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Our community and stakeholder engagement sessions, racial wealth divide research, and various internal and external conversations during the Blueprint creation showed that financial empowerment is not a one-size- fits-all model. Residents differ in their financial empowerment needs based on their life statuses and current financial situations. While residents can collectively benefit from financial empowerment services in South Bend, it is important to look at different constituency groups to specifically address the financial challenges and needs of those groups. Therefore, the City of South Bend developed a guiding framework for a path to financially empower residents of South Bend. This is an overall framework on how the City should operate when it comes to financial empowerment decision-making. Each aspect of financial empowerment will take time and resources to enact. The overall framework will continuously be refined to better reflect the financial needs of residents. This guiding framework serves as a continuum of financial empowerment for any South Bend resident. Dependent of life and financial status, residents can enter this framework wherever their needs can best be met. Residents can progress along this continuum, starting with employment with a savings program as a youth until they are ready to pass down generational wealth as a senior. This framework is also reiterative, meaning that, as generational wealth passes down to future generations, such wealth compounds to create a more financially empowered generation, neighborhood, and city than the previous. FINANCIAL EMPOWERMENT GUIDING FRAMEWORK FINANCIAL EMPOWERMENT BLUEPRINT 21