8 minute read
THE NON-PROFIT ASSOCIATION CRÉSUS
by CRESUS
CRÉSUS® is a non-profit association created in 1992 whose missions are:
to welcome, listen to and support over-indebted and poorly indebted households
Advertisement
to promote the fight against exclusion through financial education and training for all throughout life.
The non-profit association for the CRÉSUS® Foundation was created during a ceremony at the Council of Europe in 2008, in the presence of the Mediator of the French Republic and the Secretary-General of the Council of Europe.
Its purpose is to support economic and social initiatives aiming to prevent the risk of financial exclusion. The non-profit association is committed to experimenting through a partnership platform for budget support on a national scale as well as innovating in the field of budget and financial education.
The budget support and coordinated mediation platform is part of a logic of preventing over- indebtedness and professionalizing budget support, with the aim of gradually reducing over- indebtedness in France.
The CRÉSUS® platform is positioned to serve the most vulnerable of our fellow citizens in a spirit of openness and social innovation. To tackle the problem of financial and social exclusion, CRÉSUS invites economic and institutional agents to become change agents.
30 non-profit associations federated in 12 regions
620 expert volunteers (retired from the worlds of banking, insurance, law, etc.)
More than a hundred podcasts available free of charge on the educational web radio www. radioCRÉSUS.fr
2,000 Dilemme® Education kits
500 Dilemme® Entrepreneurs educational boxes
50,000 Dilemme® sessions for more than 543,000 players made aware since 2013!
128,700 individual consultations
200 local offices
1,800 ambassadors trained with the objective of training 2 million young people per year!
CRÉSUS® and the Dilemme® team are dreaming of a society where money is no longer a taboo, a society populated by autonomous and responsible citizens, able to manage their budget and thus gain freedom!
SOME FIGURES: 42 % of French people do not know how to calculate an annual interest rate of €100.
85 % of the population believes that financial services and products are complicated and confusing.
58 % of the population report difficulty paying their bills at the end of the month.
46 % of French people consider that their level of knowledge is insufficient to read a commercial information document on a service or financial investment.
Sources: CRÉDOC, Survey on "The French Financial Culture", 2011 - IFOP, Audencia, "Survey on the financial vulnerability of the French ", 2014
Generally speaking, the French and Europeans citizens have difficulties understanding various budgetary and financial concepts that could enable them to better control their purchasing power. We leave the French school system without any budgetary education, which is provided only by the family. As a result, bad (and good) budgeting habits are passed on from one generation to the other, and so on.
Households without the foundations of a fiscal and financial culture have more difficulty accumulating savings and managing their incomes effectively (Stango and Zinman, 2007) and are unable to carry medium- and long-term projects, such as retirement planning (Lusardi and Mitchell, 2006, 2007, 2009). These citizens are also easy targets in a society where temptations are omnipresent. Ambiguous credits, the continuous emergence of new dematerialized payment methods with unknown risks, increasingly sophisticated banking products, etc. Many offers contribute to weakening a population that does not know how to defend itself against the opacity of banking and insurance services.
In a complicated and gloomy economic context, insecurity and uncertainty weaken all strata of society. Budgetary and financial education is an effective response, which has already taken too long to establish itself. It allows each and every one of us to become an actor in our own lives, to be aware of the mirages of short-termism and thus able to communicate on an equal footing with the fundamental institutions of our society.
Today, in France, an over-indebtedness declaration form is filed every 2 minutes.
Because money remains taboo, existing budget education programs are struggling to attract the attention of beneficiaries.
Field experience shows that lectures, in a logic of unilateral transmission from teacher to student, rarely succeed in generating a dialogue. Presentations that are deemed as more or less dynamic are not conducive to sharing experiences or changing sustainable behaviors. Budgetary and financial education programs are very rarely provided within the education system. At the end of their studies, young people start their working lives with very little practical knowledge enabling them to acquire their independence and avoid the risks of impoverishment.
Moreover, we live in a society where some worlds evolve without intersecting. Faced with the mistrust of banking and insurance professionals towards some of their clients, civil society responds with a feeling of mistrust and an apprehension of institutions. Misunderstood, they suffer from a negative image. In this context, the budget and financial education sessions allow banking and insurance professionals to question some of their practices and review their communication habits.
