Thank You and Onward, Prosperity Now!

After spending the last five years at Prosperity Now, first as Director of Federal Policy and then as the Vice President of Policy and Research, I recently wrapped up my time at the organization. Leaving was a tough decision, especially during this moment, an opportunity to make so many of our core proposals and long-held goals a reality. However, I am fortunate to have a new opportunity to contribute to the crucial work of advancing economic justice at Code for America, leading their work to increase access to vital tax benefits that lift millions of working families out of poverty.

I would be remiss, though, if I left without taking the time to thank everyone at Prosperity Now who helped us accomplish so many positive contributions for the community-based organizations and families we serve. Despite the challenging political environment over the past four years, we have advanced several significant issues that impact low- and moderate-income families. We engaged in defensive advocacy to protect some gains and achieved impressive wins in one of the most polarized political environments imaginable.

Furthermore, the work we have done over these years has positioned us well to seize exciting opportunities in the year ahead and beyond. Below, I briefly highlight several areas where my talented colleagues and external partners can advance their groundbreaking work in this new political and policy environment.

Grassroots and Grasstops Advocacy

The world as we understood it changed in November 2016 and Prosperity Now was no exception. As the staff and organization grappled with a new political reality that threatened to bring great harm to working families, many of my colleagues and our partners rose to meet the occasion.

Vanna Cure joined us in 2017 and helped take our advocacy work to a whole new level. We acquired new technology and built an advocacy center to make it easier to educate, communicate, and mobilize our advocates across the country. We developed campaigns to focus on several of the different core threats to working families, including the weakening of the safety net, the stripping away of consumer protections, and tax giveaways to the wealthy and corporations. We also recruited advocacy leads and built coalitions in key states and among national partners and their affiliates to rise and meet the occasion.

We could not stop the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the rollback of the CFPB’s payday lending rule, but we were able to prevent them from having greater detrimental consequences. We educated thousands of stakeholders on why these issues matter for working families and how they could be done right, which positions us for this current moment. The hard work of building a robust advocacy community in defense of working families’ economic needs can now be repositioned to advance proposals that will help them achieve economic security and begin to close the racial wealth divide.

The Fight for Real Tax Reform

The work to Turn the Tax Code Right Side Up began long before I joined Prosperity Now, but over the past five years, the tax work took a big leap forward in highlighting how the current tax code makes not only wealth inequality at large worse but also the racial wealth divide. Thanks to the incredible work of Emanuel Nieves, Jeremie Greer, and our partners at ITEP, Prosperity Now helped publish several reports that advanced our collective understanding of exactly how the tax code reinforces racial inequities. This work includes the most recent version of the Turn It Right Side Up series and the groundbreaking Race, Wealth and Taxes report, which highlighted exactly how the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made racial economic inequality worse and was featured in the New York Times.

My colleagues Doug Ryan and Anju Chopra also helped apply this frame to our housing and homeownership work with our Housing Pathways proposal. This proposal tackled some of the most glaring inequities in housing tax benefits, like the Mortgage Interest Deduction, and showed how they could be reformed to help stem our country’s growing housing affordability crisis.

The pandemic has shown us what a powerful tool the tax code can be for economically empowering working families. Real reforms to the tax code, including expanding the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and rental and homeownership relief, will be at the heart of the Congressional and Presidential agenda this year. Our advocacy community and our national partners in the Tax Alliance for Economic Mobility must be at the heart of this push and help build a larger movement to make the tax code work better for BIPOC families.

VITA: The Little Program That Could

Much of the advocacy game that we developed was necessarily defensive, but the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program was the most prominent exception. When I joined the organization, despite doing exceptional and badly needed work for working families, the VITA program was only funded for $12 million annually and had spent decades seeking to be made permanent. As we begin this fiscal year, the program was funded for $30 million and has finally achieved the permanence and recognition that it has long sought and deserved.

