CFPB FinEx webinar: Libraries as a Financial Education Resource NWX-CFPB HQ Moderator: Irene Skricki December 15, 2016 2:00 pm ET Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. All participants will be on a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session of today’s call. At that time you may press star the 1 to ask a question from the phone lines. I would also like to inform all parties that the call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Ms. Irene Skricki. Thank you, ma’am, you may begin. Irene Skricki: Great, thank you very much and welcome everyone to our FinEx webinar today on libraries as a financial education resource. We’re delighted everybody could join us, especially in this busy time of year when people’s minds hopefully are all turning towards thoughts of upcoming vacations but we do want to do our Webinar every month for FinEx. So I’m going to do a brief introduction as somebody either me or someone else does on every FinEx call and then we will turn it over to our presenters to talk about the libraries initiative. In addition to someone from the CFPB -- Dubis Correal -- to speak on our work, we also have a librarian from the Brooklyn Public Library joining us as well. We’re delighted to have James Dye as well as Dubis with us today. To start-off quickly with our usual disclaimer that government employees have to say that we are not providing legal interpretation guidance or advice and our opinions stated are those of the presenter and may not represent the Bureau’s views. So again probably everybody on this call knows this well - the CFPB is a federal agency that works on consumer finance markets to make rules more effective and consistently and fairly enforce those rules and empower consumers to take more control of their economic lives. And it’s that last piece about helping consumers that we really work on here in the Office of Financial Education and through the CFPB Financial Education Exchange. The Office of Financial Education is part of the consumer-facing part of the Bureau, the Consumer Education and Engagement ivision. We work closely with some of the other offices within the CFPB working on special populations to make sure that all American consumers are getting the financial education that they need. Probably everyone on this call hopefully as part of FinEx has been getting newsletters and that’s how you knew about this Webinar. But in case you’re not, you may want to sign up to get regular updates from the financial education exchange or FinEx. Basically we are a network of financial educators around the country who are getting information from the CFPB on our latest tools and resources, sharing your own knowledge back to us through surveys and via different regional meetings we have. We have over 2200 people in FinEx around the country, as well as a similar number in our LinkedIn discussion group, and this is our 20th Webinar, our 20th consecutive Webinar. I’m very excited about that long list of topics we’ve covered, all of which can be listened to almost all on our Webpage. Again, as probably many of you know, we have a resource inventory for financial educators that you can get on our Website that talks about the different tools and resources we have that are all available for financial educators to use. That Webpage you can see here, consumerfinance.gov/adult-financial-education and that is the place to find all of our things for educators including the inventory I showed. We also have a LinkedIn discussion group where you can post your own things as well as see what we’re posting. So that’s my standard background, and if anybody is not in FinEx and wants to get the monthly newsletter, you can just e-mail cfpb_finex@cfpb.gov. I’ll put that e-mail address will be up at the very end of the Webinar in case anybody didn’t catch it. Now we will turn to our topic of the day. This is a project that we have been doing with libraries to help them partner with financial educators. We thought it would be useful to have financial educators hear about this directly and think about ways you might want to reach-out to your own libraries and learn about some of the opportunities. So I’m going to turn it over to Dubis Correal to talk about the libraries project. After her our librarian James Dye from Brooklyn will come on and speak. Before Dubis starts I’ll just note that as the operator mentioned, we will take voice questions at the end. But if you have any questions or clarifying questions or want to tee anything up for later, you can use the Q&A function within the WebEx and I will keep track of those and we’ll ask those at the appropriate moment. With that, I will turn it over to Dubis. Dubis Correal: Thanks, Irene. Good afternoon, everyone. As Irene said my name is Dubis Correal and I’m also with the Office of Financial Education here at the Bureau and what I’m going to do is to describe the libraries program that we have, some of the tools that we have created for the library and maybe inspire you to think about ways how you can work with your library. As Irene mentioned, we invited James from the Brooklyn Public Library to share the work that he’s doing with financial education providers. We started the program in December of 2013 and this was as a result of a lot of listening sessions that we did across the country when we started the Office of Financial Education. What we’ve heard from consumers was that sometimes people don’t know where to go for answers and we thought that libraries would be the obvious place for people to go. But what people don’t know is that libraries have changed their role in their communities. Libraries are not a place where people only take out books. Libraries have become this hub of the community where they provide many other services. What we wanted to do was to build the infrastructure coordinating with libraries and also working with national partners. The goal of the program with the libraries was leveraging their presence in their communities and helping them expand their efforts, because