The Benefit Cliffs Coaching Toolkit is designed to support practitioners who guide individuals and families navigating the complex intersections of income, public benefits, and pathways to economic mobility. Benefit cliffs—moments when even modest increases in income trigger disproportionate losses in essential supports—create emotional, financial, and psychological burdens for families striving to move ahead. These cliffs often feel arbitrary, punitive, and destabilizing, and they disproportionately impact families living in poverty and families of color.
This toolkit offers a trauma-informed, strengths-based, culturally responsive, and family-centered lens for understanding and coaching through benefit cliffs. It integrates frontline insights from focus groups, lessons from the Career Ladder Identifier and Financial Forecaster (CLIFF) portal evaluation from The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, best practices from coaching disciplines, and insights from economic mobility research. This approach recognizes that families do not simply make financial decisions—they manage fear, risk, trauma histories, system distrust, and the real threat of losing housing, food security, childcare, or health coverage.
The purpose of this toolkit is to strengthen coaching practice, enhance confidence when explaining complex benefit systems, and equip practitioners to partner with families in setting safe, realistic, empowering goals. The vision is a coaching model that balances compassion with clarity, empowers families with information, and supports long-term economic mobility while honoring the emotional realities families face.
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Public-facing-Document-BCC-Toolkit-1The Prosperity Agenda provides these resources as the designated national administrator of Family-Centered Coaching.