Financial Stability Program
A career and personal finance service center that helps low to moderate-income people build smart money habits and focus on the financial bottom line. We had over 90 job placements, 150 families improved family finances, and 300 families received COVID relief at Peoria Friendship House this year.
All About The Financial Stability Program
The purpose of the Financial Stability program is to help participants to increase their revenue while decreasing their expenses, thus helping them to improve their quality of life. This is a case management program that provides financial, credit and employment education, training, coaching and mentorship while providing basic needs like food, clothing, transportation, healthcare, and hygiene products.
Our mission is to do the work of Jesus Christ, providing hope, respect, and guidance towards a path to prosperity. We refer to our clients as “friends,” because our intent is to make everyone who walks through our doors to feel like they belong, and not like a component of some program.
There are 4 main components to this program:
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Financial Literacy
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Workforce Readiness
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Income Supports
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Basic Needs Support
1
Financial Literacy
We provide one-on-one financial coaching, working to build relationships with friends and establish short-term and long-term financial goals and strategies. We also provide peer financial support groups and financial education classes to provide general information on budgeting, savings, expense and debt reduction and credit repair. We also connect friends to financial service products, free tax preparation services, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit program, and asset development tools such as matched savings accounts or twin accounts.
2
Workforce Readiness
Employment services often serve as the entry point through which our friends participate in financial coaching and public benefits assistance. We establish and strengthen relationships with potential employers to match our friends with employment opportunities. When working with the unemployed or underemployed, we focus on job development and counseling, resume development, job interviewing skills and enrollment in appropriate workforce/education programs. When working with employed clients, we focus on job advancement, enrollment in workforce or adult basic education classes and long-term career planning. In both cases, our goal is job retention and long-term career planning.
3
Income Supports
Even when our friends are employed, their wages and benefits may be insufficient to meet their daily needs. Public benefits play a key role in helping families to meet basic needs and to support long-term job retention and success. Given the often cumbersome and complicated application process, our friends may need assistance to access the benefits for which they qualify. We screen our friends for public benefits, help them understand what they qualify for, help them to enroll, regularly reevaluate their eligibility for benefits as their circumstances change, help to ensure that they submit recertification applications on a timely basis and advocate at various agencies that administer benefits such as SNAP, Social security benefits, utility assistance, childcare assistance, and Earned Income Tax Credit.
4
Basic Needs Support
In order to help our friends reduce their expenses so that they can afford to live a better quality of life, we offer basic needs items and services that include:
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Food
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Clothing
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Healthcare
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Dental Care
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Toiletries
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Diapers
We also offer our friends basic needs through strategic partnerships we have with other organizations that include:
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Legal advice
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Emigration classes
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Domestic violence consultation and therapy
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Dental Care
Outcomes
We help roughly 75 friends through this program on an annual basis.
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