throughout the whole process we learned that there are many libraries out there doing great things so we wanted to amplify and then share those best practices. We also interviewed more than 700 people, including librarians, patrons, library staff, administrators because we really wanted to assess what librarians were doing in this space and how we could help. What you see on the screen is some statistics about libraries. And I think the one that caught our attention is the last bullet in last slide where he says that about 25% of the public use use the computers of the library for either commercial needs or for managing their personal finance. A lot of small businesses also use the libraries. Libraries have the technology. So when we did this survey that I mentioned before, we wanted to hear from libraries as to what they need, what we heard from librarians was that they wanted a list of resources that are vetted, that are easy to identify. U.S. financial education providers know that if you Google financial literacy, thousands of resources come out and for a librarian who doesn’t have the same kind of expertise in the field of financial education, it is very hard to identify what’s good and what’s bad. So librarians asked us to put together a list of resources and also they asked us for outreach materials because if they’re going to start promoting financial education programs, they needed a way to let their patrons know about this program. They also asked us how they could partner with either financial education providers or other members of the community so this is where we think that you as a financial education provider could play a big role. There are many libraries that are very experienced and engaging in partnerships, but there are also many libraries out there that would like to work with partners but they don’t know how to start. And also something that is very important for libraries is that libraries are a trusted source in their communities and we don’t want groups to see libraries as a platform to market their products. So they also have to be very vigilant as to who they partner with so they asked us about ideas and I’ll talk a little bit more about our resource that we created in that area. They wanted to learn from each other so we are highlighting the Brooklyn Public Library on this webinar because they have done great things, and libraries in other part of the country can learn about what the Brooklyn Public Library in this space of financial literacy. Librarians have many other places where they get together and platforms that they share but in terms of financial literacy, there are not many out there so they asked us for that as well. They asked us for training and they also asked us to be flexible because there are libraries of many sizes, different sizes. They serve different populations so the program that we created is more like a menu of things for libraries that they can use. If we go to the next slide, it shows some of the resources that we created in response to what librarians asked us for. We have Webinars same as FinEx which conducts Webinars every month on different topics. We did that for librarians. We have them posted on our Website and what’s interesting about it is that librarians come at different times to view those Webinars and last year we have had more than 8000 views of those Webinars. We also created an inventory of resources and they are posted on our Website. You see the Website address at the bottom of that page. We do have criteria, of course, for the programs that we post but if you have any ideas, any programs that you think will be helpful to libraries, you can let us know at the email we will highlight at the end of the presentation. We also on a quarterly basis post program ideas. For example we posted one about tools on auto lending and how librarians can use those and share them with their patrons. We also have a list of outreach materials like bookmarks, posters, fact sheets, different materials that librarians can use to promote their programs. The last two items are highlighted because we believe this is where your role is important. The partnership guidebooks that we created is posted also on our Website. It lists potential national, state and local partners, provides an overview of CFPB, and helps libraries build community partnerships and includes resources like worksheets that librarians can use to think through a prospective partnership. And really what we’re trying to do is help librarians because since the economic downturn many libraries have experienced reduced budgets and staff cuts so they depend a lot on help from others in their communities to maintain and increase their services. They also get grants from different groups and partnering with others is helpful to librarians so that’s why we created these tools and … Irene Skricki: You had mentioned that the Website was up on the screen. In case there’s anyone on the phone who isn’t seeing the screen, I’m just going to read it for you, www.consumerfinance.gov\library-resources and that’s where all the things Dubis is describing, the Webinars, the partnership guidebook, the program ideas are all there. Dubis Correal: Yes, yes, thanks, Irene and so we also in terms of the partnership guidebook, we put up on the screen a couple of questions that are helpful to librarians in thinking about how to partner with other groups. For example, what is the purpose of the program, what are the library’s goals for the program, how will patrons benefit from this program, who’s the ideal audience for this program? This is intended to help librarians who don’t have the expertise in terms of engaging with other partners, think about things they need to consider because their reputation is very important in their community and they have to make sure that those partnerships that they engage in are based on mutual interests and goals. And also that the information that the librarian provides is unbiased because as I said before, they’re very careful and not selling products to their