Stay Informed!

Contact: Kristin Lawton, 202.408.9788

Jun 22, 2009

CFED Announces Inaugural Class Of Innovators To Tackle Poverty Alleviation

Contact: Kristin Lawton, 202.207.0137

Programs Bring Proven and Promising Economic Strategies to Scale

Washington. D.C. — The Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), a national nonprofit dedicated to expanding economic opportunity announces, its inaugural class of Innovators-in-Residence and Innovative Idea Champions to accelerate strategies that will help Americans build assets and achieve surer financial footing. These bold thinkers will take their proven and promising ideas for economic and social improvement to scale as part of the innovation@cfed initiative. A dynamic and growing international community, innovation@cfed harvests new ideas for policy, practice and programs.

These innovators were selected from a large national applicant pool and work in diverse areas of impact including health care, children’s savings, housing and homeownership and energy and the environment. Innovators-in-Residence receive a stipend of up to $50,000, technical support and a virtual or on-site CFED residency to refine and grow their innovations to marketable scale or to advance them through real-world application. Innovative Idea Champions receive exposure to international audiences through CFED’s Web site, publications and outreach efforts. Both Innovators-in-Residence and Idea Champions will showcase their work at CFED’s 2009 Innovation Summit, held in Washington, D.C. in October.

“It is critical at this time to invest in the people and strategies that will bring real change to the American economic landscape. We are exceptionally proud to introduce our Innovators-in-Residence and Innovative Idea Champions to a global audience, and we look forward to showcasing their revolutionary work,” said CFED President Andrea Levere.

The AARP Foundation’s lead support for the programs enables innovators to incorporate issues of aging and underserved populations, including African-American and Hispanic women, into their work plans.

“CFED’s Innovators-in-Residence and Innovative Idea Champions have a huge opportunity to help address the many hardships faced by older, low-income Americans,” said AARP Foundation President Robin Talbert. “We look forward to the transformative work they will perform, and the change it will inspire across so many impact areas.”

CFED’s 2009 Innovators-in-Residence are:

Dennis J. Campa, Friedman Fellow Innovator-in-Residence Building on his work as director of the City of San Antonio Department of Community Initiatives (DCI), Campa will launch comprehensive savings programs aimed at children and adults that will integrate personal investment and financial education as a mandatory component of services. Savings opportunities will be linked in creative ways to innovative loan products, education, car ownership and housing stabilization with the aim of helping all individuals and families achieve economic self-sufficiency. These initiatives and their impact will be shared widely through the innovation@cfed platform.

CFED thanks Phyllis Friedman and Friedman family members and friends for supporting the work of Dennis Campa.

Stacey Epperson, I’M HOME Innovator-in-Residence Working with Frontier Housing, of which she is president and CEO, Epperson will launch a new business distributing high-quality manufactured homes to nonprofits nationwide to serve local customers. Frontier, which is based in Morehead, KY, will train and assist other nonprofits so their manufactured homes appreciate in value and build financial security. The new business will serve as an aggregator between local nonprofits and the manufacturer to secure volume discounts and ensure product quality.

CFED gratefully acknowledges I’M HOME: Innovations in Manufactured Homes in helping support Stacey Epperson as an Innovator-in-Residence. Major funding for I’M HOME comes from the Ford Foundation, and I’M HOME is presented in partnership with NeighborWorks America, Fannie Mae and ROC USA TM.

Eugénie FitzGerald As a driver of the Checkfree San Francisco project, FitzGerald will work with the offices of Mayor Gavin Newsom and City Treasurer José Cisneros, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and SF Works, a nonprofit housed within the Chamber, to shift the City of San Francisco and other employers to a paperless payday, a win-win for employers and employees alike. This initiative will connect workers with bank accounts or stored value cards and represents the next phase in the City’s push to enroll underbanked residents in financial and saving services that will help them save time and money and build assets. FitzGerald will work with the City, SF Works and other stakeholders from program concept to implementation, to educate and enlist supporters to help launch the program and use the innovation@cfed platform to widely share results and lessons.

CFED gratefully acknowledges support from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, including a $650,000 operating grant over two years, which expands our capacity to provide initiatives such as the Innovator-in-Residence program.

Mindy Hernandez Applying her expertise as a senior research specialist for Princeton University and Ideas42, a project of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, Hernandez will connect research in the behavioral sciences to real-world challenges in the asset-building field. She will offer behavioral consulting and design research with CFED and practitioner organizations. With an emphasis on data, documentation and knowledge dissemination, Hernandez’s work will lead to improvements that make policy, market and practice initiatives work more effectively. Hernandez and her colleagues at Princeton and Harvard Universities hope to study and apply the lessons from these pilots to state and national policy.

2009 Innovative Ideas

CFED’s 12 Innovative Idea Champions will develop and showcase promising work that will impact diverse areas including creating jobs and household savings through solar and wind energy, lifetime asset strategies for young persons with disabilities, shared ownership strategies, and health care affordability plans.

For more information, including full descriptions of the Innovative Ideas and biographies of Innovators-in-Residence and Innovative Idea Champions, visit innovation.cfed.org. For more information about the AARP Foundation, visit www.aarp.org/foundation.

# # #

CFED expands economic opportunity by helping Americans and their children build assets, save for the future, start and grow businesses, pursue education and become homeowners. We identify, refine and help realize good ideas and develop partnerships to promote lasting change. We bring together community practice, public policy and private markets in new and effective ways to achieve greater economic impact. Established in 1979 as the Corporation for Enterprise Development, CFED works nationally and internationally through its offices in Washington, DC; Durham, North Carolina; and San Francisco, California.