The 73%, Revisited

Two numbers have anchored a lot of what I’ve written this month. Seventy-three percent of our own residents once told us a referred financial literacy program was “not relevant to my current situation.” And a case manager once told me she sent a client facing eviction into a program that taught him about investment portfolios.

Put those two together and you get the clearest possible definition of what crisis-informed financial literacy is not: it’s not generic content delivered regardless of context, hoping it’s close enough to useful. It’s not “financial literacy” as a single, undifferentiated subject that applies the same way to everyone who walks through the door.

What I mean by crisis-informed financial literacy is content built to match where someone actually is, sequenced around their real, immediate constraints, not their theoretical, long-term financial future. That’s the whole definition, really. Everything else in our curriculum is an application of that one idea.

If you had to define crisis-informed financial literacy in one sentence, based on what you’ve seen in your own work, what would you say?

Author: Sandra Roussel
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