Life taught Evelyn Flores how to help build out unique Financial Opportunity Center® program

Evelyn Flores knows what generating community wealth looks like. It’s helping hard-working people address transportation or child-care challenges that are hurting their chances for promotion or higher-paying jobs.

It’s providing small business owners with technical assistance, such as marketing and bookkeeping, while addressing issues with their credit scores or dreams of owning a home. 

It’s coaching entrepreneurial-minded people who are trying to improve their financial health by turning their ideas into business reality.

As coordinator of the RAIL CDC Financial Opportunity Center® (FOC) program, Flores helps individuals and small businesses navigate the complex systems of personal finance, education and training, housing, career and business development. She wraps clients in the services they need or guides them to solutions that address their issues. 

“I have a passion for helping those that I see need the help and helping those who don’t know how to access the resources or even the fact that there are resources or that they have a voice,” Flores said. “If they don’t have a voice, I am their voice.”

Community wealth comes from neighbors and small business owners of a particular place doing the necessary work of establishing and maintaining financial stability. Small businesses, whose hiring and economic activities largely stay local, are vital to the growth and prosperity of these communities. 

RAIL CDC (Retail, Arts, Innovation, Livability Community Development Corporation) is a place-based organization focused on key low- and moderate-income areas within the Valley Metro light-rail corridor. It operates one of only five FOC programs in the LISC national network that is also a LISC business development organization with services for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Currently, the RAIL CDC FOC program offers financial coaching, career counseling and income support to 58 clients. About half the people it serves are entrepreneurs. All receive support in at least two of the FOC program’s three areas of focus; some benefit from all three.

“With community members, we’re working on how are we able to elevate you in your current situation if that’s something that you’re looking for,” Flores said. “If you’re looking for other avenues, how can we use our resources to help you get there.”

Seeing a pattern develop with clients stressed by housing instability is why Flores now is on a path to be certified as a housing counselor. It’s also why the RAIL CDC FOC program will begin a series of workshops in May for clients with goals of homeownership.

Mariana Torres, a program officer at LISC Phoenix, said efforts are underway to establish additional FOC programs with the combined business development and personal financial services model.

“This is a very, very specific program that’s happening,” Torres said. “We’re looking at how we can find someone else to help in that area, to build up other FOC programs to develop business development.”

Augie Gastelum, interim executive director of RAIL CDC, said working with small businesses during the COVID-19 crisis highlighted businesses owners’ needs for things other than technical assistance. They needed help on the personal side of their financial lives — with evictions and foreclosures, for example — while trying to keep their businesses afloat, he said.

“At that time, we just had the business program,” Gastelum said. “But we would start helping them figure out things around their personal life because we can’t separate this thing from the other thing – the personal finances to the business finances. That’s sort of the idea for putting together the FOC, to officially be able to work with them on both because we weren’t equipped or set up to do that. We were just doing it out of pure necessity.”

Flores was hired in 2022 to build out the FOC components RAIL clients needed. 

Life taught Flores practically everything she knows about creating a rare version of an FOC program that meets both the personal finance and business development needs of a community. Complex systems navigation is the story of her life in foster care, as both a child and now a service provider.

When not coordinating the work of the RAIL CDC FOC program, Evelyn is a partner with her mom, who she met while in foster care, in a Mesa nonprofit. Village de Amor is a group home for teen girls in foster care. 

“We wanted someone that knew how to navigate systems that are difficult to navigate and processes that are sometimes complex and convoluted and that had the patience to then work with people while they’re learning how to work through those systems and processes,” Gastelum said. “The passion that comes from knowing how difficult those systems are to navigate and how for some people it’s literally impossible until somebody helps them is the purpose of this FOC — to help people navigate through those really complicated systems, to the point that they then do it on their own.”

Flores said she’s honest with people who come to her with specific issues related to bad financial situations. She readily admits there are times when she doesn’t immediately know the answers to questions asked of her. 

“But if I don’t know, I’ll find out,” Flores said.