patrons. Some of those partnerships that they have and we learn from them are formal where they do sign MOUs and some others are very informal. Irene Skricki: And before you go on, I just want to note having been looking around in the site recently, while it’s aimed at librarians, both the program ideas and the Websites and videos that you were mentioning is actually a list of resources on financial education generally that may be of interest to any financial educator to see where there’s a good site that’s been vetted. Dubis Correal: Exactly, exactly. Irene Skricki: I just want to make sure people particularly take a look at that links to other Websites part even if you’re not working with a library, it could be a really useful resource. Dubis Correal: And also we divide some of the resources by topics and also by audience so yes, please feel free to go and visit that Website and use them as appropriate. The next page shows us an image of the order site. A librarian or anyone can order materials from the CFPB in bulk and for free. We have materials about different topics from how to get your credit score to how what to think about when you’re getting into a mortgage so we have all kinds of topics and all the publications are available in English and Spanish and we also have any publications available in up to nine languages. So all those publications are available to the public, to financial education providers, to the libraries for their use. Irene Skricki: And Dubis one of the questions because some people on the phone who are part of FinEx know we have a resource inventory for financial educators. Except for things unique to marketing for libraries, this is the same materials for the most part, things like one-pagers on credit or debt. It’s just a different channel and it’s partially for us to keep track of who’s ordering, right? Dubis Correal: Exactly. Irene Skricki: The audience so it’s not like there’s completely different things here except for things for librarians like bookmarks and some marketing stuff but similarly to the things you see through FinEx, it’s things you can order in bulk and it’s more for us to track who’s ordering. Dubis Correal: And as I was preparing for the presentation I was going through some of the materials that we have that were created specifically for libraries but they’re so general that they can even be used by financial education providers too to promote their programs. We just want to make sure that this program is an ongoing program. We’re always learning new things. We’re always out there asking librarians whether the program is serving their needs and so if you have an idea as I said before, you can e-mail it to us at financialeducation@cfpb.gov and I’ll repeat that, financialeducation@cfpb.gov. If you have a good idea as to how you are working with a library or an idea for a librarian, please let us know. I want to recognize some of the national partners that we’re working with with. We’re working, for example, with the FINRA Investor Educator Foundation. They have been very helpful. There were doing grants to librarians a long time ago in this space and they have been very helpful in helping us think through a lot of the strategies in this program. We also worked with the Institute of Museum and Library Services which is a federal agency that provides funding through the states to libraries across the country. And we work with the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. This joint initiative with them has been very helpful where we connected the NFCC agencies to librarians. since we started this partnership, more than 300 workshops on credit have been conducted at libraries across the country. We also partner with our colleagues in the federal government like the Federal Trade Commission. They also have great publications that we distribute through this program and I think the great thing about this program is that we’re leveraging resources that are out there. We are creating a couple of things but most of this stuff that we have compiled for librarians is stuff that is out there and we didn’t want to duplicate here. We wanted to make sure that we grouped this information in a way that makes sense to librarians. You see the rest of the partners that we’re working with. All of them have some sort of local presence in their communities and that’s how we’re able to connect local libraries to local partners so just wanted to make sure that outlined those. Irene Skricki: Dubis, one just circling back just about the e-mail address you sent-out earlier, if anyone has any library questions and you don’t remember the financialeducation@cfpb.gov e-mail address, anything sent to the FinEx inbox, I will pass-on to Dubis and the library folks ]so your comments will not get lost as we keep close track of all of those inboxes. Dubis Correal: Yes, and at this point I’d like to turn it over to James because we thought that it would be great to hear from a librarian about their experiences working with local partners in the community so James if you’re ready, the floor is yours. James Dye: Well, thank you. Hello. My name is James Dye and I’m a finance librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library in our new business and career center. We’ve had a business library in Brooklyn for many years but we recently moved the business of the library to our central library because we are trying to reinvent it as a more active presence in the community and to more of a focus on topics that are specifically helpful to our patrons.. So our emphasis right now is personal finance, small business assistance and employment and I am one of two librarians who specifically work in personal finance assisting patrons with personal finance questions. We have a good selection of books and I help patrons with titles that I would recommend. I buy finance titles for the library but a larger portion of what we’re trying to do now is work with local organizations to offer more direct assistance than just having a nice collection of finance books. So