S-CAR and Community Lodgings
In 2010, I became involved with Community Lodgings, a non-profit organization that looks to lift families from homelessness and instability to independence and self-sufficiency. Some of the services that Community Lodgings provides to help with this include transitional housing, affordable housing, job training, youth education programs, financial training, and budget monitoring.
Community Lodgings was founded in 1987 by eight Episcopal churches with the goal of building a strong foundation for a better life for working and poor families transitioning from homelessness to self-sufficiency in Alexandria, Virginia. Incidentally, many of the people that this organization serves are individuals who have become homeless as a result of domestic abuse. Thus, many of these services are designed to provide individuals with the needed support to help ease some of their hardships and uncertainty and to better cope with their circumstances. Over the years, these very important services have come to be recognized by the Catalogue for Philanthropy, which identified Community Lodgings as “one of the best small charities in the Washington DC area.”
When I joined this organization, I was tasked to teach individuals how to better manage their money, which is also known as financial literacy. In many cases, I was informed that these individuals mismanaged their funds and found themselves in debt and, as such, could not move out of their transitional houses within the 2-year period earmarked for them to be reintegrated back into society. The financial literacy program was thus supposed to help with this. With my many years of experience in the financial sector, I thought this would be an easy job.
One of the very first people I worked with was a young mother with two children. She was a very focused and determined lady who had fled an abusive husband in her native country and had made it all the way to the United States to start a new life. Although I was meeting with her regularly and offering her advice, her financial situation seemed to be getting worse. Later on, I came to learn that she was struggling with the idea of struggling in a new country. "Being in need in different country is hard to cope with, the challenge of language, to figure out where to get help, to feel shame and traveling thousands of miles to face poverty and rejection is a devastating experience for an immigrant to face" she said. As is the case with many immigrants, she was struggling with the change in culture and the financial burden of being a single mother. I had failed to consider this factor when I started to offer her financial advice.
When I started at S-CAR, some of the classes I took made me realize how important culture and identity were to many conflict situations. As such, I started to include a cultural awareness program with my financial literacy classes as I realized that my teaching cultural literacy was an important component in trying to help individuals in these situations. If an organization like Community Lodgings did not exist to providing these services, many people would really struggle to cope. If an institution like S-CAR did not exist, the challenges of people learning to cope would be disregarded by those trying to help.