Many people played a role in making this happen over the years. From Chad Bolt, who helped us develop our appropriations advocacy strategy; Joanna Ain, who implemented and refined it, to Rebecca Thompson and Justin Chu, who built the Taxpayer Opportunity Network into the living, breathing heart of free tax preparation movement.

In the years to come, there will be many opportunities to continue to improve and grow VITA, help hold paid tax preparers to the same high standards of VITA volunteers, and leverage technology and the lessons of VITA to make sure more low- and moderate-income families can access safe, reliable, accessible, and free tax services to deliver the tax refunds they so dearly depend on to survive.

Racial Wealth Equity

One of the most significant developments during my five years at Prosperity Now was the launching and growth of the Racial Wealth Divide Initiative under Lillian Singh’s leadership, along with Ebony White and Cat Goughnour. This initiative grew from a single, self-contained project to touching every aspect of Prosperity Now, both internally and externally. The policy and research work I led was no exception. The work of the Building High Impact Nonprofits of Color project and others laid the groundwork for applying a racial wealth equity analysis to all our policy and research work — something Prosperity Now badly needed. It began with the Ever-Growing Gap report with our partners at the Institute for Policy Studies and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad helped contribute to a movement to educate Americans about the racial wealth divide and push for policies to close it. We dove deeper into housing and homeownership’s role in driving the racial wealth divide, as well as remedies, in our Downpayment on the Divide report.

Building on this work, and with the assistance of strong partners like Dr. Darrick Hamilton, Prosperity Now developed robust racial wealth equity enhancing federal policy proposals, like Baby Bonds. We worked with Senator Cory Booker and other congressional members to design, introduce, and advance the first federal legislative proposal for Baby Bonds. This proposal now stands a chance of being enacted by the new Administration and Congress this year as part of COVID-19 economic relief efforts.

At the state and local level, we also worked closely with Prosperity Now’s Racial Wealth Divide Initiative team to help nonprofits of color advance local policies for advancing racial economic equity from the ground up. We designed and implemented a model to help these organizations utilize our research, policy, advocacy, and coalition-building skills and resources to drive their own policy agendas to best address their communities’ most essential needs. In Congress, statehouses, and city halls across the country, the time for further developing and advancing policies like these is here and will only grow. Prosperity Now is uniquely positioned to continue this vital work and seize this unique moment to take it to the next level.

Consumer Protection

Consumer protection has long been at the heart of Prosperity Now’s core mission, recognizing that you cannot build wealth and financial security if bad financial actors are allowed to whittle and strip it away. For this reason, Prosperity Now fought for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. When I first arrived, we advised the bureau on the design and pushed for the release of their landmark payday loan regulations that had been sorely needed for so long in vulnerable communities across the country.

My colleagues Anju Chopra and Emanuel Nieves helped lead the campaign with our partners from across the country to get the rules enacted. After the election in 2016, the new rules, along with many other important regulations, came under threat from both the CFPB and Congress. Housing and fair lending protections also were dismantled or ultimately rescinded over the past four years that we fought.

But the CFPB itself has mostly survived, and thanks to one change, has an opportunity for new leadership in the immediate future. There were many hard battles to protect consumers, but the opportunity to rectify many of the wrongs committed over the past four years will soon be here. This includes finally enacting robust payday loan regulations, and Prosperity Now should continue to be at the forefront of that crucial policy and advocacy work.

Emergency Savings

One of the key lessons of the pandemic’s aftermath is that far too many households had no rainy day funds to fall back on when disaster hit. Many were barely getting by in “good” economic times. Prosperity Now has highlighted this problem at the national, state, and local level through the Scorecard’s liquid asset poverty measure. We also developed several policy proposals that were turned into bipartisan pieces of legislation to address this need. The Rainy Day EITC, conceived by Ezra Levin and his coauthors, incentivized matching emergency savings for EITC recipients at tax time and became the Refund to Rainy Day Savings Act. It also led to similar proposals at the local level. In the next Congress, it stands a strong chance of becoming a reality and beginning to help working families.

