This report provides an in-depth look at student loan borrowing in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. As of March 1, 2018, approximately 735,000 Bay Area student loan borrowers (12.2 percent of the adult population) owed a collective $26.6 billion in student debt, with an average balance of $36,243. Nationally, total student loan debt climbed to $1.46 trillion by the end of 2018, more than doubling in size in the past decade, making it now the second largest source of consumer debt.

In March 2020, K2C launched an equity incentive, called the “I Am the Future” campaign designed to accelerate targeted asset-building for students experiencing the greatest barriers to opportunity. To best reach these students, K2C selected 9 elementary schools from SFUSD’s PITCH initiative, a program aimed at closing the opportunity and achievement gaps for students facing systemic and persistent barriers to equity.

San Francisco’s Guaranteed Income Advisory Group was created to advise the Board of Supervisors, the Mayor, and appropriate City departments on various aspects of guaranteed income. The recommendations in this report examine how to move guaranteed income from pilots to policy in San Francisco, while maintaining and strengthening the City’s support for pilot development and implementation.

This brief offers lessons learned about how to protect recipient benefits, particularly in California, through the lens of the Abundant Birth Project (ABP), a pilot program aimed at reducing birth health disparities and improving birth outcomes for Black and Pacific Islander pregnant women in San Francisco by providing $1,000 per month for six months during pregnancy and six months post-partum.

Read five ways to create meaningful and life-changing financial outcomes for the community with this report from Smart Money Coaching. Read more here.

In this report we tackle the unfair, unequal and opaque consumer banking systems that have blacklisted so many low-income consumers, immigrants, and in particular Black consumers from the financial mainstream.

Since founding the Bank On movement in 2006, the San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment (OFE) has found persistent disparities in banking access due to structural flaws in the financial system. This brief outlines four major systemic barriers to banking -- distrust of mainstream financial institutions, ChexSystems records, debt in collections and asset limits -- as well as opportunities to remove these barriers and increase banking access. Read more here.

A joint report done with the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC). As COVID-19 continues to ravage the health and economic security of millions of Americans, it is critically important to evaluate the relief efforts offered by financial institutions. And at this time, when our nation is confronted with the reality of its historic and systemic racism, it is crucial that we evaluate such relief efforts with a racial equity lens.

The experience of the Kindergarten to College (K2C) Children’s Savings Account (CSA) program run by the San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment (OFE) shows that despite economic hardship as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, families remain committed to saving for college.