Project Director: Jan Gilbertson
Project Duration: 2016-2017
The Church Urban Fund's Cash Smart Credit Savvy project sought to improve financial capability by offering introductory training around basic budgeting skills and through utilizing existing community links and networks to encourage participation. The use of a cascading model was designed to encourage participants to share knowledge with others and spread important financial capability messages.
The evaluation had a number of key objectives to:
- Review, evaluate and refine the delivery model to increase participation and long term impact
- Improve processes for data capture particularly those for capturing medium-long term changes to behaviour around money
- Understand the impact and effectiveness of the cascading model
It adopted a mixed methods approach to address key research questions including:
- Is CSCS an effective approach to improving financial capability for working age adults through a short-term community-based training intervention?
- Does it improve individuals’ ability to make financial decisions that will benefit them (e.g. appropriate choices of financial providers and building a savings buffer)?
- Does it encourage and enable and prompt participants to share and transfer the knowledge, skills and positive behaviours with others in their community?
