The War on Poverty Florida encourages and assists minority organizations with the development of comprehensive financial literacy programs that provide minority families, small business, community and faith-based organizations the skills and tools they need to achieve economic security and broaden wealth, particularly for those excluded from the financial mainstream.

WPF will engage asset mapping in target communities and organizations to identify the strengths the community and organization has and the opportunities that exist for community revitalization. Asset Mapping involves documenting the tangible and intangible resources of a community, viewing it as a place with assets to be preserved and expanded upon. This approach is based upon the principles of empowerment and ownership; collaborative economic development models that place priority on making the best use of a community’s resource base; and efforts to strengthen civil society by engaging people as citizens rather than clients. Assets may be persons, physical structures, natural resources, institutions, businesses, or informal organizations.

The process involves making an inventory of assets and capacity, building relationships, developing a vision of the future, and leveraging internal and external resources to support actions to bring our vision to reality. Asset mapping is a positive, realistic and inclusive development strategy that includes inventorying the capacities of individual skills and talents; local associations and organizations; private businesses and local institutions; infrastructure and physical assets; financial assets, and record of accomplishments within a community.

It is proven that minority organizations with roots and capacity in the community are generally more effective in bridging the range of problems in a community facing poverty cycles than organizations with marginal capacity.

WPF community development programs are structured around three focal points for breaking the cycle of poverty in the target communities: Comprehensive, Collaboration and Community Organizing.

1. Provide training to individuals and organizations within African American, Latino/Hispanic and Latino Immigrant, Asian and other minority communities.
2. Develop competencies of trainers and leaders of community organizations and agencies that deliver services to minority organizations within the communities we serve.
3. Provide coaching and mentoring for a period of 3 years, including monitoring and providing continuing education components that will reinforce and support the organization’s sustainable development and achieve or maintain Certification as HUD Approved Housing Counseling Agency.
4. Provide capacity building, infrastructure and training development for financial literacy training programs tailored to target communities and/or organizations.
5. Financial Literacy training Evaluation Research and Reporting; measuring program outputs and product outputs and progress during the contract period.