CFK reports from: Hall of States Building
Event: "2005 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard: Can Families Still Achieve the American Dream?"
Organized by: Corporation for Enterprise Development
Where/When: Washington, D.C., July 29, 2005

Report by Sunny Xiang

Experts at a Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) policy briefing said they believe CFED's 2005 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard will generate discussion and collaboration on asset development for working families.

The scorecard, released about two months ago, measures how well states are enabling families to protect their assets and to achieve financial security.

“The scorecard is a tool to help us advocate for better policies and programs," CFED President Andrea Levere said. She added that the findings can also play an integral role in building new coalitions and generating public support.

This year’s scorecard is CFED's third attempt to assess the financial security of families. CFED approaches the assessment using two methodologies: policy ratings based on common policies across states and outcome grades determined by each state's financial security, business development, homeownership, health care and education.

The data shows that one in five American families owes more than it owns and that one in four families would fall below the poverty level in the event of a job loss.

The numbers are especially dramatic for women and minorities, said Beadsie Woo, CFED's senior economist whose primary projects deal with state and federal asset policies. Woo's PowerPoint breakdown of the Scorecard showed that for every dollar in net worth of a male-headed household, a female-headed household has about 40 cents while a minority-headed household has about 6 cents. Other key statistics indicate that minority home ownership lags behind white homeownership in all but two states and that almost half of all bankruptcies are due to medical costs.

The Scorecard reveals the vulnerability of families, especially working families living in areas of concentrated poverty, said Ralph Smith, the senior vice president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Smith explained that because families are working "under so much stress and in so much distress," parents are unable to provide for children's well-being. The result, he said, are significant setbacks in the life chances for many of the nation's youth.

What Smith found “most distressing” was that the majority of low-income kids are from families with at least one working adult. In other words, these families, although attempting to sustain economic self-sufficiency, are teetering on the edge of poverty. In such a precarious situation, one sick child or job loss could cripple them, Smith said.

Debbie Weinstein, the executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, echoed Smith's sentiments. "We need to do more to help families get a more secure foothold in the effort to get into the middle class and stay there," Weinstein said. The Scorecard, she said, helps by putting a human face on the problem and creating an amplified snapshot of American people's lives.

While advocates such as Smith and Weinstein emphasized the Scorecard as a valuable tool for coordinating with antipoverty allies and for lobbying legislators, Susan Golonka, the human services program director for the National Governors Association addressed the situation from the states' point of view.

Golonka said that while the Scorecard can put low-performing states in a defensive position, she believes that governors will ultimately use it to stimulate conversations about how asset-building fits into long-term state policies for working families.

The Scorecard is unique in that it is all-encompassing and can appeal to both Republican and Democratic governors while also engaging both the public and private sectors, she said.

Golonka, however, also stressed that states face many challenges in addressing the issues the Scorecard raises. "I think you have to be very realistic," she said. "But raising the level of discussion is always the first step."

View the Scorecard, its potential uses and state-by-state breakdowns.