Dear Friends,

I’m delighted to share that 2026 is a milestone year for Commonwealth, and I invite you to help us celebrate our 25th anniversary! As we reflect on 25 years as part of a community of people and organizations working to expand financial security and opportunity, I want to share some observations and lessons learned that guide us today and will shape the decades ahead.

This Work Truly Matters

Financial security and opportunity are essential for the things we all want and deserve: dignity, self-determination, the ability to care for those we love, and the chance to pursue our dreams. Like many of you, we’ve drawn strength from this fact over the past 25 years. And I’m confident we’ll draw on it going forward as a source of passion and determination to find new solutions, attract new partners, and try new approaches.

The foundational role of savings and wealth motivated us to form Doorways to Dreams Fund in 2001. In 2026, we remain dedicated to making the workplace an engine of financial opportunity, to expanding access to capital markets for all, and to ensuring technology enables everyone to prosper.  

Experimentation is Essential

We’ve learned that powerful breakthroughs in expanding financial opportunity come through real-world experimentation, pilot testing, and demonstrations. For instance, saving for the short-term actually enables long-term saving (for retirement or education). We’ve also learned that people begin to see themselves as an investor after as little as six months of market participation, that employers can deliver useful financial tools to all kinds of workers (even those who don’t sit at a desk), and that low-income people can, do, and will use conversational AI.

Because our work is about influencing system-shaping organizations to act, we pledge to continue to “practice what we preach,” modeling action through experimentation, testing, and by ‘getting dirt under our fingernails’.

Evidence is Foundational

From the beginning, we’ve been guided by data and a clear commitment to building the collective evidence base of what works. Facts explain where we are today: tens of millions of families struggle with income and expense volatility, financial anxiety, low wealth, and the financial impact of extreme weather—and these households are disproportionately Black, Latin and led by women. 

Soon, we expect the data will also reflect the financial stress of the widespread chaos and cruelty unleashed this year on low-to-moderate income immigrant communities and communities of color.     

Evidence continues to help us focus our strategy: we’ve learned that tens of millions of people living on modest incomes already use financial AI technology, participate in capital markets, crave saving opportunities, respond to creative incentives and embrace well designed tools and opportunities. 

Nothing Big Gets Done Alone

Our aim has always been, impact at scale—a goal that makes collaboration not just an essential tactic, but part and parcel of the outcome we seek. This mindset means we have, and will continue to, work closely with a wide range of partners that shape the financial landscape tens of millions of working families operate within: financial service providers, employers, technology firms and policymakers who see widespread financial security and opportunity as part of their work and aligned with their long-term interests. Working in collaboration requires flexibility, compromise, and patience. It challenges us to build substantive relationships with those who operate under different constraints and within different cultures. In a time of rising mistrust, we strive to remember that future progress toward our vision depends on our ability to build a network of productive relationships. 

An Intractable Challenge Demands Ingenuity

Against a tough challenge, we’ve found that pragmatic, high-leverage, boundary-crossing creativity is an asset. It has led us to some unorthodox ideas (saving lotteries, financial capability video games), unusual distribution partners (retailers, payroll firms, tax authorities), unexpected target markets (caregivers, college students), and surprising political coalitions.  

Together, this portfolio of ingenuity has helped us enable over $8B in savings for 2 million people.

It also inspired us to set our current overarching goal: to create $15B of financial security and opportunity for 10 million households living on low-to-moderate incomes. We know the only way we can achieve this wildly ambitious target is to take risks, embrace innovation, and push boundaries in workplace financial benefits, inclusive investing, and financial AI.

Help Us Shape the Next 25 Years

We’re celebrating our 25th by looking ahead, and would be honored for you to join us.

Passion, action, data, collaboration, and ingenuity—that’s our playbook, honed over a quarter century of hard work, progress, mistakes, and lessons learned. 

We would love to hear from you. As we enter the second quarter of this century, what financial security challenge or challenges are facing working families that are top of mind for you? What do you think most demands collective attention and action?

We welcome you to please take a moment to respond in the form below. Later this year, we’ll share a summary of what we learned and what is top of mind for the financial inclusion community. 

In the meantime, it’s an immense privilege to do this important work. We are grateful to the many partners, supporters, and families living on modest incomes who have put their faith in us and our ideas over these past 25 years. And we are committed to re-earn that trust and faith each day for the next quarter century.  

Tim