New Bill Introduced to Create Children’s Savings Accounts

 By Lisa Kopochinski, NASW-CA Editor

In December, Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian (AD 46) introduced a bill to create Children’s Savings Accounts (CSA) for every newborn in the state of California.

Yes, when the bill is passed, every child born in California will leave the hospital with financial assets—money in a 529 account! CSA is a key intervention in financial social work and one of the Grand Challenges.

This is particularly heartening for Nayiri Nahabedian, MSW, who teaches in the School of Social Work at California State University, Los Angles and has been working toward it for years. More recently, she spearheaded the CSA initiative with Nazarian and is helping shepherd it. She is happy that all of these efforts have translated into this moment: Assembly Bill 34.

Of course, there is much work ahead, including finalizing the draft bill, designing the details, appropriations and much more.

As the Assemblyman’s adviser on the bill, Nahabedian wants to bring in the social work community sooner rather than later. CSAs expand educational and economic opportunity for the next generation. They create more wealth equity for middle and lower income California children. Research demonstrates that children with financial assets are three times more likely to go to college and four times more likely to complete college.

Early childhood development, academic performance and college-bound expectations all rise with CSAs. Simply, it changes the life trajectory of low- and middle-income children!

For more information, please visit http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180AB34 or contact Nahabedian, Vice President of the Glendale Unified School District, at nnahabedian@gusd.net.