Innovators-in-Residence

CFED’s 2009 Innovators-in-Residence are:

Dennis Campa, Friedman Fellow Innovator-in-Residence
Stacey Epperson, I’M HOME Innovator-in-Residence
Eugénie FitzGerald
Mindy Hernandez

Residencies will begin in late summer or early fall 2009 and, depending on the Innovator, will run for periods of 12 to 24 months. Innovators-in-Residence will present works-in-progress at the 2009 Innovation Summit. Stay tuned as additional information about their work is shared here during the coming weeks.

Dennis Campa, Friedman Fellow Innovator-in-Residence
San Antonio, Texas
Building on his work in Texas as director of the City of San Antonio Department of Community Initiatives (DCI), Campa is launching comprehensive savings programs aimed at children and adults that will integrate personal investment and financial education as a mandatory component of services. Savings opportunities will be linked in creative ways to innovative loan products, education, car ownership and housing stabilization with the aim of helping all individuals and families achieve economic self-sufficiency. These initiatives and their impact will be shared widely through the innovation@cfed platform.

CFED thanks Phyllis Friedman and Friedman family members and friends for supporting the work of Dennis Campa as the inaugural Friedman Fellow Innovator-in-Residence.

Stacey Epperson, I’M HOME Innovator-in-Residence
Morehead, Kentucky
Working with Frontier Housing, of which she is president and CEO, Epperson will launch a new business distributing high-quality manufactured homes to nonprofits nationwide to serve local customers. Frontier, which is based in Morehead, KY, will train and assist other nonprofits so their manufactured homes appreciate in value and build financial security. The new business will serve as an aggregator between local nonprofits and the manufacturer to secure volume discounts and ensure product quality.

CFED gratefully acknowledges I’M HOME: Innovations in Manufactured Homes in helping support Stacey Epperson as an Innovator-in-Residence. Major funding for I’M HOME comes from the Ford Foundation, and I’M HOME is presented in partnership with NeighborWorks America, Fannie Mae and ROC USA^tm

Eugénie FitzGerald
San Francisco, California
As a driver of the Checkfree San Francisco project, FitzGerald will work with the offices of Mayor Gavin Newsom and City Treasurer José Cisneros, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and SF Works, a nonprofit housed within the Chamber, to shift the City of San Francisco and other employers to a paperless payday, a win-win for employers and employees alike. This initiative will connect workers with bank accounts or stored value cards and represents the next phase in the City’s push to enroll underbanked residents in financial and saving services that will help them save time and money and build assets. FitzGerald will work with the City, SF Works and other stakeholders from program concept to implementation, to educate and enlist supporters to help launch the program and use the innovation@cfed platform to widely share results and lessons.

CFED gratefully acknowledges support from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, including a $650,000 operating grant over two years, which expands our capacity to provide initiatives such as the Innovator-in-Residence program and supports our work with FitzGerald.

Mindy Hernandez
Washington, DC
Applying her expertise as a senior research specialist for Princeton University and Ideas42, a project of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, Hernandez will connect research in the behavioral sciences to real-world challenges in the asset-building field. She will carry out behavioral consulting and design research with CFED and practitioner organizations. With an emphasis on data, documentation and knowledge dissemination, Hernandez’s work will lead to improvements that make policy, market and practice initiatives work more effectively. Hernandez and her colleagues at Princeton and Harvard Universities hope to study and apply the lessons from these pilot efforts to state and national policy.

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