Solution
The WealthRise® Model
Wealthrise® is our flagship program, which continues to grow and evolve. We take a bespoke, holistic approach to each project, partnering with you to challenge and dismantle inequities embedded in policy, education, cultural, and famial systems.
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Culture
Our cultural institutions are how community ecosystems retain and reenact historical financial trauma. As such, we identify these institutions and build capacity for these entities to recognize and disrupt the transmission of financial trauma.
Policy
Our local and state policymaking partners commit to capacity-building programming, trainings, and events that teach legislative aides and the like to incorporate understandings of wealth justice and financial trauma in their work. Equally, we host community activations to codify the ways local political institutions can help the broader community metabolize the financial trauma that has been thwarted onto the community.
Education
Our education partners commit to deliver our programming to their students up to daily through our Equiddie® platform. Equally, we conduct capacity-building trainings and infrastructure-building for education system leaders to successfully reduce or eliminate the impact of financial trauma.
Family
We host regular programs for families to learn, heal and build wealth.
Impact by the numbers
Although our quantitative metrics are impressive, we put an emphasis on qualitative metrics because it really demonstrates impact more than any quantitative measure, since we know that financial trauma has the biggest influence on a person's wealth building capability.
How we evaluate our impact
Impact and success are based on Chloe B. McKenzie's research and wealth justice framework. The framework discusses four pillars to demonstrate that the commitment to wealth justice is being achieved and communities are healing from financial trauma:
Material Safety
Material safety is is an understanding - an inner knowing - that you are assured protection from financial trauma, abuse, shaming, and economic insecurity. (McKenzie et. al, 2021). It is measured qualitatively and quantitatively. Major points of evidence we look for are through our community circles (they look like focus groups) and metrics like increased use of resources offered or applied for.
Material Wealth
Access to fee-free assets are crucial to generating wealth. As such, every participant receives access to fee-free bank accounts and brokerage accounts. Through our Bank on Us and Activist Investors initiatives, we are able to fund these accounts and generate wealth for our partner communities. Some key metrics are the number of assets generated and how much material wealth is generated.
Healed Financial Trauma
Healed financial trauma is measured qualitatively and quantitatively. However, it reveals the most about the impact made because it demonstrates how much the community members' wealth-building capabilities have changed. We apply Chloe McKenzie's financial trauma measurement tool that has been leveraged by a number of state-based and higher education institutions like Georgetown University and Temple University. Wealth-building capability is a person's or community's ability to accumulate and sustain (material) wealth, which is often influenced by a person's unique struggles against multiple forms of oppression (McKenzie et al, 2021).
Transformed Institutions
When we transform the major transmission centers of wealth-building capability, we advance wealth justice and increase the wealth-building capabilities of community members. This impact measure has both qualitative and quantitative metrics. Some key metrics include: number of policymakers trained; number of policies changed or influenced (influences include citation of our research). We also apply our healed financial trauma measurement tool for institutions to demonstrate whether they are transmitting or perpetrating financial trauma at the same rate or magnitude.
The WealthRise® Model in Action
BlackFem’s WealthRise® Model is not linear but rather a whole-community system that intervenes and engages with all the stakeholders and "centers" (i.e. entities) where financial trauma can be perpetrated. We focus on the following pillars and programmatic actions:
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Culture
Cultural institutions shape behaviors and beliefs, making it a powerful vehicle for change. From churches to town hall meetings, we work with on-the-ground activists to address financial trauma with locally relevant training and programming
Family
Wealth building is tied so closely with the family unit– from how we form an understanding of wealth, to how we accrue it from generation to generation. To reach families directly, we host programs that empower them to learn more about how they can identify bias and better navigate unfair systems in place.
Policy
Policies can help communities build wealth, but they can also invisibly oppress those most vulnerable. We educate leaders on how to dismantle systems of financial trauma, then work side-by-side with them to integrate our wealth justice research into new legislation.
Education
From K-12 to higher education, we help reform the environments that shape our community’s young minds. For students, we build curricula that heals their financial trauma and teaches them how to build wealth. For leaders, we provide capacity-building trainings and advisory to help them eliminate financial inequities in their schools.