Prosperity Now (in partnership with a large and diverse group or partners including Mark Iwry, Prudential Financial, the Aspen Institute, Bipartisan Policy Center, AARP, CFPB, and many more) helped push for research and policy changes to make it easier for workers to save for emergencies with the help of their employers. This effort has led to growing adoption by employers, along with regulatory changes and legislative proposals. In the wake of the pandemic’s economic aftermath and a more friendly policy environment, this work has massive opportunities to grow and scale to the benefit of workers across the country. Leaders in the organization, such as Joanna Ain, Parker Cohen, and Myrto Karaflos, are carrying this work forward.

Unfortunately, one cannot talk about helping working families save without recognizing the barriers that hold them back. Asset limits or saving penalties have long been among the biggest barriers for families who rely on safety net programs to get by financially. Over the years, Prosperity Now and many other organizations have made progress with some specific programs and individual states. In recent years, thanks to Senators Brown and Coons’ leadership, Prosperity Now was able to help introduce legislation that would eliminate almost all asset limits at the federal level. With the next Administration and Congress, this legislation has never seen a better time for becoming a reality.

Groundbreaking Applied Research

The Prosperity Now Scorecard has been at the heart of Prosperity Now for almost as long as the organization has existed. Thanks to the amazing work of people such as Lebaron Simms, Holden Weisman, Kasey Wiedrich, Solana Rice, Guillermo Cantor, and Simone Robbennolt, over the past five years, it has made great strides in many areas of research and policy, including the continued work of disaggregating data by race at the local level to help communities of color to better highlight and understand racial disparities in their communities. Beyond even the raw data points, the Scorecard took giant steps to highlight the role of race in policymaking and politics and show us a better path forward. In the wake of the pandemic, the applied research team pivoted the Scorecard’s work to highlight the economic impact and stakes for vulnerable populations and communities, microenterprises, and immigrants.

The organization also created several strong qualitative and human-centered design research projects in recent years, led by my former colleagues Pamela Chan and Spectra Myers. This work included what was supposed to be a project last year to understand better how recent tax policy changes influenced lower-income Americans use of financial services and products that had to be completely reinvented in the face of the pandemic. After hard and excellent work by Guillermo Cantor, Stephanie Landry, and Ivan Avila, it instead became a survey to understand better how lower-income Americans were faring in the pandemic after the CARES Act was passed, and helped inform Congressional leaders on necessary next steps in debates on Capitol Hill this turbulent year.

Internal Management Efforts: Racial Economic and Wealth Equity

Lastly, but certainly not least, I want to acknowledge the racial economic, and wealth equity work that began during my time at Prosperity Now and thank my colleagues Adnan Bokhari, Lillian Singh, and Cat Goughnour for their leadership in defining, shaping, and operationalizing it. The process has been anything but smooth, but the larger steps taken to move this work forward were necessary and have helped our organization, like many others going through the same process, better live up to the ideals we profess in our work in our own houses. It is my hope that this work continues after this pandemic abates and that staff and leadership continue to push themselves to make sure Prosperity Now continues to meet high standards of equity and respect for all staff.

My final thanks go to both the Presidents and CEOs that I had the pleasure of serving, the Prosperity Now board of directors and Bob Friedman, my fellow leadership team members, and the policy and applied research teams of today and the past. I particularly want to thank Andrea Levere and Jeremie Greer for all their support over the years, along with Caryn Sweeney, Lillian Singh, and Adnan Bokhari. Each of them both pushed and supported me in becoming a better leader and person. For that and their friendship, I will be forever grateful.

More challenges await our country, Prosperity Now, and our larger community in 2021, but this window of opportunity is one of the brightest we have seen in many years. Thanks to my colleagues and our partners’ work, the time to capitalize on these opportunities is here, and I am excited for what is to come. Even though I am leaving the organization, I will still be in the community and cheering you all for success. Thank you and onward, Prosperity Now!