Economic empowerment sites are coming to a Regions Bank branch in Jennings and St. Louis City Hall, thanks to partnerships that Operation Hope has forged with the bank and with St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones.
Sites for Hope Inside, a project of John Hope Bryant’s not-for-profit Operation Hope, offer a HUD-approved mortgage counselor, an SBA-approved office for entrepreneurship and small business, and consumer credit counseling.
“Nothing changes your life more – other than God or love – than moving your credit score 120 points,” said Bryant, an economic advocate for underserved communities, who was on hand at the Jennings Branch of Regions Bank on June 22 to make the announcement.
“Through the partnership with Operation Hope we are able to offer one-on-one financial education and counseling to anyone who needs it – for free,” said Mike Hart, Midwest area president for Regions Bank. “You don’t have to be a Regions customer, and you don’t have to pay anyone.”
Treasurer Jones also was present in Jennings. She said her plans for Inside Hope include raising money privately and publicly to give incentives for young people and parents to save money and participate in financial education courses.
“If the State of Missouri and our local government can find money to build a stadium for a team that doesn’t even want to be here, then I can find money to invest in our children,” Jones said.
Bryant said a banker’s visit to his Compton-area elementary school put him on course to empower communities through the understanding of commerce.
“He started talking with me about the language of money,” Bryant said.
Though he came from a family of successful business owners, Bryant admitted that his father was a functioning illiterate when it came to finances.
“He’d make a dollar and spend a $1.50 – which means the more money we made, the broker we got,” Bryant said.
Now Bryant is a member of the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability, co-founder of Global Dignity, co-founder of the Gallup-HOPE Index and a bestselling author on economics and leadership.
“Community banking built this country,” Bryant said. “Something happened that perverted that experience.”
Bryant looks to President Lincoln’s Freedman’s Bureau act – established to teach former slaves about money – as an indicator of the importance of financial liberation. He said Lincoln did for former slaves “what that banker did to me when I was nine years old – set you free by showing you how this economy works,” Bryant said.
Lincoln was killed five weeks after the Freedman’s Bureau and accompanying bank was created.
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass attempted to continue Lincoln’s vision by investing $10,000 of his own money, but his attempt to save the bank was unsuccessful.
“Douglass admitted that the failure of the bank did more to set free slaves back than 10 more years of slavery,” Bryant said.
Bryant said that his life’s work is based on completing the mission Lincoln started and that Martin Luther King Jr. revived a century later with his Poor Peoples Campaign.
“There’s a memo on free enterprise and capitalism. You never got the memo. There’s a memo on GDP and jobs: Half of all jobs in America are provided by employers with 100 employees or less,” Bryant said.
“Every big business was once a small one. We’ve got to create small businesses and business owners right here, right now. And to quote my friend Van Jones, ‘The best way to stop a bullet is a job.’”
Bryant said that residents of Jennings, Ferguson and other areas of North County and North St. Louis have been “written off” financially.
“In a black or brown urban neighborhood, you will see a check casher next to a payday lender, next to a rent-to-own center, next to a liquor store,” Bryant said. “That’s not racism, that’s target marketing. They are targeting the 500-credit-store customer. This is modern slavery. I’m going to rob them of their customer, in broad daylight and legally.”
