Plenary Session 1 (Opening Session)
A Lifetime of Assets

The assets field is growing and increasingly serving people of diverse races, skills, and stages of life. CFED and Cherokee Nation Community Development Department director Wilma Mankiller will kick-off the conference by framing the evolving assets field and discussing how it can best support a lifetime of assets.

Plenary Session 2
Breakfast with Accountholders

The work of the assets field has touched and transformed countless lives. A favorite at past conferences, this plenary will feature a new homeowner with disabilities, an accountholder from a Native American community, and a participant in a youth savings program sharing their stories about how their lives have changed.

Plenary Session 3
Strength in Numbers: Collaborating to Connect Asset Building with Financial Services

Sponsored by The Center for Financial Services Innovation

Collaborating with the financial services industry is critical in facilitating access to both short-term transactional services and longer-term asset-building opportunities. This engaging plenary will feature an innovative partnership among KeyBank, WECO Fund, and Valid Systems.

Plenary Session 4
New Opportunities in the Asset-Building Policy Movement

A decade ago, the IDA was a powerful idea that demonstrated the concept of matched savings for low-income people. Today, the vision is expanding to a broader, growing notion of asset building. There is significant potential to get a larger asset-building field behind a federal and state policy agenda that includes ?big ideas? that have been vetted and have a fair amount of support; ?easy ideas? that are simple, low- or no-cost, but would have a real impact; and ?new ideas? for building on old systems. This plenary will highlight new directions in asset-building policy at the federal and state levels and reveal opportunities to join this accelerating movement.

Plenary Session 5 (Closing Session)
Call to Action: Asset-Building Research and the Implications for Practice and Policy

The Federal Reserve System and CFED issued the Closing the Wealth Gap: Building Assets among Low-Income Households call for research papers to identify research that holds potential for advancing the asset-building field. This plenary will highlight selected papers from this juried competition and uncover their critical implications for and connections to asset-building practice and policy. The plenary also will explore how to apply the interconnected research, policy, and practice ideas to take the assets field to a new level.