoCaFi will collaborate on a Community Emergency Fund to protect low-income renters in Oklahoma City. The project will leverage the Flagstone Initiative’s access to aggregate data collected by its workforce housing partners and from one-on-one interviews and surveys with renters, and it will be deployed through MoCaFi’s on-demand fund distribution platform.
- Nebraska Early Childhood Collaborative and Pie for Providers will partner to maximize Nebraska child care providers’ income through subsidy funding and automate calculations for the state’s billing process, improving providers’ financial health and enabling the opening of new government-funded child care spots for Nebraska families.
The partnerships in this year’s cohort will work with the Financial Solutions Lab through September 2023 as they roll out their programs, exploring ways to improve the reach and impact of benefits for the populations they serve. The 2022 Exchange program builds on our past work connecting nonprofits and fintechs and will further the work of the Accelerator’s 2022 cohort on benefits solutions that advance financial health.
We look forward to working with all grantees and continuing the journey with those that have collaborated with us to improve financial health through our prior programs: 2022 Accelerator alumni Pie for Providers and 2021 Exchange alumni MoCaFi. With support from the Exchange, the organizations in this year’s cohort will provide solutions across the focus areas of financial coaching, housing, and child care in areas of the country where we have not previously made grants.
Sign up for updates from the Exchange team to receive access to events, reports, and learnings from these projects and more. To connect with us or the grantees, email exchange@finhealthnetwork.org.