The City of (Brotherly) Love Celebrates Thrift

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The City of (Brotherly) Love Celebrates Thrift

Elizabeth Marquardt 01.20.2011, 10:34 AM

This week, Philadelphia has become the first city in the nation since 1966 to celebrate National Thrift Week. Read all about the new thrift at NewThrift.org, the site of our John Templeton Center for Thrift and Generosity. Thrift leaders at our Institute include Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, director of the center, Institute president David Blankenhorn, and our thrift week coordinator (and also FamilyScholars.org blogger!) Amber Lapp.

Today, Carolyn Moynihan of MercatorNet in Australia writes about the new thrift movement in America and the social needs it responds to, including the decline of marriage among the broad middle of society, reported in our recent issue of The State of Our Unions. Moynihan writes:

…the household is the primary unit of society and marriage the fundamental economic partnership. But this is precisely this building block of freedom that is being eroded today for the “middling sort” of people for whom (Benjamin) Franklin mainly wrote. As the National Marriage Project recently reported, it is middle Americans, about 58 per cent of the population, who are increasingly divorcing or failing to marry — and so becoming impoverished.

See her whole article, here, for a good summary of the Institute’s thrift work.

And, you can learn more about this week’s activities in Philadelphia in our most recent issue of Institute in the Public Square (including a video from Amber Lapp) and at the Templeton Press Bring Back Thrift Week site. See news coverage at Philadelphia’s NBC10 television station (they are sharing a thrift tip of the day, every day this week, see here and here) and today’s Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed by Gerard P. Cuddy, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Beneficial Bank.

And here’s your thrift tip of the day from FamilyScholars: Because divorce and family breakdown have huge costs, financial as well as emotional, do something sweet for your spouse or loved one today. It’s fun, and it’s thrifty!


Categories: Marriage and Money
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