Blueprint for Designing Children’s Savings Account Programs

Posted by CFED on October 5, 2015

A Step-by-Step Guide to Designing Children’s Savings Account Programs

Children’s Savings Account (CSA) programs are a powerful tool for growing college savings and building students’ aspirations for their future, which is why interest in CSAs has been growing in communities across the country.

Today, as part of the effort to expand CSA programs nationwide, CFED is excited to announce the release of Investing in Dreams: A Blueprint for Designing Children’s Savings Account Programs, an interactive guide to help organizations, cities, counties and states design successful CSA programs. This resource reflects the latest thinking on successful design and implementation of CSA programs from CFED and the many practitioners, researchers, funders and others who have helped shape this field.

http://cfed.org/programs/csa/investing_in_dreams.pdf

The guide walks you step-by-step through the process of creating and launching a CSA program designed to meet the particular needs of your community. It contains tools such as:

• Program design blueprint activities that help you work through the key design elements of a CSA program.
• A budget calculator to estimate the cost of your program, including different incentive structures.
• Examples from the field that describe how different CSA programs have customized their programs.

Through the Campaign for Every Kids’ Future, CFED and our partners have set the goal of reaching 1.4 million kids with CSAs by 2020. Investing in Dreams is part of that larger effort to foster the development of new CSA programs across the country, especially large-scale programs capable of serving all children in cities, counties or even entire states.

http://cfed.org/programs/csa/campaign/

We hope that this design guide provides valuable guidance to your initiative.