Prosperity Now is happy to announce that we are starting the next phase of our work with the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Southern Partnership to Reduce Debt (SPRD), a collaborative formed in 2017 to help put communities of color in the South on a path toward greater financial security by reducing the amount of harmful debt they carry.  

This opportunity aligns with Prosperity Now’s mission of creating opportunities for success and growth through increased financial security, particularly for underserved populations. Our commitment to this goal, during a time of crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic, could not be stronger.  

Best Practices from 2020 and Our Online Advocacy Toolkit 

Before we fill you in on our goals and plans for this new round, we wanted to highlight some of our work from the previous phase of our partnership. 

Accomplishments include “Lessons Learned from the Southern Partnership to Reduce Debt (SPRD) in 2020,” a resource highlighting successful strategies employed by SPRD partners and collaborators to bring down high debt levels and put families on more stable financial footing. Best practices shared include examples of building partnerships with institutions that contribute to debt burdens and how to recruit members impacted by debt to educate and advocate for change. 

We also published an online advocacy toolkit with information and resources designed to help communities reach their debt reduction goals. The toolkit includes tips for advocating at different levels of government, the core elements of an effective advocacy campaign and ways to communicate policy goals that will set advocates up for success.  

We set out to share the insights gathered from successful initiatives and outline the elements that go into an effective advocacy campaign. By using these resources, you can help take your debt reduction efforts to the next level and increase your chances of making an impact.  

Plans for the Next Phase  

Many organizations and communities, including SPRD partners, spent a good deal of time over the last year responding rapidly to the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on the lifeblood of their communities. They were constantly called on by all kinds of actors to put out fires caused by pandemic-related joblessness, threats of evictions and business closures.  

Now – hopefully – the eye of the COVID-19 storm has past. For the next phase of our work with SPRD, we want to help our partners step back, breathe and get some perspective on exactly how COVID-19 impacted the debt levels and wealth-building opportunities of their communities. We want to better understand what helped households stay afloat as well as where and how efforts fell short. But most importantly, we want the insights gathered from this exploration to help the development and implementation of a strategy to weather the final stages of the crisis and improve financial stability for the long term.  

To achieve this, we will be hosting a series of roundtables and other information-sharing events to provide a space for organizations to come together and learn pandemic lessons from each other as well as brainstorm about steps forward. We also plan to highlight new data, where possible, to increase our understanding of what debt does to household financial security and provide technical support to organizations dedicated to achieving meaningful household debt reduction.  

We are looking forward to the next phase of this work and encourage advocates and change makers to take a closer look at our Lessons Learned report and Advocacy Toolkit while we prepare for it. If you have any questions about these resources, or about the next steps in the project, please contact Anju Chopra at [email protected]. Together we can build a more equitable and inclusive future. 

We also want to thank the Annie E. Casey Foundation for continuing to invest in this partnership.