Maine's retirement savings program for small employers expands language options
FILE PHOTO / TIM GREENWAY
Elizabeth Bordowitz, center, MERIT’s executive director, met with Lewiston-based Quoddy Shoes owners Kevin and Kirsten Shorey, who registered in MERIT last year.
In its effort to make retirement savings accessible for all Mainers, the Maine Retirement Investment Trust, or MERIT, launched a language access expansion to better serve the diverse workforce statewide.
“We want to ensure MERIT is easily understood by everyone and we jumped on the opportunity to co-create and establish these tools,” said Elizabeth Bordowitz, MERIT’s executive director.
MERIT is a relatively new state program that provides retirement savings plans to workers who otherwise don’t have that access.
A pilot, launched in late 2023, enrolled 16 employers and 169 employees. The full rollout began in January 2024 to nearly 10,000 employers and 200,000 employees — about 40% of Maine’s private-sector workforce.
The program, envisioned as an easy way for employers to offer retirement savings for their employees, requires employers with five or more workers not offering a qualified retirement savings plan to register for MERIT and begin using it in 2024.
Enrollment is growing. By January, the program had enrolled 12,015 employees with funded accounts totaling over $8.2 million.
Now the number of Mainers with an active MERIT account surpasses 15,000 with a combined retirement savings of over $17 million.
The growing program means a growing need for language services, according to a news release.
“Populations speaking languages other than English have been growing in Maine,” said Bordowitz. “A lot of these Mainers are small business owners or work for small businesses, which means they often interact with MERIT.”
The language initiative was launched in partnership with Vestwell and the Vermont Language Justice Project.
Vestwell, a New York City 401(k) recordkeeping platform, in partnership with the Bank of New York Mellon Corp., serves as MERIT’s administrator.
The project includes 14 educational videos co-developed with the Vermont Language Justice Project and introduces 18 new language options on the MERIT employer and employee portals, implemented by Vestwell.
Video languages include American Sign Language, Arabic, English open captioned, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Somali, Farsi, Swahili, Spanish, Russian, Kirundi, Vietnamese and Dari.
Portal languages include: Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Yiddish, Bengali, Haitian Creole, Italian, Polish, Urdu, French, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Farsi, Armenian and Portuguese.
“By offering the MERIT program in multiple languages, the state is breaking down barriers and helping more people be included and supported,” said Aaron Schumm, CEO of Vestwell.
MERIT has shared the language videos on its YouTube, Facebook and website platforms. It also reached out to local organizations that assist New Mainers or those with English as a second language.
For more information, click here.
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