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Aspen Institute Financial Security Program

The Aspen Institute Financial Security Program’s (Aspen FSP) mission is to illuminate and solve the most critical financial challenges facing American households and to make financial security for all a top national priority.

Aspen FSP believes that transformational change requires innovation, trust, leadership, and entrepreneurial thinking. The program galvanizes a diverse set of leaders across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to solve the most critical financial challenges. Aspen FSP does this through deep, deliberate private and public dialogues and by elevating evidence-based research and solutions that will strengthen the financial health and security of financially vulnerable Americans.

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Aspen Institute Financial Security Program
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2022 Benefits Scorecard

2022 Benefits Scorecard

Framework by the Aspen Institute to assess how both public and private benefits are performing to support workers’ financial security needs, identify where innovations are needed to fill current benefit gaps, and explore opportunities to improve and modernize design and delivery. This resource allows policymakers, employers, benefits providers, and researchers assess benefits performance for constituents and identify opportunities in market and policy innovation to ensure equitable benefits distribution.

Aspen Institute Financial Security Program
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Building the Tech-Enabled Safety Net: Public Benefits and Innovation Amid COVID-19

Building the Tech-Enabled Safety Net: Public Benefits and Innovation Amid COVID-19

COVID-19 has highlighted the central role that technology plays in delivering essential services such as food, housing assistance, and unemployment insurance. How that technology is designed can make the difference between receiving or being denied the public benefits people are eligible for. The social safety net has been remade on the fly in response to COVID-19, but temporary patches to our systems aren’t sustainable. A growing field of tech-enabled safety net organizations have begun building tools that apply modern digital technology to the safety net. Getting people the services they’re eligible for requires the government to create policy and build technology that are inclusive, portable, interoperable, and people-centric. Read our new field scan, “Building the Tech-Enabled Safety Net” to understand a dozen fintech and civic tech organizations working across fourteen safety net programs and showing what’s possible when modern technology is married to a consumer insights perspective.

Aspen Institute Financial Security Program
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Reimagining a U.S. Benefits System That Supports All Workers: Five Key Takeaways from Public and Private Benefit Leaders

Reimagining a U.S. Benefits System That Supports All Workers: Five Key Takeaways from Public and Private Benefit Leaders

This rapporteur’s report features 5 key takeaways from the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program's 2022 Benefits Forum with 55 experts in public and private benefits, including corporate leaders, policymakers, worker advocates, entrepreneurs, and researchers, who came together to brainstorm solutions for closing gaps in our public and private benefits and strengthening their design and delivery to support all workers and their families. The goals were to identify areas of agreement across stakeholders and imagine and invent the benefits solutions that workers need today, and in the future, to promote household financial security. Participants concluded on five key takeaways from the discussions: 1. Households Need a Core Bundle of Benefits 2. Technology is Important, but it’s not a Panacea 3. Narrative change around Benefits is critical 4. Government and Employers have Important, Shared Roles 5. Financial Security Outcomes of Benefits must be Measured

Aspen Institute Financial Security Program
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The Complete Financial Lives of Workers

The Complete Financial Lives of Workers

If work is to provide a real pathway to financial security, public and workplace benefits need to reflect the realities of 21st century employment, which includes a workforce increasingly required to engage in nonstandard and sometimes multiple jobs and where job stability is not guaranteed. Download “The Complete Financial Lives of Workers: A Holistic Exploration of Work and Public and Workplace Benefit Arrangements” today to learn: - Four conditions of work and benefits that allow LMI workers to thrive – informed by front-line insights from Aspen’s Consumer Insights Collaborative - A new matrix to unpack and highlight the major connections between work and benefit arrangements and workers’ prospects for financial security - Five key recommendations to build a benefits system that meets the needs of all workers and addresses the inequities observed in the current labor market and benefits systems

Aspen Institute Financial Security Program
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Social Listening: Covid-19, Social Media, and The Path to a Better Safety Net

Social Listening: Covid-19, Social Media, and The Path to a Better Safety Net

The Aspen Financial Security Program identified five reoccurring trends of social media platform usage by people in relation to safety net programs and four techniques for capturing people’s experiences in order to reform the safety net. This report describes how the government can use widespread social media feedback and begin to build long-term measures to center people’s experience as an important component of policy design

Aspen Institute Financial Security Program
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A Modernized System of Benefits is the Foundation for an Inclusive Economy

A Modernized System of Benefits is the Foundation for an Inclusive Economy

Report by the Aspen Institute discussing Benefits21, a multi-stakeholder, multi-faceted initiative to integrate and modernize benefits systems. This paper provides an overview of Benefits21, along with a discussion of the shortcomings of current public and private benefit systems.

Aspen Institute Financial Security Program
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