I’m just going to talk a little bit about our current services that we offer in partnership with local organizations. I would say the biggest program that we offer right now to the public is our financial counseling which we offer together with the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation which is a local organization dedicated to personal empowerment for local residents. The financial counseling is held every Tuesday and every Thursday and on alternate Saturdays and a volunteer from Bed-Stuy offers financial counseling to patrons on a one-on-one basis where they will provide assistance and advice on topics like repairing credit, balancing a budget, opening a banking account, very much like the basics of personal finance. They don’t go into the area of investing or the stock market. It’s more personal help on managing someone’s money to the best of their ability so it’s again topics like budgeting, balancing a budget, some insight inside how to apply for a mortgage and buying a house, those sorts of topics. And we’re currently working with Bed-Stuy on a new program we hope to start next year in 2017 where we’ll hold workshops. Right now we’re looking at one a month where we’ll pick a topic and have it open to an audience of patrons rather than one-on-one assistance. So there would be a workshop for multiple participants. And again we would choose one topic a month and it would be the same territory. It would be a budgeting or repairing credits, retirement, those sorts of topics generally but there’s actually a new program that we’re just starting now that we haven’t done before. We’ve worked with Bed-Stuy on the financial counseling for quite some time but the new workshops are something we’re just starting to work on now. It’s something new that we’re introducing. Another program that we offer for the patrons is specifically programs for older adults of retirement age or older so the business and career center works with another section of the library, the services for older adults in offering a series of workshops on financial topics for older patrons. Just two months ago we worked both for the service for older adults in a business and center worked with our local Social Security office on a program titled when to withdraw money from Social Security. We had a representative from our local Social Security Administration office speak to patrons on the optimal time to start accepting checks from Social Security, when is it optimal depending on what money the patron might need to be comfortable every month like what is the optimal age to start receiving Social Security, what the benefits are, accepting Social Security right at retirement age versus waiting a few years. The representative from the Social Security office provided good graphs and charts that patrons could use to determine what is the right age for themselves to start working with Social Security and receiving benefits. We also offer an interactive class usually during the summer months that we call the virtual investment club. This is a program that was started partially with a grant we received from FINRA several years ago. That grant has now been completed but we are going ahead and continuing with the program with our own funds. We work with the local financial counselor names Mina Ennin Black who is wonderful. She hosts the program and it’s a series of classes. Usually there’s an introductory class for educational classes and then a final wrap-up class I guess you’d say where the patrons are introduced to the stock markets. They learn about the basic concepts of investing, what the stock market is, what the major exchanges are, how stock investment works. And they basically pretend to invest in stocks and Mina monitors their success based on the stocks they’ve chosen to invest. She sees the interest earned on this virtual investing. Of course they’re not using real money. It’s just an educational exercise but they learn how to invest in the stock markets. They learn about returns. They learn about exchanges, indices, all the basics of stock market investing and then at the end of the program in the final class of the workshop, she usually rewards like small prizes to the patrons who have earned the most interest on their stock market picks. So it’s a really fun way to teach patrons about the stock market and investing in a way that’s not too dry, not just through lectures. They’re actually participating and learning on their own and with Mina on how to invest and having fun, enjoying themselves doing it. And we also offer financial counseling specifically for immigrants who are seeking advice about citizenship that we offer through the New York Legal Assistance Group so if they need financial counseling in regards to obtaining citizenship, that is something that we offer. Again it’s a partnership with New York Legal Assistance Group and they help local immigrants with any financial matters that they might need to know in regards to obtaining citizenship. So these are right now the four major programs that we hold with outside organizations. We also have other resources for patrons such as databases that they can use to learn to budget and to learn about taking care of their finances and learning. Even though our FINRA grant has finished, we actually have a Web program still available on our Websites that was created in development with the FINRA grants called Growing Dollars so patrons can access their Website. It's a series of interactive programs that they can use at home or on the library through our Website to learn about these topics as well. So even though the FINRA grant has completed we still have the resources of the grants available through these interactive programs on our Website and we have laptops in our business center that patrons can use on their own time to learn about personal finance through our Web resources. We try to do more than just offer personal finance books. We have plenty of those and we’re happy to help patrons learn which titles to read and buy good books for