By Jennifer McClain & Sarai Garza

This report provides a summary of the insights LISC Chicago has gained from years of working with organizations to adopt and implement the Financial Opportunity Center® (FOC) model.

As part of their CDFI Futures series, Next City dove into the impact of LISC’s Financial Opportunity Center (FOC) and Bridges to Career Opportunity (BCO) models. More than 100 FOCs, in 26 states, combine job placement, financial coaching and financial supports to improve peoples’ long-term economic prospects. Katrin Sirje Kärk, LISC’s director of Workforce Innovations describes how the program promotes clients’ lifelong goals: LISC and the coaches, she says, “are committed to being there for as long as needed.”

The Arouet Foundation supports women returning from incarceration in Phoenix, helping them work toward financial stability and avoid recidivism—beginning while they are still imprisoned. The Foundation’s Alison Rapping sat down with LISC to explain how the Financial Opportunity Center model, combined with other wrap-around services, has been extraordinarily successful in assisting clients to get past the unjust obstacles that block the progress of so many returning citizens.

Kiva loans supported by LISC are a lifeline of zero interest capital to dozens of micro-business owners in underserved places across the country. But just as critical to the loan’s success as an entrepreneur’s dreams and drive is the role of the Kiva trustee—a trusted, community-based partner who supports borrowers from application and business development all the way to loan repayment. Joseph Ceasar, founder and CEO of Legacy Institute for Financial Education in rural Lufkin, TX is an exemplary Kiva trustee, on a mission to bring financial know-how and stability and generational wealth-building back to his community.

In recognition of Citi Foundation’s $10 million commitment to LISC’s Bridges to Career Opportunities (Bridges) program, we are sharing the extraordinary journeys of nine people who now have promising careers and brighter financial futures. Bridges helps chronically unemployed and underemployed adults train for, land, and advance in jobs in local growth industries—sectors such as healthcare, construction, and technology—by helping them overcome the roadblocks to success. The majority of Bridges clients are people of color and women, representing the groups facing the highest systemic obstacles to opportunity in our economy.

April is Financial Capability Month, and LISC is lifting up the stories of people who are forging greater economic stability with support from LISC’s Financial Opportunity Centers and Bridges to Career Opportunities programs. Shannettea Joseph is one of those people. The relationship she has built with her financial coach at North Lawndale Employment Network in Chicago has helped her overcome real hurdles: first, barriers to reentry after a prison term, and most recently, the financial fallout of the pandemic while caring for sick family members.

“My enticement to the inner city kept me struggling for years with criminal activity,” says Anthony Nash, a lifelong Chicago resident. With help from LISC’s Bridges to Career Opportunities (Bridges) program, Nash got the training and support services he needed to get his life back on track and build a new career in the growing Transportation, Distribution and Logistics industry. This is just one of many success stories catalyzed by LISC’s partnership with Union Pacific Railroad.

Since the pandemic began, LISC’s network of Financial Opportunity Centers has shifted gears to get cash grants to hundreds of clients who need immediate resources—to put food on the table, keep a roof overhead and get to the other side of a crisis. MetLife Foundation, Citi Foundation and Wells Fargo Foundation have stepped up to make it possible.

By LaSonya Bishop, Volunteers of America Texas

Volunteers of America Texas (VOATX) in Houston is one of more than 40 community-based partners nationwide using LISC’s Bridges to Career Opportunities model. LaSonya Bishop, VOATX’s Regional Director of Workforce, explores what it takes to help unemployed and underemployed people build their skills and find good-paying jobs – a task that is more challenging than ever with the pandemic. She does so through the lens of a Houston resident named Tamara, who overcame addiction and homelessness to graduate from a VOATX training program and get a job as a phlebotomist, which she has maintained since Covid-19 hit our shores. This is just one of many success stories catalyzed by LISC’s partnership with the Citi Foundation.