New Financial Center Signals Change in Southwest Baltimore (Continued)
Tapping the Community's Potential
The financial center, which opened its doors in March, is the brainchild of a partnership that includes Operation ReachOut-Southwest (OROSW), a broad coalition that does strategic planning for Southwest Baltimore. It comprises 15 churches, 12 community-based and 10 nonprofit organizations, five businesses and Bon Secours Hospital, West Baltimore’s biggest employer.
The other partner is the Bon Secours of Maryland Foundation, the hospital’s community development arm.
The two groups joined in the mid-1990s to tackle a bleak set of problems.
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| Our Money Place provides check cashing and credit union services to the Southwest Baltimore neighborhood. |
Though Southwest Baltimore is a well-organized and active mostly African-American community of about 21,000, it has had high crime, drug-addiction and unemployment rates. One 1995 study found that more than 45 percent of working-age people didn’t work.
The median income is $19,000, with 58 percent of people living below the federal poverty level. About a third of residents own homes; nearly one-fifth of the neighborhood’s houses are vacant. Four-fifths of high school freshmen do not graduate.
Those challenges gave rise to a sweeping action plan with strategies to improve safety, sanitation, health, recreational opportunities and the area's physical appearance.
Coalition residents also designed strategies to empower their neighbors to get jobs, become economically self-sufficient and build wealth-creating assets through homeownership and financial planning.
Enter Our Money Place, the most significant of OROSW’s responses to the community’s financial service needs.
With as many as 6,000 “unbanked” households and many people living from paycheck to paycheck, residents have been prime targets of predatory practices such as charging exorbitant fees to cash checks or loan money. That leaves them even less able to pull ahead financially.
Coalition members researched the neighborhood's financial status and preferences. However impressed members were with the community's collective wealth, most banks didn’t share their view, they learned.
But one, the SSA Baltimore Federal Credit Union, needed the neighborhood as much as the neighborhood needed it.
The credit union faces dwindling membership as federal agencies keep downsizing, explains Nina Spencer, the credit union’s vice president, branch services. In expanding its charter to underserved areas of Baltimore, the credit union “needed to find members, not only to help people but also to sustain our business,” she says.
The credit union signed on with Our Money Place to provide non-cash services. It offers checking, savings, retirement and holiday accounts, as well as some loans and mortgages to anyone who “lives, works or worships” in Baltimore and plunks down $6 to become a member. Tellers do not dispense cash; an ATM and the check-cashing operation toward the front of the building do that.
Continue: Providing Financial Services and Opportunities >>