personal finance but we’re trying to be more proactive in working with our community in working with other organizations on on these personal finance topics. And since the FINRA grant has completed, we are really basically making a full push on our own to keep continuing with these resources in making them available to the community. We are expanding on our own with personal finance workshops particularly that’s going to be a big portion of what we want to offer to our patrons. I also host a series of occasional programs where I will teach basics of personal finance and to other librarians and other branches of the Brooklyn Public Library system who are not specialized in business particularly but may be interested in learning about the subject to help their patrons in their branches. So occasionally I’ll host a workshop where I basically teach other librarians about the basics of Web resources that are essential for learning about personal finance like CFPB’s Website and FINRA’s Website. I just go through general basics where I teach other librarians and hope that they can teach the patrons in their branches and can disseminate these topics all through the entire the Brooklyn Public Library system, not just inside our business and resource center but throughout all the branches of our library. And that’s really what we’re doing and we hope to expand further and hope that we can to the best of our ability serve the Brooklyn community. Irene Skricki: Great, James, thank you so much. That was great. There was a lot of really cool things that you guys are doing up there in Brooklyn. James Dye: Thank you. Irene Skricki: I have a couple of e-mailed questions that have come in already through the Q&A function but let me just quickly have the operator open up for voice questions too as it takes a minute to tee them up. Operator, can you give people instructions on voice questions and then we’ll jump in? Coordinator: Yes. At this time we would like to begin the question-and-answer session of today’s call. If you would like to ask a question from the phone lines, please press star then 1, unmute your phone and record your name when prompted. If you need to withdraw your question, please press star then 2. Once again to ask a question from the phone lines, please press star then 1 and record your name when prompted. One moment, please, while questions queue-up. Irene Skricki: Great, so while people are doing that and again you can also feel free to send them into the Q&A function on the WebEx, I have a few questions I want to ask you -- but let me start off with one that came in, James, for you about the financial counselor who comes to your library. The person asks if she passes out business cards, is she allowed to talk about her business and more generally then how do you kind of prevent promoting of personal business to anyone who may come in and partner with you on financial education? James Dye: Well, that’s a good question. The financial counseling program does not push any business. It’s strictly assisting the patron with their own issues with budgeting or credit repair or the usual topics. They don’t push any business agenda. They also do not talk about personal investments such as the stock market. They do not push any like business programs whatsoever. It’s simply the counselor working with the patron on whatever personal finance issue they need assistance with. There’s no pushing of any product or outside business. It’s strictly assistance and there’s a very like firm law that we have that it’s only assistance and it’s not just our laws with Bed-Stuy, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation’s law. It’s for the assistance of the community only. We’re very firm on that. Irene Skricki: Right, I assume in that question it is implied is she an employee of Bed-Stuy? Is she a volunteer? What is kind of her status relative to the library or does she have her own business? James Dye: No, it’s usually a volunteer or a full-time employee of Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. Irene Skricki: Okay, great. James Dye: If it is a volunteer who has business ties outside, they do not push any outside business in the counseling. Irene Skricki: That’s great. Let me quickly see, any voice and questions via phone? Coordinator: Once again if you would like to ask a question from the phone lines, please press star then 1 and record your name when prompted. Irene Skricki: And then I will I actually would like to just ask you this because I know a little bit about the libraries program, just so people have the context, there are a lot of libraries around the country who have already signed-up to be part of this and are doing different levels of things from offering materials to doing the kind of things that James described in terms of workshops and counseling. Give us the sense of the scope of the program. I know you have a lot of libraries signed-up. Dubis Correal: Sure, so when we started in 2013 we started with nine pilot libraries across the country and actually we used those and Brooklyn Public Library was one of those, we used those librarians to help us as we were developing this program so any new idea we would always bounce those ideas off them to make sure that we were developing this program for librarians by librarians. We started with those nine libraries and we have been doing a lot of outreach in terms of going to state conferences, national conferences, working with associations of libraries. One of our partners as well is the American Library Association and we have been doing a lot of outreach to public libraries mainly. And we have more than 2500 branches across the country that now are getting this information. We’re going to be conducting a survey next year to measure the impact of the program whether we’re helping increase capacity at libraries to provide financial education. We know that out of all those libraries that I mentioned, there are different ranges of programs so there are libraries that are distributing materials, distributing information