KERA's One Crisis Away Highlights Asset Poverty in North Texas

KERA, public media for North Texas, offers One Crisis Away, a multimedia initiative created to increase awareness of asset poverty. Asset poverty is when a household does not have the financial resources to provide basic needs over a period of 90 days. This applies to one in three North Texans. A job loss, health emergency or even legal trouble is enough to put a third of North Texans into a financial crisis.

One Crisis Away features videos, blogs, radio stories, conversations on KERA’s public affairs radio program Think and a public forum which was hosted at Dallas City Performance Hall with the Communities Foundation of Texas. The public forum was broadcast on KERA TV.

Part one of the series, One Crisis Away: Living on the Financial Edge, highlights the struggles of those living on the financial edge by following several North Texas families. The initiative also provides a list of local resources for those in need of financial assistance.

The second part of the series, One Crisis Away: Inside a Neighborhood, focuses on the high cost of being poor in the Jubilee Park neighborhood in Old East Dallas. It features video clips, pictures and a map of Jubilee Park to investigate the area.

Explore the series so far and join the KERA News team as they add new chapters to One Crisis Away.

One Crisis Away also won the first ever national public radio award for Excellence in Consumer Finance Reporting from Public Radio News Directors Inc. (PRNDI) and the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE). For more information on the award, click here.

You can watch the public forum below: