The secret to ending generational poverty
WHY COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS MUST GO BEYOND TRADITIONAL FINANCIAL LITERACY PROGRAMMING
For decades, community organizations serving marginalized families have worked tirelessly to provide financial education, job training, and resources to help break cycles of poverty. But despite these efforts, generational poverty remains a deeply rooted issue.
Why?
Because ending generational poverty isn't just about teaching financial literacy - it's about transforming how families think about wealth, worthiness, and abundance.
At The Institute for Worthy Living, we believe that true financial transformation starts with shifting mindsets, beliefs, and family dynamics around money - and we've developed a powerful tool to do just that: Family Legacy Meetings.
Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short
Most financial literacy programs focus on individual knowledge and behaviors. But wealth-building is a family affair - what one person believes and does with money affects everyone else. Also, many families have deeply ingrained scarcity-based narratives about money, often shaped by generations of financial struggle. Without addressing these belief systems, no amount of financial education will lead to sustainable wealth.
Unlike a typical financial literacy workshop, this meeting isn't about budgeting tips and saving strategies alone - it's about rewiring limiting beliefs that keep families stuck in survival mode and empowering them to adopt an abundance mindset.
Family Legacy Meetings change the game by:
- Creating a safe, open space for families to have honest conversations about money.
- Helping families rewrite their financial identity - from lack and struggle to prosperity and possibility.
- Encouraging collective responsibility for wealth-building, rather than leaving it to one or two financially "successful" family members.
The Family Legacy Meeting defined:
The FLM is a family meeting but so much more. It is preceded by a comprehensive assessment that paints a picture of each family's journey. Importantly, the assessment explores the family's belief system - the strongest determinant of their generational patterns, including their relationship with poverty.
The process is adapted from a best practice tool, Family Team Meetings, that originated in New Zealand and is used in the child welfare system to either preserve or reunify families. Michelle Hollinger has revised the process, infusing it with innovation and creativity, incorporating historical educational components, an assessment tool that pinpoints a family’s belief system and powerful success principles that empower families to not only desire generational wealth, but to also understand how they can achieve it.
Guided by a trained facilitator, the Family Legacy Meeting takes approximately 90-minutes (more or less, depending on dynamics) and follows very intentional components to guide family members to deeper awareness of the belief system guiding their family's financial status. The strength-based, solution-focused approach includes powerful success principles and tools that make it easier for families take ownership of their wealth-building journey.
Following the family's inaugural FLM, the family participates in a series of monthly meetings, convening to check-in, celebrate their progress and hold themselves accountable for achieving the goals established in the inaugural meeting.
With enough Black families participating, the Family Legacy Meeting could join the ranks of rich traditions like family reunions.
Your organization takes the lead on facilitating Family Team Meetings as a part of your engagement with families. The monthly meetings are an excellent tool to help families:
- Shift from survival mode (just getting by) to thrive mode (building and sustaining wealth.)
- Identify and dismantle limiting beliefs about money that have been passed down through generations.
- Develop a family-centered financial vision where everyone has a role in building legacy wealth.
- Move beyond individual success to collective financial empowerment that benefits the entire family unit.
Being an integral part of the family's wealth-building vision also helps your organization understand the family's dynamics, including helping them navigate potential or actual obstacles to reaching their wealth-building goals.