Asset Building in Low-Income Communities of Color, Part 2

This report presents findings from the second year of an initiative to assess what works to enable low-income communities of color to build assets. It highlights predisposing factors and promising practices in ten states that received low rankings on asset building for low-income people in the 2007-2008 Assets & Opportunity Scorecard. The featured states are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Texas.

This report not only examines asset building in these 10 states — most with sizable communities of color — but also compares these findings with those for states with high rankings on asset building for low-income people (Delaware, Hawai’i, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin). The states with high rankings on asset building-and small communities of color in general-are analyzed separately in the first-year project report entitled Asset Building in Low-Income Communities of Color, Part 1: Predisposing Factors and Promising Practices in States Effective at Building Assets for Low-Income Residents (Executive Summary).

Also, see the Executive Summary and Fact Sheet “Confronting and Closing the Wealth Gap.”