In partnership with others, the Institute co-sponsors large conferences to share new information and advance engagement, organizes medium sized events on specially focused issues or population interests, and convenes leadership working meetings to advance insight and action.
Asset-Building Coalitions in States: Innovative Coalition Development and Policy Advocacy Strategies 
Working Together to Build Wealth in Lower-Income Communities
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New measures and indicators are strategically supporting and positioning an important new national conversation on family financial well-being. Three complementary areas of research and analysis are being used to identify and understand more fully the characteristics that contribute to family financial well-being: (1) creation of indicators of stability and vulnerability; (2) refining, validating and expanding measures of asset poverty; and (3) analyses of federal and state tax codes for individual asset accumulation provisions and distributional impact.
The Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP), in collaboration with our partner organizations Dēmos and CFED, embarked on a three-year project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, on family financial well-being and the role of the social contract in creating opportunities for economic security and stability in this nation.
This project creates strategic data tools and evidence-based analytic measures--a middle class security index and a refined asset poverty index--to establish an integrated framework for identifying factors that contribute to family financial well-being and that most impact their stability and vulnerability. Additionally, the project frames out an examination of key federal and state wealth-building tax policies that may affect these measures to understand better the relationship between policy and financial security.
With these tools and measures, data will be analyzed to understand the impact of public policies on family financial well-being, and to inform policy decisions that build toward a new social contract addressing the security and opportunity needs of all families. Shifting the perspective from income poverty to examine family assets expands our understanding of the relationship between temporary poverty and the conditions for middle class security and the role of tax policy investments in wealth building. This work will contribute to identifying policy mechanisms that block mobility, make asset accumulation difficult, maintain wealth inequality, and most importantly, contribute to stability.
Together these new measures, indices, and analyses of policy initiatives will improve public understanding of economic vulnerability and its links to public policy, and will inform policy making and legislative agendas by making visible the cost-benefit value of social investments and variations of impact for different populations. This project aligns perfectly with the Institute on Assets and Social Policy�s core mission of building knowledge and resources to support economic and social mobility.
For more information about this project please contact Tatjana Meschede or phone 781-736-8678.
By a Thread: The New Experience of America's Middle Class, Nov. 2007
Economic (In)Security:
The Experience of the African American and Latino Middle Classes, Feb. 2008
© 2008, Institute on Assets and Social Policy, The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. All rights are reserved.
