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.
Since 2005 LISC has developed a network of more than 120 Financial Opportunity Centers® (FOCs) based in community nonprofits around the country. Their mission is to help the most economically marginalized among us—often female heads of household in communities of color—climb step by deliberate step out of poverty.
The FOC formula bundles three types of services that, research shows, work better together than alone: one-one-one financial coaching to create a household budget and build credit and savings; employment coaching, training, and placement to help clients secure living-wage jobs; and counseling to connect folks with public benefits that increase net income.
This work has never been more urgent. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the very people who’ve long struggled to gain a toehold in the U.S. economy have suffered the steepest job losses and experienced a slower recovery. They’ve been more likely to have a hard time paying bills and, not surprisingly, were less likely to have money set aside for emergency use.
As the pandemic bore down hardest last year, LISC FOCs rapidly adapted activities to provide desperate clients with emergency cash, food, and other necessities. They can play an equally vital role in helping individuals and families begin to rebuild their lives in Covid-19’s wake.
With this objective in mind, Wells Fargo, already a supporter of FOCs, recently committed an additional $1.3 million to augment FOC work in 17 markets, especially focusing on building savings.
One recipient of this capacity-boosting grant: the Arouet Foundation in Phoenix, AZ. Arouet works with women transitioning from incarceration, a group even more economically vulnerable than most FOC clients. Its program begins inside Perryville state prison for women about 20 miles west of Phoenix, and continues after participants’ release at Arouet’s FOC.
Seventy percent of women who take part in orientation while at Perryville continue to engage with coaching and other services at the FOC. And of this latter group, over three years, about seven percent recidivate—compared to 39 percent who end up back in custody statewide.
We sat down with Arouet Foundation Executive Director Alison Rapping to find out more.
Women coming out of prison confront especially steep financial hurdles. What are the biggest issues?
There are like 145,000 collateral consequences—additional civil state penalties mandated by statute that attach to conviction and can affect somebody coming out of incarceration. These range from not having access to any housing because landlords won't rent to felons to not being able to even make it through the first computer algorithm when applying for a job; once they say they've been convicted of a crime, they’re knocked out. These consequences affect professional licensures, voting rights, and even the ability to attend a child’s school event. Many people will come out owing a significant amount of money, too, whether in restitution, to get their [driver’s] license reinstated, or to pay fees to the court for parole.
It feels like death by a thousand pinpricks, and many of these are unnecessary.
In this context where someone’s struggling to find work and housing, how do you begin to talk about savings? Why is that important to do?
The first thing we do in our week-long program in the prison is really, really encourage them and motivate them to understand that there are all kinds of possibilities, to not feel defeated when they come out. We talk about the first things they have to do to ensure they won't be defeated.
And so we work with them immediately on building a budget, creating a savings plan, understanding their credit and starting to build credit, even if it's with a secured credit card or credit-builder loan.
Because once they see their financial situation more clearly, they can start to see their credit score slowly improve and their savings grow. Even if it's just saving $25 a month, they can do it. Maybe it’s enough to buy Christmas presents for their children. That is directly correlated to their having the confidence to know they're going to be able to make it.
What are some of their longer-term savings goals?
Through our partnership with the International Rescue Committee, we’re able to get women into very affordable car loans, so that’s one goal. We go with them to the dealership to help them negotiate. Many would like to get a higher-education degree or certificate. And they are getting their kids back, so they want to have enough money to provide everything they’ll need for their children.
Because they're so challenged to rent, we also do a lot of discussion about home buying. For some women it may be their only option. If they can get their credit score up to 680 or 690, which many can do in about a year, then we partner with financial institutions and nonprofits to determine what first-time homebuyer programs would be available for them. We’ve had a lot of women who've been able to buy homes.
Accessing benefits is another pillar of the FOC model. What are the most important income supports for women coming out of incarceration?
Having access to good health care is one of the critical things people need. They may have had far less care than they needed over the time they were incarcerated. And they are still dealing with trauma, including the trauma of going to prison, as well as potential substance use and mental health issues, the anxiety of trying to reintegrate into society. In Arizona, by law anybody coming out of incarceration is eligible for AHCCCS [pronounced “access”], our state Medicaid program. So every woman in our program applies for the health plan.
And then we work closely with them to identify, what do they need from the health plan? What prescriptions do they need? What do their children need? What kind of preventive care are they looking for? We spend a lot of time helping them think about health and wellness and nutrition so that they can then feel well enough to focus on savings.
So the two most important income supports are AHCCCS and SNAP CAN, which is food stamps. This provides each woman with complete health care and enough money to buy basic food.
You mentioned how tough it is to land any kind of job. How do you tackle that component of the FOC approach?
We're all-in on that one. That is a huge focus for us. We have created a storytellers program. We’ve trained 50 women and their family members to be able to go directly to business leaders and talk about fair-chance employment.
Our strategy is to showcase the success of the women who are currently in our program. When you really get to know women who are coming out of prison, they are brilliant, industrious, beautiful, talented women. I would think that any employer would be happy to have the majority of women that are in our program. We don't need to convince them how amazing the women are. We let the women do that.
And then we sit down and talk to employers: What are your reservations? What are the barriers? We try very hard to mitigate those risks. We also are very adamant that we want livable-wage jobs. We don't want to put women into $11- or $12-an-hour jobs where the stress is so great that they can't get out of all of the struggles that they're in. If the job does not create stability for them, it's not a good job for them.
We now have 50 employment partners—employers who really are committed to working with us and working with the women that we serve. We’ve had really good luck with call centers that are willing to work with the women, support them, give them raises, and be flexible. We've had good success with women working in health and in recovery. And we're starting to build some good rapport with hotels.
Arouet works with a very specialized population. How does the FOC model fit with your overall mission?
I'm going to preface this with something that will explain why this model means so much to us: I'm the daughter of an economist. And so when LISC came to us three years ago to ask if we would be interested in piloting this model, we saw the essential triangle of financial wellness—the saving and budgeting and credit building, the income supports, the livable employment. And we knew that LISC had figured out the secret sauce. So we’ve been working on those three things in a very systematic, very organized way, with constant feedback from LISC as to how we were doing.
That's allowed us to take the model as the foundation of everything we do. We build other programming that's directly supportive of women who are coming out of incarceration; we augment the model with these wraparound services and supports. But we do it with the model at the center.
That model has kept us at a seven percent recidivist rate. This approach for women coming out of incarceration that we’re building now, I really believe that we can take it to scale. I think we could share this with other states. Because we're able to leverage all of the work that LISC did before Arouet even got an FOC grant.