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.

Excitement and joy are not the typical responses to receiving a letter from the Internal Revenue Service. But an effort launched by the IRS in California is changing that- just in time for the holiday season.

This week and next week, 46,000 households throughout California are getting letters in the mail telling them they may have qualified for the Earned Income Tax Credit last year, and that it's not too late to claim their refund (which for these folks, is an average of $1,400). Talk about a Christmas bonus.

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.

Eric Weaver of Opportunity Fund and Matt Lonner of Chevron open the two-day Microfinance USA conference in the penthouse of the Metreon in downtown San Francisco. Premal Shah of Kiva and First Lady of California Maria Shriver remain onstage.