Obama appoints Morial to advisory council

3rd March 2014   ·   0 Comments

President Obama announced last week the appointment of 15 individuals to his Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans, including former New Orleans mayor Marc H. Morial.

“I am extremely honored by this opportunity to serve on the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans and further serve our nation in helping to confront some of the primary issues of our time,” said Morial, who is currently the president and CEO of the National Urban League.

Morial joins a slate of other appointees from around the nation tasked with advising the President and the Secretary of the Treasury on how to “promote the financial capability of young people, work toward future financial stability and increase upward economic mobility.”

“Whether we refer to them as income inequality, loss of social mobility, the eroding middle class or opportunity inequality at their core is a great divide that threatens our present and our future,” Morial said. “We must work together to ensure that the very essence of 20th-century America — the possibility of upward mobility for all – does not become elusive and distant in the 21st Century.”

The administration hopes to use technology to promote financial capability among young Americans and encourage building the financial capability of young people at an early stage, whether in schools, in homes and communities, or at the workplace.

The council will work seek to identify ways to:

• build strong public-private partnerships between and among members of the Financial Literacy and Education Commission; other agencies; State, tribal, and local governments; and private entities to coordinate the use of high quality financial capability resources and practices in schools, families, communities, and elsewhere in order to build the financial capability of young Americans;

• support ongoing research and evaluation of financial education and capability activities aimed at young people to determine and disseminate effective approaches;

• effectively assess the financial capability, including both financial knowledge and financial behaviors, of young Americans;

• identify and develop strategies to pilot financial capability approaches in schools and among young people that are likely to have significant effects on young Americans’ financial capability, and determine ways to test and implement such innovations in a large-scale and sustainable manner;

• identify, develop, and measure the effectiveness of technology-driven approaches to promote financial capability among young people;

• identify and test promising and tested approaches for increasing planning, saving, and investing for retirement by young people; and

• promote the importance of starting to plan and act early for financial success broadly among Americans through public awareness campaigns or other means;

“These dedicated and accomplished individuals will be valued additions to my Administration as we tackle the important challenges facing America,” President Obama said. “I look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead.”

This article originally published in the March 3, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.