4. DILEMME ® : A “BUDGET EDUCATION FOR ALL” PROGRAM!
Dilemme® is a budget and financial education program available throughout France, based on several fun tools:
BOARD GAME: A playful educational tool that offers the possibility to approach different topics (banking, savings, insurance, etc.) with any type of audience and to build tailor-made sessions. The game allows you to learn about budget and finance in a fun way.
New since 2019
BOARD GAME: When entrepreneurship becomes a serious game! Dilemme has developed a version of the board game especially for entrepreneurs. The objective is to allow players to understand several aspects of the different stages of entrepreneurship, from the start-up to the daily life of an entrepreneur.
The three tools below are used for Dilemme® Education and Dilemme® Entrepreneurs
DILEMME® ANIM'APP: This mobile app is designed to provide pedagogical support through facilitation advice and the reinforcement of a few theoretical main points. It allows the game cards to be generated, either randomly or in a predetermined tailor-made way, according to the priority themes or the public concerned. PEDAGOGICAL USB KEYS: They contain many practical educational resources (budget guides, templates of official letters, podcasts hosted by lawyers, etc.).
AMBASSADORS’ PLATFORM: Online space dedicated to the program that allows the ambassadors to follow the schedule of the sessions and to access educational resources.
APPLICATION: This mobile app is an educational game for children to raise their awareness of budget management.
Le jeu
Under development
THE BOARD GAME: Declination of the game for the general public. The objective of Dilemme’s board game is to encourage exchanges and debates within the family or among friends
Through a playful and innovative pedagogy, the Dilemme® budget and financial education program offers a learning method based on constant back and forth between experimentation and theory. This tool allows each person, regardless of their learning style, standard of living and personal background, to acquire new practical knowledge, raise awareness or raise questions about consumption, marketing methods, social choices, solidarity, etc.
Beyond its pedagogical impact, the role-playing game creates a formidable space for exchange and debate, where the absence of taboos and judgment finally makes it possible to speak freely about money.
The context of the game allows participants to distance themselves from their own experiences by confronting them with concrete and realistic situations that reflect their own experiences or those of their loved ones.
Dilemme®'s mission is above all to change the relationship with money, to train responsible citizens and consumers by offering them the necessary tools and knowledge to gain autonomy.
This mission is divided into different goals:
Address the issues of budget management through practice
Deliver basic knowledge about banking and insurance products
Promote informed and responsible consumption
Propose alternatives and solutions in case of financial difficulties
Inform about the rights and duties of everyone regarding the world of banking, credit, and insurance
Foster money-related dialogue
Avoid the spiral of over-indebtedness
Preventing the risks associated with gambling
The values of the Dilemme® program are those that CRÉSUS® has always defended:
Commitment and independence: The Dilemme® program is and will remain independent. The program's stakeholders are all committed to making a profound change in society and bringing their experience and expertise to all those who could benefit from it.
• Cooperation and co-construction: The development and implementation of the Dilemme® program are carried out in a spirit of cooperation and co-construction with numerous banking, insurance, institutional and non-profit association partners. The sessions are carried out, as far as possible, by pairs composed of a CRÉSUS® speaker and a volunteer from the banking or insurance world.
Expertise: It is thanks to the experience and expertise that CRÉSUS® has developed over the past 25 years that the Dilemme® program has been created. Its relevance and proximity to concrete reality are the results of years of welcoming, listening and supporting households with low or excessive debt. No one works with Dilemme® tools without prior training.
Openness and non-judgment: The objective of the Dilemme® program is to educate and inform, not to judge. CRÉSUS has always been committed to empowering citizens without assisting or seeking guilt or victimization. Bringing the various stakeholders of society together around a game board or an application, in a non-commercial context, allows direct and frank exchanges to be encouraged. This innovative method is a way to fight against the stigmatization of certain groups, while desacralize the role of banking and insurance.
Innovation: Innovation is at the heart of the program's creation and development process. Pedagogical innovation in the first place, since the Dilemme® program is part of a movement to promote education and promote a vision of learning, thinking outside the box. Playing allows free speech and to overcome the taboo of money: this is the main revolution in the Dilemme® program. The social and pedagogical innovation, which is the DNA of the Dilemme® program, is enriched by unprecedented use of digital media.
