Prosperity Works

Prosperity Works equips limited-income (LI) New Mexico households with social and financial assets to catalyze sustainable solutions for building strong, thriving communities.

We operationalize this mission by leveraging our initiative-shaped Financial Opportunity & Inclusion Continuum (FOIC) to build LI households’ socioeconomic assets longitudinally: from birth, with Child Savings Accounts (CSAs), to adulthood, with Individual Development Accounts (IDAs); and at mid- to late-life asset-building milestones, with Fair Lending Options and through proactive financial capability coaching and training..

Crafted through an intersectional lens that centers racial equity, our FOIC is: access- and action-oriented; focused on sustainable, holistic praxis that foments intergenerational socioeconomic health and wellbeing; and tailored and disseminated to LI households through our network of community-embedded partners.

Through our work, we endeavor to achieve these ongoing, community-centric goals:

Goal 1: Integrating asset-building strategies with local businesses, including CSAs, IDAs, and Fair Lending Options for employees;

Goal 2: Expanding Prosperity Kids (CSA) accounts/offerings to LI households with children--especially those in rural parts of the state;

Goal 3: Expanding IDAs to rural communities statewide; and

Goal 4: Developing a Financial Capability Coaching Module (FCCM) for partner organizations--to complement our current FOIC initiative suite.

Our FOIC-focused work is framed by a dual-pronged antipoverty tack, which includes "out of poverty" and "ending poverty" strategies.

>Out of poverty strategies leverage our FOIC to connect individuals and families with change-making assets--such as CSAs, IDAs, and financial capability training.

>Ending poverty strategies involve proactive policy advocacy--to dismantle racist policy and processes that limit the asset-building capacity of BIPOC communities, and to collaboratively shape an "opportunity economy" predicated upon equitable policy and access to assets.

Our dual-pronged tack helps ensure intergenerational assets are secured, protected, and leveraged sustainably--to maintain household members' health, and to support their long-term goals. We work through this strategic tack to achieve our ongoing, community-centric goals (above).

From our inception, Prosperity Works has led the way in shaping a social justice space framed by community relationships and predicated upon effecting sustainable, systems-level socioeconomic change--specifically in partnership with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) changemakers.

We have worked proactively to identify trusted community partners with whom we can collaborate, and through whom we can disseminate our asset-building resources to LI households. Establishing such an integral network, especially in rural areas, required us to clear hurdles creatively (such as basic access and language) to provide place-based, asset-building resources.

Accomplishments per strategic goal (outlined above) are detailed below:

Prosperity Kids CSAs. When possible, we work to dovetail home visiting initiatives with our Prosperity Kids (PK) strategies—so as to lay a strong financial foundation for infants and their families and centering their experience in the process. While the power of home visiting initiatives in improving the health and wellbeing of children and their families is well established, those same programs face challenges—not only in recruiting families prior to a child’s birth, but also in retaining them in the program for the optimal three-year period. To address this issue, our design incentivizes early enrollment and retention with initial deposits for the children, and an Emergency Savings Account (ESA) for the parents; incentive deposits are added to both accounts each quarter of participation. From 2019-2020, we expanded our PK programs across Bernalillo County and well into northern New Mexico, including: enhancing the work with home visiting programs in Rio Arriba County; initiating a PK program with the Head Start program in Abiquiu; and coordinating PK offerings in Gallup, Las Vegas, and Farmington.

IDAs. Our IDA work as deployed thru the rural delivery system that we developed, the New Mexico Assets Consortium, has been a story of expansion, contraction, and modification to address funding changes. As a poverty-reduction tool, our IDA program has allowed several thousand New Mexicans to acquire life-changing assets, including: a home (629 families); a business (729 individuals, which collectively created 1,200 new jobs); and a college education (810 degrees, with a resultant aggregate annual income increase of approximately $6.5M).

Fair Lending Options. For LI individuals, or those without a developed credit history, the savings offered by employer-based lending models like the TrueConnect loan program can mean the difference between financial security and financial ruin. From 2017-2020, we were able to enroll 21 employers in the TrueConnect loan program—including multiple counties (e.g. Taos, Bernalillo, and Doña Ana), major cities (e.g. Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces), Santa Fe Public Schools, Northern New Mexico College and Central New Mexico Community College, Comcast, and Youth Development, Inc. (YDI). Families have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by avoiding predatory lenders, and increased their credit scores and financial capability. Employers have benefitted from increased employee productivity and satisfaction, and from decreased separations and lenders’ wage garnishments. Moreover, the savings through TrueConnect over this three-year period approximate $8M, with a default rate of less than 2%. When individuals are able to have access to an equitable lending source like TrueConnect, and are not reliant on predatory lenders, the socioeconomic advantages ripple through their respective communities—enhancing household and community health.