“I want to see someone who looks like me, sounds like me, and knows my experience...”Meet Trez. He’s 33 and lives on East Side in Detroit. Trez has some trade school education. He works as a barber, but also has various side hustles: light handiwork, music producing and catering. He has debt from a bogus vocational school that closed down. He doesn't use traditional banking and deals mostly in cash. He has old collection debt, but very little credit usage or history. Trez does not have a lot of trustin financial systems. His living situation is in flux as he splits time with his mom and partner.Consider how Trez might improve his financial health. Imagine if he were to attend a PowerPoint driven presentation on improving your FICO score. What if he views a webinar on the benefits of checking accounts? Or maybe he reads a blog article on budgeting tips. For Trez, increasing his knowledge alone is not likely to have much of an effect.
Omari Hall is a native Detroiter. His experiences helped him develop an empathetic worldview and understand how setbacks and circumstances can affect one’s quality of life. He realized that to bring about positive change, it starts with yourself. You need to work on being the change that you’d like to see in the world. As a grassroots community organizer, Omari was given the task of supporting residents to shape the decisions being made in their community. This was the moment when he realized his passion: helping to empower underrepresented communities. Whether these be communities of color, inner-city communities or any other marginalized group, he strives to be an advocate and an ally. During his time as an organizer, particularly in the inner City of Detroit, the factors that contributed to some of the city’s most pressing issues were obvious to him. They ranged from poor school systems and extreme poverty to unreasonable access to city services. However, it wasn’t until his time at GreenPath that he realized one of the underlying factors leading to the continuation of this poverty cycle was a lack of access to financial education. It became very clear to him how fundamentally important financial literacy is to sustain a reasonable quality of life, and how much of an impact he and his peers at GreenPath can make by being advocates for those in need. After spending several years as a financial counselor, Omari was able to participate in a leadership development program at GreenPath. As part of this program, he completed a “stretch assignment” focused on bringing more financial education directly to Detroit communities. As he transitioned to a role in GreenPath’s Education team, this evolved into the Detroit Voices initiative. The goal is to refocus GreenPath's reach and resources to sustainably and consistently meet the needs of Detroit's Black and Brown communities. Omari has continued to build momentum for this initiative as he shared key insights and potential gaps to GreenPath’s board and Executive Leadership to influence their broader Diversity and Inclusion strategy. For this kind of work to have true impact, it was important to take the long view.
An integral element of grassroots relationship building is recognizing the networks and relationships that have already been established, and authentically leveraging those relationships. An example of this is GreenPath’s partnership with The Michigan Chronicle to facilitate the Millennial Money Financial Glow-Up Facebook event, where they held space for successful black millennials to lead dialogue on financial wellness. Omari has also been featured on several occasions on a Detroit-based radio show, the Conference Room with Mark Lee. Additionally, the Human Centered Design approach provides many tools to facilitate creation of meaningful content. An example of this is the creation of personas, where data points and observations are brought to life. Trez, who we introduced earlier, is a persona. Through Omari’s research and outreach, he and his team have created personas to inform their work and help them understand what navigating financial systems as a Detroiter really feels like. Omari has observed that Black and Brown Detroiters have similar goals as GreenPath’s average “suburban” client.
This has inspired Omari to plan to create a video series featuring Detroiters sharing their experiences with financial systems. He wants to build a library of easily sharable content to promote financial wellness where black and brown people will see themselves represented as knowledgeable experts. Of course, building meaningful relationships takes time. We live in a world where often the default is building solutions to meet the majority (middle class white people). Imagine a world with equitable outcomes where people can see themselves in the "picture" that honors their unique journey. With Omari’s efforts and the work of the coalition he is building, this dream will one day become a reality for Detroit and beyond.
28 сен 2024
