The State of the Children’s Savings Field 2017

Posted by Prosperity Now on March 5, 2018

Report on State of Children’s Savings Field Reveals Growing, Changing Movement
By Diego Quezada, program associate, Children’s Savings & Entrepreneurship, Prosperity Now

On February 13, Prosperity Now published The Movement Takes Off: The State of the Children’s Savings Field 2017, an overview of findings from the Children’s Savings Account (CSA) program survey. Conducted annually, the survey assesses a plethora of aspects of the design and operation of the CSA program respondents, including number of accounts, account incentives, wrap-around services for students and parents, and other critical program features. This field, now well into its second decade, is seeing some important new trends and developments.

The Movement Takes Off highlights trends across these different program features. For starters, it finds that more than 382,000 children in 54 programs had a CSA by the end of 2017 — a 22-percent increase from 2016. Programs range from small, community-based programs serving a few hundred kids to large-scale programs, which we define as those that enroll at least 2,000 children annually. These largest programs enroll the majority of children who have a CSA; the seven large programs account for 86 percent of total CSA enrollment.

https://prosperitynow.org/resources/movement-takes-state-childrens-savings-field-2017