Para sacar nuestra gente adelante: Building Generational Wealth in the Latino Community

Graduates of Familias Adelante, a free financial capability program offer by MEDA.

By Ernesto Martínez, Vice-President of Asset Building Programs

As we begin March’s Financial Wellness Month, a topic near and dear to our hearts here at the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), we reflect on the strengths of our Latino community, the barriers we face, and the opportunities to build our financial stability here in San Francisco and across the nation.

While financial wellness, financial literacy and financial capability might not be the most intuitive or attractive phrases, what they mean for the Latino community is deeply rooted in our culture.

When I was a child I asked my immigrant mother why our family moved to the United States – and specifically Bay Area – from Guatemala and Mexico. She replied with a simple yet powerful answer: “Para sacarlos adelante,” translated in English to, “to get you all ahead.”

This selfless and sacrificial sentiment is shared by millions of mothers just like mine across California and the United States. The desire for their children to have a better future where there are opportunities and options is the main driver for mothers and families to take on dangerous migration, backbreaking work, and a plethora of challenges our communities face here.

Every year we help over 4,000 community members file their taxes, 30 individuals buy homes, and support clients in making 3,000 positive financial improvements. However, it’s so much more than building for one or two assets, it’s about establishing generational wealth

At MEDA, we are not educating and supporting our clients on debt reduction, budgeting, or credit management for the sake of having metrics to showcase, but for the opportunities that these allow. Financial literacy is key to saving for many opportunities such as: school and college so our children can get good jobs, to open up a business so that we can make our dreams of being business owners come true and so that we can pass something on to our children, and to have a stable home to raise our families. Being able to understand the U.S. financial system and gain control over one’s finances unlocks so many opportunities that our families and parents came here for. Our community and families are some of the hardest workers and understanding how to leverage one’s resources to gain new assets is paramount for Latino prosperity here in San Francisco and the US.

MEDA has worked in financial literacy for over half a century and ia committed to scaling impact for our community. Every year we help over 4,000 community members file their taxes, 30 individuals buy homes, and support clients in making 3,000 positive financial improvements. However, it’s so much more than building for one or two assets, it’s about establishing generational wealth.

MEDA’s financial capability coaches assist individuals and families in achieving their financial goals.

Our goal is not limited at getting our community out of a cycle of poverty, but into a cycle of generational wealth. This means having sufficient assets, planning, and educating to ensure that your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will never be in a place to lose their housing, assets, or have to settle for a job they don’t want. This means that our focus needs to expand beyond getting jobs, but starting high-income careers and businesses. Beyond finding only one reasonably affordable home, but purchasing multiple real estate assets. Beyond having a few months of savings in a bank account, but having various investment interests in a living trust.

Now one might say that these are lofty goals for an organization serving low and moderate-income Latino communities, but it’s the type of goal that our community needs. It’s the conversation that our community deserves – and that’s the audacity that MEDA brings.

Yes, this is more than MEDA does or might do, but it’s not a single organization’s responsibility, if we want a community that is building wealth, place, and power; we must push the envelope of the conversation.

This is why MEDA is evolving our financial capability coaching model for asset building to our next version: Viva 2.0. This will focus on moving our community into these next phases of wealth building while focusing on the immediate needs of all of our community. In the next few months, we will be debuting this model with our coaching clients while publicly launching our Comunidad Prosperando wealth-building series in our community.

This is necessary, para sacar nuestra gente adelante.

(English Translation: To secure our people ahead)