In recognition of our contributions to the field of financial education research, Knology was recently chosen to be the first recipient of NEFE’s Innovation Award. We are honored to have been selected for this award, and would like to thank our NEFE collaborators for supporting our research, and for believing in our goal of consolidating financial education policies and investments across the nation into a single database. For more on our work in support of financial education efforts, click here.

We’d like to share this recognition with all of our partners who support financial education research—including the FINRA Foundation, the American Library Association’s Public Programs Office, and Pockets Change. We are also proud to share this award with the 2022 NEFE Knology Fellows: Drs. Lu Fan, Thomas Korayanke, Jeffrey Anvari-Clark, and Yingying Zeng, and Lena Gan and Jack Kroger. These Fellows’ work (which you can read about here) demonstrated the value of a consolidated public dataset for understanding how variation in state policies plays a role in the financial security for the next generation.

Developing education programs that advance financial well-being is core to human rights and human dignity. Without solid financial education, we leave the most at risk in our society to be victimized by predatory opportunists, living in a world of unmanageable individual debt, and creating instability in our entire economy.

We hope that this award draws attention to the need for better datasets so research can support better policy, and that it can stimulate rapid innovation in financial education policy.

Photo by Linus Nylund on Unsplash