Updated: January 2013

Insurance Education Project

Consumer Action's Insurance Education Project and its web site, Insurance Education (www.insurance-education.org) focuses on consumer education around the need for adequate insurance coverage. Covering a multitude of consumer insurance products, it features Consumer Action’s award-winning multilingual educational projects promoting informed participation in the marketplace by consumers with low financial literacy levels. These include but are not limited to people of color, low income and rural consumers, recent immigrants, non-English speakers and seniors. The Insurance Education Project will also provide training materials and curricula to community-based organizations (CBOs) nationwide.

The Insurance Education Project focuses on these broad areas:

• Understanding insurance services (including homeowner’s insurance, auto insurance, health insurance and life insurance) and ways to get the best deals on insurance premiums.
• The importance of anticipating, planning and saving for emergencies—such as job loss, disasters, illness or disability.
• Ways that individuals can identify and avoid becoming victims of fraudulent activities—such as insurance fraud and scams.

The work of The Insurance Education Project includes:

• Creating coalitions of key stakeholders to coordinate and promote the use of existing insurance education programs.
• Holding forums in which community and consumer groups can network with financial services industry associations and corporations to air problems and concerns and to create partnerships.
• Training Consumer Action’s network of more than 10,000 community-based organizations nationwide. Consumer Action has built this pipeline as an efficient and effective way to promote personal financial literacy, because these organizations are regarded with trust in their communities.
• Partnering with corporations and nonprofit consumer advocacy and community based organizations to create and distribute free materials and conduct outreach and training activities.
• Providing community partners with stipends and other financial support to allow them to fully participate in Insurance Education’s agenda.
• Bringing together stakeholders to further develop and coordinate existing insurance education programs.
• Increasing awareness of success stories, best practices and key incentives for teaching personal finance topics.
• Ensuring the availability of in-language materials and outreach in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Other languages may be added in future.