Prosper Canada

Prosper Canada's vision is that all Canadians have access to the financial programs, services, products, and advice they need to build their financial well-being. In doing so, we aim to reduce poverty across Canada.

To achieve this, our work is centered around financial empowerment, an approach to poverty reduction that focuses on improving financial security through a set of interventions that together help low-income Canadians grow their incomes, improve their credit scores, savings and debt levels, and build wealth through reducing financial barriers to education, employment, entrepreneurship, and improved housing. 
Financial empowerment is not like most other poverty reduction approaches. It focuses on helping low-income people participate and be included in our financial system. It increases the opportunities and knowledge of people living on low and modest income, and fosters behaviours that are critical to their economic security and their ability to invest in their future.

Volatile incomes, fewer workplace benefits, and increasingly complex financial products and choices mean many Canadians struggle to achieve financial stability today, let alone financial security for their future. While some argue the answer is better/more employment, it is incredibly difficult for individuals to find a better job when they face immediate financial pressure--and not everyone can participate in the digital economy now. Without short-term stability, far too many Canadians are stuck and vulnerable.

However, this stability cannot come through high-interest short-term lending, which undermines long-term financial security. Rather, we believe the solution is to leverage existing social infrastructure: helping more people access the over $1 billion in government benefits that go unclaimed annually. While these benefits aim to help vulnerable households, they often involve cumbersome applications and eligibility criteria, making it difficult for many to understand what they are eligible for and how to apply, especially for those with lower literacy levels or scarce time.

Our organization primarily helps people living on low or modest incomes in Canada. Several of our programs are also oriented around helping particular groups that are typically marginalized or excluded from the financial system, including newcomers, Indigenous people, and people with disabilities. Each of these groups face specific challenges that hinder their full inclusion and participation in the Canadian financial system, such as lack of formal government ID, limited or no Canadian credit history, accessibility issues, and low levels of financial literacy. We work with our partners to address these barriers, increase incomes, and build financial stability.

Far too often, people in these groups face other, related barriers, such as low literacy and numeracy levels, which further act to exclude them. Financial issues compound with these barriers to make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to get ahead: they are left out of the benefits of economic growth and innovation. By addressing many underlying financial challenges, we believe we can help more people to engage, work in, and benefit from our increasingly digital economy.

Our strategy to scale financial empowerment across Canada revolves around three key pillars.

The first of these pillars is supporting "Financial Empowerment Champions": non-profit/charitable organizations that provide services, such as financial counselling, to people with low or modest incomes, and who act as advocates for financial empowerment in their communities. Currently, we work with 14 leading organizations across five provinces, who have been instrumental in building our movement and are the primary conduit by which we reach low-income households.
The second pillar, "Prosperity Gateways," involves embedding financial empowerment into programs provided by governments, such as employment and social services. These programs already reach many people, and we leverage their established infrastructure. We apply service design methodology to help integrate financial empowerment into these services in a seamless way, and best address the financial needs and problems of their clients. In addition, we work to ensure that appropriate policy and funding frameworks are in place so that these integrated services remain in place in the long-term.
Finally, the third pillar of our strategy involves building technology solutions that address specific challenges faced by people living on low or modest incomes. This includes our Benefits Screening Tool, which we hope to improve through the Prize. We recognize that technology plays a critical role in the other two pillars of our strategy, and can help accelerate other financial empowerment interventions.
We believe that together, these pillars are mutually supporting, and position us to scale financial empowerment across Canada.

Prosper Canada has been in operation for over 30 years, and has extensive experience working with non-profit organizations across Canada. We have dedicated partners working "on the ground," and deep institutional knowledge about financial insecurity in Canada.

We also work with and receive support from industry-leading private sector partners, such as Intuit, Capital One, and TD Bank, and some of Canada's key philanthropic organizations, including Maytree and the J.W. McConnell Foundation.
We work closely with government at all levels across Canada. We are working with major municipalities to help embed financial empowerment into their services; we also engage the federal government and provincial governments on developing policies to help build financial security.
While other organizations address financial literacy, work to reduce poverty, or develop products and services to build financial stability, few combine these approaches and additionally have our breadth of experience, strong network, and capacity to effect change.

Our organization leverages technology both in our internal operations, and in providing external-facing tools to help Canadians build their financial literacy and security. 

Internally, we are transitioning to cloud computing platforms to help facilitate our work, and enable us to collaborate more productively. We also track our reach through a centralized database, used for reporting to our funders and stakeholders and for monitoring and evaluating our programs. In conjunction with our move to the cloud, we are now working to transform our data practices, to become more efficient, reduce error, and take advantage of more sophisticated data visualization tools.

Our external-facing online tools, including our "My money in Canada" website for newcomers (https://moneymanagement.prospercanada.org/) and Benefits Screening Tool (in pilot testing), help us reach more people at scale. These expert systems help curate appropriate information, identify options, and build plans to address financial challenges for individuals with low or modest incomes, with less demand on a human facilitator. We recognize the importance of these type of platforms for scaling financial empowerment more broadly, and plan to build on these existing websites with versions in additional languages, and more enhanced features.

In addition, our organization is making concerted efforts to stay ahead of digital disruption. We are actively investigating the implications of open banking and emerging fintech for our work, and collaborating with leading technology firms in Canada to explore opportunities to work together on new solutions.

