Your Money, Your Goals - A financial empowerment toolkit for social services programs.

Integration

Integration of financial empowerment means identifying where and how you can weave

financial empowerment information and tools into the work you are already doing.

Why is integration of financial empowerment such a promising strategy? Here are a few

reasons:

 It builds on established relationships you may have with clients.

 Clients are busy—there is efficiency in addressing many issues in one stop.

 Financial and economic issues cut across situations and challenges: basic needs

housing, health and health care, child rearing and care, work, transportation, and

so on.

 Financial empowerment integration may present a more holistic approach to

working with clients.

 It provides opportunities for reinforcement during “natural” discussions with

clients.

 It may result in better outcomes for the clients and programs.^3

This module provides you with a tool to get you started: the Client Financial Empowerment
Checklist. The purpose of this tool is to provide you with a tracking template for use with each
client you provide financial empowerment services to. It’s meant to be a simple way to keep
track of the tools or information you have shared with a particular client as you integrate
financial empowerment into the work you are already doing with clients. It can also be used to
share output level data with your organization and as a case management tool to connect one
meeting with a client to the next.

(^3) Giuffrida, Inger, Integrating Financial Education into the Work that You Do, April 2010.