“When you leave today, I want you to have hit the reset button for who your real enemy is,” said Operation Hope founder John Hope Bryant. “It’s not a black or white issue. It’s a green issue – and us not having enough of it.”
Bryant, a renowned economic advocate for underserved communities, was on hand at the Jennings Branch of Regions Bank Monday morning. He stood alongside bank executives and community leaders as they collectively announced that an invaluable community tool will come along with the branch’s reconstruction.
“Let’s be real, everybody in here has too much month at the end of your money,” Bryant said. “But when you’ve been doing so much with so little for so long, you can do almost anything with nothing. We are going to be the private banker to the working poor, the struggling class and the teetering middle class.”
Hope Inside, an element of Bryant’s Operation Hope not-for-profit that educates the masses on money and finance, will be housed within the walls of the new and improved Regions space starting next fall.
The financial empowerment center designed to support unbanked and underserved residents in the St. Louis area.
“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.”
Bryant said just like the 100 that have been opened across the nation over the past year, the Jennings Branch Hope Inside will house a HUD approved mortgage counselor, an SBA approved office for entrepreneurship and small business, every Hope Inside will be certified for consumer credit counseling.
“Nothing changes your life more – other than god or love – than moving your credit score 120 points,” Bryant said. “Jennings, Ferguson and other areas of North County, they have written you off. Consider it a compliment to be underestimated. First they will ignore you, then they will criticize you, then they will try to copy you and then you will win.”
City Hall will also have a Hope Inside thanks to Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones. She was also on hand in Jennings to happily announce that a Hope Inside Financial Dignity Center will open for St. Louis City in August.
She spoke of her plans to give every kindergartener entering a public school a $50 account funded by the treasurer’s office that will grow a dollar for each week of perfect attendance.
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 promised.
Bryant’s humble beginnings
The smallest investment in a child’s future is a notion Bryant knows better than most. 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, he 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.”
But the career day chance encounter and his personal experiences with lack of financial resources set him on a path to educate America about money from the bottom up as founder, chairman and CEO of nonprofit Operation HOPE.
Bryant is also 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.
“Rainbows only follow storms, loss creates leaders and your pain can be your promise,” Bryant said.
Power of financial freedom
“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 free slaves about mone – as an indicator of the importance of financial liberation.
“Arguably the best president we’ve ever had, after the worst war we’ve ever had, after the Emancipation Proclamation thought the most important thing that he could do was to do to us 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.
Famed 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.
He feels like history has proven true the cost of poverty to America and he seeks to eradicate it with initiatives like Hope Inside.
““There’s a memo on free enterprise and capitalism. You never got the memo,” Bryant said.” There’s a memo on GDP and Jobs. Half of all jobs in America are provided by employers with 100 employees or less,” said Bryant. “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 his life’s work – including what will be taking place in the Jennings Hope Inside is about finishing what Lincoln –and later Dr. King with his “Poor Peoples Campaign” – started.
“In a white rural neighborhood, 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.
We are going to solve this problem and lift ourselves. This is the James Brown version of affirmative action – ‘Open the door and I’ll get it myself.’”