to libraries like the Brooklyn Public Library where they’re partnering with specific groups and bringing one-on-one sessions to the library. So we have the whole range of programs but it’s interesting because at the beginning we didn’t know what the reception was going to be from librarians but they are eager for this information because they tell us that they get these kinds of questions. What we intend to do with the program is not that the librarian becomes a financial advisor but the librarian has access to unbiased resources,or be able to connect with those groups in the communities so librarians have actually responded very positively to the program. Irene Skricki: Thank you and actually there was a related question that came-in which is, how can I find out which libraries in my area are utilizing these services which is great question. Dubis Correal: Yes, it’s a great question but it’s also a complicated question because we as a government agency protect personally identifiable information very well so we would not be able to share contacts but we are looking for a way to be able to perhaps share the names of libraries that are part of the program. But before we do that we would have to ask for permission to the library in order for us to do that. I’m happy to talk to the person who sent the question. If you e-mail your information, and I’m happy to talk to you but right now we’re still thinking about how we make that information available. Irene Skricki: But certainly we encourage anyone you know, on this call or elsewhere to go-in and talk to your local library one, to see if they’re already participating. If not, encourage them to and that may be one channel to both find existing programs or libraries who are participating and also encourage additional ones to join but it sounds like there in the future there may be some way to just find out where your library is. Dubis Correal: Yes, we hope so and other programs that are very strong with the libraries are the summer reading programs for children so there’s also a lot of children's librarians out there where they’re also interested in bringing these concepts to the kids. And the summer reading programs are also a very important tool especially if you’re using existing literature that incorporates those financial literacy concepts so that’s also an opportunity for those groups who are working with youth. Irene Skricki: Great, and then there was a question I was going to ask but somebody has also e-mailed it in which is how well - this is for James - James … James Dye: Yes. Irene Skricki: How extensive are the programs at the Brooklyn Library? Can you give us a sense of numbers, both I think for the group things as well as the one-on-one counseling to get a sense of kind of demand and interest? James Dye: Sure, so for the one-on-one financial counseling the counselor usually sees between four and eight people during a day. Usually it’s during the week on the Tuesdays and Thursday like 4:00 to 6:00 is usually the range. There tend to be more on the alternate Saturdays because more people, you know, are available to see the counselor on the weekend and so we usually have between six and eight on the alternate Saturdays. For the workshops that are open to multiple patrons it’s usually between 10 to maybe 30. The virtual investment club is very, very popular so we’ve had as many as I’d say between 40 and 45 patrons at some of the classes for the original investment club so the programs are very popular. We are trying to track more patrons. Some of these programs are fairly new so we’re hoping that by holding the virtual investment club every year and holding workshops every month, we’ll attract hopefully a larger and larger audience. As I mentioned the personal finance area of attention within the business library is relatively new so we’re starting from the meeting ourselves and learning how to successfully offer these programs to our patrons but we’re pretty successful. It’s definitely between 10 to 40 patrons for every workshop. Financial counseling again it’s usually between four and eight people a day. Irene Skricki: That’s wonderful, that’s great, you know, because getting people to step out of their busy lives and come to things is a challenge I think everybody faces in our field or in any service people provide so that’s great to hear. A follow-up question from me is that James you obviously have programming for people. As just as a librarian, I don’t know if you actually literally sit at your librarian’s desk or … James Dye: I do. Irene Skricki: … if you move around a lot but do you get a lot of people who come in with like money questions or asking for referrals or are people comfortable asking that kind of question? I’m curious what you see just in your day-to-day kind of job as a librarian in terms of a sense of interest from people on these topics. James Dye: Sure, so I work at a reference desk for two hours each day along with my other responsibilities. We all receive lots of questions usually on small business employment and finance but for finance specifically, we usually get patrons asking about programming or they ask for specific titles within personal finance. The big one is retirements, saving for retirements, investing in 401(k)s or IRAs, that’s very popular, Social Security titles. We get a lot of questions on Social Security. Those are very popular. The personal finance help books like the Suze Orman titles, we get a lot of patrons asking about that so finance is definitely a popular topic. I’d say we get maybe four to five questions a day from patrons just on personal finance. We do keep a record of the questions we’re asking patrons on what specific topic so we actually have a record of this so I’d say like four to five questions a day which is a very good day for us so we do receive them. Patrons are interested. Whenever a patron asks about specific subjects, we refer them to our programs as well as the titles on the shelves. You know, we try to make it very clear to patrons that our area of