Let's Push the Envelope on Financial Capability Professional Development
Through the continuous improvement of training and development for financial capability professionals, the knowledge that you acquire and the skills that you gain will lead to improved outcomes for the hard-working households that you are committed to serve.
This post was inspired by Vu Le’s recent post on his Nonprofit AF blog (please read his post and subscribe to his blog here). While Vu’s focus is on executive directors and specifically leaders of color, my focus in this post is on financial capability professionals, people who lead departments or manage contracts or work as front-line staff and support a caseload of clients.
Who are those fearless individuals who lead the fight day-in and day-out to equip low-income and low-wealth households with the tools to climb the economic ladder, you might ask?
If you are like me, you entered the field with a college degree and classes in psychology, sociology, English, or the sciences. Maybe even art history. In other words, you had no direct practical experience in the strategies or tactics that are used in providing effective financial capability services to hard-working households.
Or you may be like the folks that I tend to see in my professional trainings: social service staff with a range of backgrounds and full of good intentions and hopes for the future, but again, lacking in direct practical experience (which is why you are in my trainings in the first place, so thank you for being there!).
Please note that this post does not intend to dismiss what is currently out there in terms of training for financial capability professionals. There are people and organizations doing great work every day. And as a provider of those same services, I relish every opportunity that I get to facilitate groups of eager learners. You are my People.
Rather, I want to follow Vu’s inspiration and paint a picture (expressed in an easy-to-read bullet-point form) of what in my eyes a perfect world of training and development for financial capability professionals might look like. Please feel free to add to the list in the Comments Section below or on the social media platform of your choice. Let’s imagine ourselves with the capacity to wave a magic wand and create instantaneous improvement.
Sound like fun? I think so too. Let’s begin.
Include “talent development” into the budget of all funding packages. Maybe you are investing in the growth of future leaders or training brand-new hires. Regardless, all staff benefit from a line item in your budget for ongoing professional development.
Eliminate intense data collection for small grants. I think that we can all agree that small grants do not lead to major outcomes, yet they can help advance the cause. Award the small grant and get out of the way.
Provide multi-year funds. Vu advocates for 5+ year grants and I’ll get in line behind him. When you have a 5-year (or more) timeline, you can affect major change. As an example of this, when my agency (then the International Institute of Boston, now the International Institute of New England) received 5 years of funding from the Office of Refugee Resettlement to run an Individual Development Account program, we succeeded in serving 350 households and generating $2 million in combined assets (homes, cars, college degrees, etc.). And can I tell you a little secret about that fabulously successful program? We didn’t really even hit our stride until Year #3.
Fund learning cohorts. While I will concede that long-term one-on-one TA can indeed be expensive –albeit effective – to provide to an organization, small learning cohorts based on functional areas (program management, direct service, outreach and recruitment, etc.) can be powerful. And with technology like Zoom, group learning sessions can happen without time out of the office sitting in traffic or stuck on the subway (I’m looking at you, MBTA).
Offer and fund sabbaticals! Yes, I am dreaming big now, Talking About Money Community! Why not? How much happier and productive would I be if I had a paid sabbatical? How much happier and productive would you be if you had one too?
Enhance nonprofit agency employee compensation and benefits packages. This falls under the topic area of “put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others.” How can we expect financial capability professionals to give of themselves fully when they might be carrying around the stress regarding their own financial futures? This includes but is not limited to: commensurate compensation, decent health insurance, a retirement plan with incentives for participation, and assistance in paying off those dastardly student loans.
Another story: Once I had a professional training participant tell me that she had a part-time weekend job (as did her husband) so that she could afford to work at her nonprofit providing financial capability services. Read that sentence again and let it sink in. I contend that while none of you has an intention of getting rich doing this kind of work, you should at least get the weekend off to rest.
I also want to share what I have noticed around me for the last few years: Some eager highly-motivated newer-to-the-field professionals are pursuing their Certified Financial Planner designation with the belief that it is the best professional development option for them. And once they learn the skill of financial planning and know how to manage the portfolios of high-wealth households (and see how much money they can make doing so), some of them leave the financial capability field entirely.
This is an unfortunate loss of talent.
I believe that the financial capability field should support career paths for its professionals and provide professional development opportunities at every step along the way.
To that end, please let me introduce you to the Association for Financial Planning & Counseling Education, or AFCPE (and full disclosure: I serve as a volunteer on AFCPE’s Certification Council and I do occasional contract work for them). I support AFCPE’s efforts to promote the professionalism of the financial capability field through their high-quality professional certifications in financial counseling and financial coaching.
I will share with you that oftentimes nonprofits will say to me, “I’d love to get a credential from AFCPE, but it’s so expensive!” Let’s get out our magic wands one more time and see what we can do:
Message to Funders: Prioritize that your grantees pursue professional development and provide in your funding packages the resources to do so.
Message to Nonprofits: Check out AFCPE’s website! They are trying to reach more nonprofits, and to that end they offer a variety of scholarships to nonprofit professionals.
