• Visit our brand sites
  • Levi's®
  • Dockers®
  • Levi Strauss Signature®

• HIV/AIDS
• Product Sourcing Practices
• Community Involvement
• Public Policy
• Environmental Sustainability
• Diversity
• Levi Strauss Foundation
  • Our Mission and Guiding Principles
  • Grantee Listing and Spotlights
  • Grant Making Staff
• Recognition
• Red Tab Foundation

Asset Building: Frontiers of opportunity

Asset building is a new field seeking fresh solutions to intergenerational poverty. While most economic development approaches focus on income generation, asset building focuses on public policies and programs that enable low-income working people to accumulate assets that compound in value over time.

While the last decade has witnessed a general improvement in income among the world’s working poor, there has been a growing asset divide in most parts of the world. Today, asset inequality dwarfs income inequality worldwide. In the United States, for example, for every one dollar in net worth of a household headed by a male, a female-headed household has less than 40 cents. For every one dollar in net worth of a household headed by a white adult, a minority-headed household has about six cents.

In 1997, the Levi Strauss Foundation became the first corporate foundation to support a groundbreaking pilot called the American Dream Demonstration (a collaboration between CFED/Center for Enterprise Development and the Center for Social Development). It was the first large-scale test of Individual Development Accounts—matched savings accounts for the working poor devoted to purchasing a home, paying for college or skills training, and starting a small business. The findings of the five-year American Dream Demonstration have powerfully influenced policies and programs in the United States—and more recently, abroad. Above all, it yielded two groundbreaking insights:

• Low-income working people, when given the right incentives and support—including financial education—can and do save for long-term goals.
• Building assets has profound effects on individuals and families and their ability to break the poverty cycle. It enables them to plan for the future and avoid risky behavior, weather unexpected financial storms, lower their housing costs through ownership and create their own job opportunities through entrepreneurship.

The Levi Strauss Foundation is committed to building the global asset building field. We seek to enable low-income people to accumulate and preserve financial assets through the following strategies:

• Direct services for apparel and textile workers and underserved youth:
  • Access to critical financial services and savings opportunities
  • Financial education
• Policy advocacy
  • Research and advocacy to promote asset-based public policy
  • Research and advocacy to ensure asset protection
  • Sharing of key learning’s and best practices
• Model development
  • Drive asset building program innovations to scale and sustainability
  • Global adaptation of successful asset building policies and models