From 2015 (the start of the Prosper Canada Centre for Financial Literacy) up to the end of March 2019, together with our partners we have helped over 250,000 people improve their financial well-being and increase their economic prosperity. This includes helping over 109,000 people file taxes and submit benefit applications, leading them to access over $305 million in new income in total. In addition, we have helped 5,176 individuals to open basic bank accounts or set up direct deposit for the first time; 4,684 low-income families to open Registered Education Savings Programs (RESPs) and access the Canada Learning Bond; and have provided over 148,000 people with financial education or one-on-one financial coaching. Several of our programs are also engaged in more thorough evaluations, to better understand the characteristics of the people we serve, and our full impact.

Beyond the immediate, quantifiable evidence of our impact on the lives of people with low and modest incomes, we have also acted to help Canadians on a systemic level, working with regulators to enhance consumer protection, researching the financial problems that Canadians face, and advocating to and engaging stakeholders on the importance of financial literacy and financial security.

Over the next year, our top three goals are to refine and further clarify our strategy to build Canadians' financial security, to improve internal processes and talent development, and to expand our future impact by campaigning and catalyzing more funding from the private sector.

Our organization faces three key types of internal (strategic) and external risks, including:

(1) Scaling and growth: We will require further evidence that our programs are effective, to motivate others to partner with us. We also rely on partners to carry out our programs, meaning appropriate execution and fidelity are critical. In addition, we need to ensure programs are sustained over time.
(2) Financial: We also require continued funding to keep scaling, much of which comes from government. Unfortunately, this funding can be at risk from budget cuts as governments or their priorities change. T
(3) Technology: Our work is not immune from digital disruption, and the rise of fintech opens both opportunities and risks for how we support low and modest-income households.

1) We intend to manage our scaling and growth risks by continuing to build evidence on the impact of financial empowerment in Canada; carefully selecting and communicating with future partners; and continuing to mobilize governments at the local level, so they understand the merit of financial empowerment initiatives and come to support them in the long-run. 2) To mitigate the financial risk, we are actively working to diversify our revenue, expand business development/fundraising, and proactively engage government stakeholders to demonstrate the value of these programs. 3) To avoid the risk of irrelevance or displacement in the technology sector, we are actively analyzing what the implications of these changes are for our current work, and are exploring opportunities to work with some of Canada's leading technology firms on developing new solutions for vulnerable groups.

Prosper Canada originally began in 1986 as Self-Employment Development Innovations ("SEDI"), a program of the Ontario Social Development Council (OSDC). Our founder, Peter Nares, worked with OSDC on social policy, but came to focus on the potential for self-employment to help lift Canadians out of poverty. 

Today, our organization is led by Elizabeth Mulholland, who joined Prosper Canada in 2011, after a 25-year career in the public, private and non-profit sectors,

Founded in 1986, Prosper Canada is a national charity dedicated to expanding economic opportunity for Canadians living in poverty through program and policy innovation. As Canada's leading champion of financial empowerment, we work with partners in all sectors to develop and promote financial policies, programs, and resources that transform lives and foster the prosperity and financial well-being of all Canadians.

From our offices in Toronto, Ontario, we support the development and sustainable scaling of financial empowerment supports for people with low and modest incomes across Canada, in particular with our partners based in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. In this capacity, we: mobilize funding/resources and act as a funding intermediary; develop and pilot test new programs, tools, and resources; provide training and capacity building to frontline services providers; undertake research and mobilize knowledge to drive impact and innovation at the program and policy level; and pursue strategies to sustainably integrate financial empowerment approaches into provincial and municipal services used by Canadians.
Prosper Canada is also serves as the "backbone" of the financial empowerment field in Canada. We chair the national ABLE Network (https://ablefinancialempowerment.org/), a cross-sector community of practice dedicated to reducing poverty through financial empowerment. Our Learning Hub (http://prospercanada.org/Resources/Learning-Hub.aspx) also serves as a central online platform for resources for the financial empowerment field. Altogether, we are uniquely positioned at the centre of efforts to build financial security across Canada.

Prosper Canada has often been recognized for its leadership. A few of our past accolades include the appointment of our CEO, Elizabeth Mulholland, to the federal government's National Steering Committee on Financial Literacy; the 2008 Toronto Community Foundation's Vital Ideas Award for our Independent Living Account (ILA) program; and the induction of our founder, Peter Nares, as a Global Ashoka Fellow.

Prosper Canada is also frequently asked to provide comment for major publications on developments related to financial security and financial literacy in Canada. We have leveraged this recognition to propel our policy advocacy efforts and forge new partnerships across sectors.

Prosper Canada's funding sources are diverse, with support through grants and contributions from governments, companies, and philanthropic foundations, as well as occasional fundraising initiatives. In addition, Prosper Canada receives generous individual contributions, sponsorships for events we host, and in-kind donations (in particular for our legal support, technology, and occasional venues) that allow us to pursue our objectives. Beyond these contributions, we also carry out some earned income activities, providing courses and training for financial educators and coaches on a fee-for-service basis, and consulting for government agencies and services interested in integrating financial interventions into their existing programs and services.
This mix of funding allows our organization to be nimble and responsive, with programming that benefits our network of non-profit organization partners, and ultimately Canadians in need. We believe with this continued support, we are well positioned to scale in the long term and develop a truly national presence.

If selected as a Solver, we would leverage the resources mainly on developing our Benefit Screening Tool (BST). We plan to include benefits from more provinces, user accounts for saving/tracking results, and to estimate income from selected benefits. Ultimately, we hope the BST might facilitate applying for benefits within the platform, for instance through an API connection with benefit providers and other services. We would also spend funds on training materials and promoting the BST to organizations.

We would also leverage the recognition from the prize to advance our thought leadership and to catalyze new interest and funding for our work, particularly from the financial sector.