Family Economic Success Series partnership helps immigrant consumers

In the last quarter of 2018, Consumer Action partnered with Portola Family Connections to deliver two money management presentations for women participating in its Family Economic Success Series (FES). Portola Family Connections supports and empowers low-income, immigrant working families and individuals throughout certain neighborhoods in San Francisco. The consumers participating in the series originated from across Latin America and attended the FES workshops on credit, starting a business, saving for college, managing their finances and more. Portola Family Connections also offers a FES program for Chinese immigrants.

Portola Family Connections has offered the six-week FES series for over five years, and Consumer Action staff have partnered with Portola Family Connections several times over the past six years. Consumer Action’s Audrey Perrott conducted the presentations, while a Portola Family Connections staff member, Jessica Arevalo, translated them into Spanish. The trainings featured Consumer Action’s Tracking Your Money educational module, which covers the basics of money management and helps consumers develop a budget or spending plan to control expenses.

“It is always a pleasure to work with Portola’s FES consumers,” Perrott said. “Attendees were eager to learn as well as share best practices on how they’ve been implementing what they’ve learned to improve their lives and the financial health of their families.”

From the very start, the series of sessions were relevant and timely. The first session, for instance, covered the importance of tracking expenses and balancing accounts in preparing and managing a budget, ways to save money, ideas to increase income, financial goal-setting and more. The consumers worked through various “real-world” case studies in the module.

At the end of the six-week session, Consumer Action returned on graduation day. The participants shared their personal goals and more information about how they planned to save to execute them. The goals ranged from having the extra money to take family members on getaway trips, to saving for college, to buying property in their home countries.