Financial education as political education: a framework for targeting systems as sites of change

ABSTRACT The ability of individual-level interventions to improve people’s financial conditions is compromised when the root causes of precarity develop at systems levels. While it can be a challenge to intervene at the systems-level, we contend that one approach is for social work and allied professions to treat financial education as political education. Building on the activist organizing approaches of Paulo Freire and the Black feminist scholarship of bell hooks, we offer a framework to target systems as critical sites for change. If we wish to empower people to transcend rather than cope with the oppressive power of racial capitalism, there may be no choice but to find ways to raise people’s consciousness about structural oppression as the root cause of financial precarity. Implications for practice are discussed in the contexts of labor organizing and the Black cooperative movement.