expertise in the library isn’t just having the books available but also the programming that we offer. Irene Skricki: Cool, that’s very helpful. Actually we have another e-mail question which is somebody asking about whether there it’s possible to see the content of the virtual investment club of that class whether that is sharable or I guess if there’s a way people can learn more about it. It’s interesting the level of demand you described and it’s something others might want to do. Is there any way they can learn more about that? James Dye: I don’t believe that it’s available to the public because it’s created by Mina Ennin Black who is a financial counselor who runs the program with us. She provides PowerPoint presentations and literature at the actual workshops themselves. We’ve never put that information on our Website. It’s something I can certainly ask about but I would have to ask Mina first because it’s her creations, it's her literature that she created for these workshops. We have not put it on or made it available on the Web in the past so it may be up to her whether she’s willing to allow us to make the PowerPoint presentations on our Website. We have not done that in the past though so she may only want to keep it within the workshops. Irene Skricki: Yes, that’s helpful. I think it was just whether is what some other,publicly available curriculum and there may be other things like that out there that people could look around. I think the nice thing is just knowing that that type of thing is of interest to people. People can financial educators and libraries can probably find ways to do something similar to that. James Dye: Sure, I should mention really briefly, we do offer two databases, Morningstar and Value Line to our patrons. That’s available for free with the library card and both of those databases do have like workshops that that users can basically participate in to learn about the stock market and investing. They’re online tutorials basically available to all of our patrons, you know, with the use of their library card they can educate themselves online on these subjects. It’s very similar to the virtual investment club. Irene Skricki: Great. Let’s see, let me just ask, operator, do we have any other voice questions? Coordinator: There’s no questions in queue from the phone lines. Irene Skricki: Okay, I am going to just ask one more thing of Dubis. We’re approaching time but feel free if you do have a question to still send it in through Q&A or dial star 1 to do a voice question. Dubis, probably folks picked-up that we have a series of Webinars and tools for libraries and a series of Webinars and tools such as this Webinar for financial educators. Since they’re both available to either audience, can you just tell us a little bit about the Webinars - the library Webinars - what are some of the topics that the people might know there’s one that’s of interest to them that maybe we haven’t covered in FinEx or maybe with them more recently. Can you tell me a few of those just to give people a flavor for what’s available? Dubis Correal: Yes, so we have one similar to this presentation where we describe all of the resources that are available to librarians. We have one where we had guest speakers and it was about financial education programs for children so we invited librarians, we invited other entities that have programs so it’s about resources for children. We also had a Webinar about how librarians that get a lot of people to the library do it so they sort of share their strategies about how they market their programs in their communities because we heard that libraries say that sometimes they have all these programs and this information but it’s hard to attract people. So we had a Webinar about that so like marketing ideas from librarians for librarians. We also did one on retirement tools and so about it’s very similar to the ones that we do for financial educators. Irene Skricki: The audience is a little different so that would tend to cover differently in terms of how someone might use those resources but I would imagine some things like the ones for kids, we haven’t covered that in a lot of detail and FinEx might be of interest to some of the folks on the call today or others. Great, well let’s do one last check, make sure there’s no voice question. Operator, are we good with question? Coordinator: We are showing no questions from the phone lines. Irene Skricki: Great, well we’re just about at time so I want to thank everybody. This was really interesting. This one as we know is a little bit different than some of our other FinEx Webinars because this is a resource local to you that we hope you can actually offer some assistance to perhaps by finding your own local library, and potentially using that as a place to provide financial education or be a source of referrals for libraries who may have patrons that need help. And we think some of the things on here on the libraries Website may be of interest even if you never to talk to your library. I think some of the list of resources could be helpful but we definitely encourage financial educators to reach out to libraries, see them as a resource and encourage your own libraries to do more if they’re not working in this area. So again all of the resources are on our Website, consumerfinance.gov. Anyone who’s not in FinEx definitely sign up, so you'll get the every two to four-week newsletter so you know what’s going on. Thank you so much to Dubis, my colleague, and a special thanks to James Dye who’s calling in from Brooklyn talking about what his library is doing. He has been a real leader in the field and we’re delighted to have you take time out to join us. So thank you everybody and I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season. Dubis Correal: Thank you. Bye bye. James Dye: Thank you. Goodbye. Coordinator: That concludes today’s conference. Thank you for participating. You may disconnect at this time. END NWX-CFPB HQ Moderator: Irene Skricki 12-15-16/2:00 pm CT Confirmation # 2067884 Page 1