Blog
Leadership in Action
What would it take to make Colorado the best place to have a child and raise a thriving family? To answer that question, Ascend invested in a cohort of diverse leaders across systems and communities, on the Front Range and along the Western Slope – leaders with big ideas and leverage points to transform Colorado’s…
An IT Company Creates Strategic Partnership with Two-Generation Organization
Evans & Chambers Technology (EC) is all about solutions. The Washington, D.C.-based information technology firm founded in 2003 develops software for government and commercial enterprises. However, in 2018, several years after EC opened its new office in the historic Shaw neighborhood in 2015, office manager Alice Swan realized the company needed to address an issue.…
Aspen ThinkXChange 2019: 240 Leaders Convene to Advance Family Prosperity
Families must be at the center of any and all work to address intergenerational poverty. That’s why our Aspen ThinkXChange 2019, which focused on using a two-generation (2Gen) approach to advance family prosperity, began the way that it did – with more than 240 leaders (parents, practitioners, and policymakers) listening and learning from families. At…
New Toolkit Offers Tips on Designing a 2Gen Convening
Two-generation (2Gen) convenings have the potential to create change for whole systems and the lives of the families they serve. This planning guide is the first step. Having planned and supported more than 100 2Gen convenings, Ascend has cultivated a depth of knowledge for the practical elements and nuanced factors that result in successful convenings.…
“We can solve poverty if we want to.”
It was another great day of provocative conversation at ThinkXChange. Here are three of our favorite insights from the breakout group on cash transfers: “Poverty is the absence of cash flow. If you want to solve poverty, give people money. That’s it. We can solve poverty if we want to.” — Anthony Barrows, managing director…
Real solutions for closing the very real racial wealth gap
The racial wealth gap is well-documented and undisputedly real. The median white family has 41 times more wealth than the median African-American family and 22 times more wealth than the median Latino family. And things are getting worse, not better: The proportion of black families with zero or negative wealth rose by 8.5 percent to…