The IDA and Asset Building Collaborative of North Carolina, EITC Carolinas, NC Cooperative Extension, the Department of State Treasurer and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hosted the second Statewide Conference on Financial Education and Asset Building at the Friday Center on October 8-9.  The conference provided valuable information and training on financial education and asset building resources available in our state. 

View conference agenda | View conference photos

Plenary Speakers Bios:

Thomas Shapiro directs the Institute on Assets and Social Policy and is the Pokross Professor of Law and Social Policy at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University.

Professor Shapiro’s primary interest is in racial inequality, poverty, and public policy.  He is a leader in the asset development field with a particular focus on closing the racial wealth gap. The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality, 2004 (soft cover, 2005) was widely reviewed, including by the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and others.

With Dr. Melvin Oliver, he wrote the award-winning Black Wealth/White Wealth. Black Wealth/White Wealth, which received the 1997 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. This book also won the 1995 C. Wright Mills Award . A Tenth Anniversary Edition of Black Wealth/White Wealth, with two new chapters was published in 2006.

Recent policy pieces are included in Ending Poverty in America, edited by John Edwards, and The American Prospect.

Robert Friedman is general counsel, founder and chair of CFED's board. Since 1979, CFED has worked to foster widely shared and sustainable economic well-being by promoting asset-building and economic opportunity strategies that bring together community practice, public policy and private markets in new and effective ways. Mr. Friedman and CFED have helped lead the U.S. development of innovative economic development strategies including microenterprise, flexible business networks, individual development accounts, and economic health assessments. Mr. Friedman's current work focuses on the Savings for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED) Policy and Practice Initiative to assess the potential of long-term savings and investment accounts established at birth.

Among Mr. Friedman's other major publications are:

The Return of the Dream: An Analysis of the Probable Economic Return of a National Investment in Individual Development Accounts (1995)

The Development Report Card for the States (co-author, 1986-1995)

The Safety Net As Ladder: Transfer Payments and Economic Development (1988)

Expanding the Opportunity to Produce: Revitalizing the American Economy Through New Enterprise Development (Co-editor, 1981).

Mr. Friedman was founding chair of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity; and currently serves on the board of Levi Strauss & Co., Ecotrust, Friedman Family Foundation, and the Rosenberg Foundation. Mr. Friedman is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.