LISC Financial Opportunity Centers
LISC Financial Opportunity Centers are on 
THE MODEL
Financial Opportunity Centers are career and personal financial service centers that focus on the financial bottom line for low-to-moderate income individuals. This means changing people's financial behavior in a way that encourages them to make a long-term commitment to increasing income, decreasing expenses and acquiring assets. FOCs provide families with services across three areas:
- employment placement and career improvement;
- financial education and coaching; and
- public benefits access.
The Financial Opportunity Center model integrates these core services and provides them to clients in a bundled fashion. Offering the services as a bundle is a holistic approach where the individual services reinforce each other and provide a multi-faceted approach to income and wealth building. The model for these centers is an evidence based model developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The model also incorporates a strong evaluation component nationally to enhance the model with the aim of enhancing individual outcomes. LISC currently has Financial Opportunity centers in Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, Newark, Oakland, and San Diego. Click here for a map of center locations countrywide. As of 2011, Houston has six Financial Opportunity Centers.
HOUSTON FINANCIAL OPPORTUNITY CENTERS
The Alliance for Multicultural Community Services (Gulfton), 6440 Hilcroft Avenue, Houston, TX 77081 (713) 776-4700
Chinese Community Center (Alief), 9800 Town Park, Houston, TX 77036 (713) 271-6100
SER Jobs For Progress (Magnolia Park), 201 Broadway Street, Houston, TX 77012 (713) 773-6000
United Way Bay Area Services Center (Clear Lake),1300 Bay Area, Bldg A, Houston,TX 77058 (281) 282-6000
Volunteers of America Texas, Inc. (Independence Heights), 4808 Yale Street, Houston, TX 77018 (713) 460-0781
Welsey Community Center (Northside), 1410 Lee Street, Houston, TX 77009 (713) 223-8131
CORE PROGRAM ELEMENTS
Employment Services
Work and the ability to find or transition to good jobs is one of most important aspects of a family's financial security. The employment services offered at the centers are the main platform on which most of the FOCs are based, and might include basic job readiness soft-skills training, hard skills training, and/or career advancement. The employment component of the FOCs often serves as an entry point through which clients participate in financial coaching and public benefits access.
Financial Education and Coaching
While each local LISC site varies in its implementation of financial education and coaching, the core model is similar across sites. FOCs offer three kinds of services to all clients: 1) group-based financial education, which provides general information on a range of topics, such as budgeting, and developing savings plans; 2) one-on-one financial counseling, which focuses on solving specific problems or crises, such as high debt or eviction prevention; and 3) one-on-one financial coaching, which is the primary focus of long-term financial intervention and will be described in more detail below. FOC staff also connect clients to mainstream financial service providers and free tax preparation services.
Economic stability is something that families strive to achieve over the course of a lifetime of working and saving money and LISC believes financial coaching is the best technique to help clients reach their financial goals. As noted by Michael Collins in a 2007 study for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the goal of the coach is to help clients achieve long-term economic stability by changing financial behavior over time. The financial coaches are versatile enough to help clients fix an immediate problem, but that is not the primary goal of the coach. Rather, the coach's role is to help the client create a vision of financial stability, to develop goals that are critical to realizing that vision, and to hold the client accountable for achieving those goals. The coach's ongoing encouragement and support helps to make it easier for clients to stay on a consistent asset building course that leads to economic stability.
Public Benefits Access
In most cases FOC clients are employed, but their wages and benefits are insufficient to meet their daily needs. Public benefits play a key role in helping working families pay for their everyday living expenses. While individuals may want to access public benefits, the system itself is cumbersome and complicated, making it difficult for working people to access the benefits for which they qualify. Having a place that helps people understand what they qualify for, complete the application correctly, and is open during non-business hours is important in order for working people to receive the benefits for which they qualify. A recent study from SEEDCO, shows that people receiving public benefits as a supplement to their working income are 30 percent more likely to stay employed. This underscores the importance of integrating public benefits access with employment services and, further, financial education and coaching.
Bundling of Services
One-stop centers have been a staple of the publicly funded workforce system for many years. They offer a variety of services and allow individuals to choose for themselves what they want to receive and clients are not expected to use more than one service. The Financial Opportunity Centers take the one-stop concept and takes it one step further. The premise is that clients who receive more than one service are more likely to achieve economic stability. The bundling of services is very deliberate and happens through the design of the program, staff interactions and data collection so that the majority of clients receive not only employment counseling but financial education and coaching as well as public benefits access.
Client Outcome Tracking
In order to determine the success of FOC clients a data tracking system is utilized that measures the types and quantity of service a client received and how successful is a client in achieving economic stability outcomes such as employment tenure and credit score improvements. Since many economic stability outcomes are achieved over time, FOCs value working with clients over a longer period of time and thus the data tracking is conducted in a way where service provision and outcomes are followed over a period of years and progress can be measured.
FOC Site Designation
Organizations in Houston seeking to attain certification as an FOC site must indicate readiness or enroll in LISC's readiness program to receive technical assistance reaching program and organization readiness for FOC Designation.
To learn more about obtaining FOC Designation, click here. (44.7KB)
For more information, contact:
Berenice Tostado, Program Officer
Houston LISC
713-334-5700 x 15
BTostado@lisc.org
Downloadable Documents:
Reports
Special Report: "Financial Opportunity Centers offer Comprehensive Approach for Long-Term Financial Health"
"An Integrated Approach to Fostering Family Economic Success", Annie E. Casey Foundation, Jan 2010, (305KB)
"Applying Financial Coaching to Asset Building" by Michael Collins, University of Wisconsin-Madison, July 2010
Maps
National FOC Site Map & Houston FOC Site Map
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An Initiative of Houston LISC in strategic partnership with United Way THRIVE
