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Carl Rist, Executive Director, 1:1 Fund

Areas of Expertise: Children’s Savings Accounts, Enterprise & Economic Development, IDAs, Local Policy, Savings & Financial Security

Carl Rist has spent the past 20 years at the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), working on a variety of strategies to expand economic opportunity and help lower-income households build wealth. Presently, Mr. Rist is the Executive Director of the 1:1 Fund, CFED's newest social enterprise, an online community that connects low-income students with individual donors who match their savings in qualified Children’s Savings Accounts (CSAs). Prior to directing the 1:1 Fund, Mr. Rist was Vice President of Assets & Opportunity Programs and Director of Asset Building at CFED. In this role, he was responsible for CFED's work to develop, test, support and expand innovative community practices and programs that help create greater economic opportunity. Mr. Rist has extensive experience in the area children’s savings accounts. From 2003–2009, he was the director of the SEED (Savings for Education, Entrepreneurship and Downpayment) Policy and Practice Initiative, a multi-year, multi-site demonstration of matched savings accounts for children and youth in low-income families. In addition, Mr. Rist helped to design and implement an innovative partnership between UNCF (United Negro College Fund), the KIPP network of public charter schools and CFED to offer incentivized college savings accounts to KIPP students.

He is the co-author of numerous publications about children’s saving, including Hope in Concrete Form: Children’s Savings Accounts and the Save and Invest Economy, From Piggy Banks to Prosperity: A Guide to Implementing Children's Development Accounts, and Children's Savings Accounts: A State Policy Sourcebook.

Prior to his work on children’s savings, Mr. Rist was responsible for CFED's efforts to support state-level policy and coalition-building initiatives designed to expand Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) and other asset-building programs. He led the development and design of the initial version of CFED's Assets & Opportunity Scorecard (then known as the State Asset Development Report Card), a comprehensive tool that examines wealth, poverty and the financial security across the 50 states using performance and policy measures. Mr. Rist's experience at the state level includes working with state task forces in both Delaware and Pennsylvania to develop recommendations for helping citizens, especially those of low-incomes, to build and protect assets. Mr. Rist also has served in an advisory capacity for a number of state-level IDA coalitions, including the North Carolina IDA and Asset-Building Collaborative, the Michigan IDA Partnership, the South Carolina IDA Collaborative and the Mid South IDA Initiative (Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi).

Mr. Rist earned an M.A. in public policy in 1991 from the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. He also holds an undergraduate degree from Davidson College.

Publications

Hope in a Concrete Form: Children’s Savings Accounts and the Save and Invest Economy

Improving Your Business Climate: A Guide to Smarter Public Investments in Economic Development

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