Maria Sotero: All Related Content

The California Asset Building Program's Banking Development Districts measure, AB 38, and no-cost philanthropic Financial Education Fund measure, AB 597, have again cleared policy hearings in the Assembly.

This afternoon I attended "The State of Health Care Conference: Strategies for Success in 2011," in Sacramento, and the event provided an impressive overview of what California faces in implementing health care reform. Nearly as impressive were the local "smarty-pants" who will attempt this Herculean feat.

I had the incredible opportunity to give a presentation on asset building policies today at the United Way of Kern County's Professional Development Conference. An annual gathering for a wide range of Valley advocates, the conference drew hundreds of participants- and this year's focus was Maximizing Assets.

The California Asset Building Program and the New America Foundation proudly co-sponsored the annual Working Families Policy Summit, held last week at the Sacramento Convention Center. The Asset Building and Asset Protection panel, the only discussion on the topic of helping working families build and protect wealth, was also the only policy breakout session to be taped. The conversation, moderated by Assemblyman V.

This Monday, one hundred twenty people packed into the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s offices in San Jose for a discussion on “Alternatives to the Payday Loan Trap.” The meeting was co-hosted with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

SACRAMENTO -- More than 46,000 California workers who may have missed out on a significant federal tax credit - and local economies that may be losing the stimulus effect of workers spending those credits - are getting a boost from the Internal Revenue Service this November. The IRS is mailing notices to targeted filers this week and next week as part of a special outreach project in California to encourage more families to claim their Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which the New America Foundation found stimulates local economies but suffers from low claim rates in the state.

A bright and unseasonably warm morning at Sanchez Elementary in the Mission District brought uncommon excitement to the urban school. At eleven o'clock this morning, Mayor Gavin Newsom, Treasurer Jose Cisneros, two of the city's supervisors, and a crush of news cameras crowded into a small library for the formal launch of the Kindergarten to College initiative. 

This panel, moderated by Maria Sotero, focused on bringing local-level perspectives to the larger policy process. Vanessa Muniz, Director of the United Way of the Bay Area's successful free tax filing program Earn It! Keep It! Save It! along with Sarah Brennan with Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon's office, Abigail Marquez with Los Angeles' Community Development Department, and Olivia Calderon of New America provided their experiences to the discussion about strategies and best practices for best connecting tax time to larger opportunities to save and build wealth.

We've been eagerly awaiting this: Rourke O'Brien's cover story "Beyond the Poverty Line" in the current Stanford Social Innovation Review about the importance of updating the American poverty measure.

We all should've started saving for retirement yesterday. We know this, yet most of us can barely keep our spending in line with our incomes. And when we try to start saving, we are either overwhelmed with options (best case scenario) or with figures that spell inevitable doom.

It must be said. Gavin Newsom opened the second and final day of Microfinance USA, and Andrea Levere of CFED followed with a longer address, but the money quote has come from Lisa Mensah."Money scattered in a dark place brings light." Mensah, of the Initiative for Financial Security at the Aspen Institute, has perhaps summed up the entire conference.

 For a full, even-more-real-time briefing, check out New America in California's Twitter feed. A lot of our tweets are ending up on the conference's feed as well. Today's conference packs in three tracks, for nine total panels.