RespectAbility
Best Practices in Action - The Iowa Able Foundation
Micro-Enterprise, Micro-Lending and Financial Security for Iowans with Disabilities
October 18, 2016
1:30 p.m. ET
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This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings
Good afternoon and welcome to the RespectAbility webinar for October18th, 2016. My name is Philip Pauli. I am the policy and practices director for RespectAbility, and I am very excited to be here with you today. Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us. And I want to wish everyone a happy National Disability Employment Awareness Month. This is the month that was inaugurated by Congress 75years ago to celebrate the challenges and opportunities impacting Disability Employment, and there's a lot of issues involved. And one of them that doesn't get as much credit as it needs is the issue of financial security and access to credit and self-employment, entrepreneurship, and kind of all of the related challenges that come with the endemic cycle of poverty and challenge that people with disabilities face.
And so today we are going to be talking about the Iowa Able Foundation. Some of you may have heard of it, some of you may have not. The webinar is going to give you their approach to tackling poverty, overcoming stigma related to disability. We would not be able to offer these webinars if it wasn't for the generous support of JPMorgan Chase. They have supported our webinars this year and allow us to provide closed captioning and provide it for free.
Today we are talking about the Iowa Able Foundation, and we are joined by Jill Crosser who is the executive director of the Iowa Able Foundation. Prior to joining the Iowa Able team, she worked-- and had case experience with the case management and elder care waiver, working with job placement as well. Jill received her undergraduate degree in criminology and women's studies in Iowa and received a degree from Drake University. I'm quoting from her bio-- to become part of the financial mainstream by learning to manage their finances, participate in banking services, and other financial goals are often underestimated. Working for Iowa Able with our working, lending, educating and advancing initiative, working to help each other reach goals is what we do every day.
And so today we are hoping to have a good conversation. You can submit your questions at any time using the chat window on the left of the presentation screen. To submit your questions at the bottom of the chat window, locate the little downward arrow on the right, select moderators, type in your question, and we will get to it either during the presentation or toward the end. I'm very excited to be joined by Jill today. Thank you very much, and please take it away.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining the webinar. You know, and as a piece of National Disability Employment Awareness month, I think this fits perfectly with the initiatives that this brings to our communities, and I will be talking about employment with people with disabilities and giving you some direct examples as well.
So today, to start, I'm going to talk to you about our lending program called the Iowa Able Foundation, and provide you examples of some of our borrowers that have successfully started their own business or been given the opportunity to work with our support. I'll talk a little bit about some of our financial coaching initiatives and other statistical pieces that we are seeing in Iowa when it comes to working with people that are underbanked or unbanked.
So please slide over to the next slide here.
The Iowa Able's mission statement is that we are assisting Iowans with disabilities, their families, and the aging to achieve and maintain independence through education, lending, and advancing. And I feel like these three words, the lending, educating, and advancing are really the core components of who we are. We are a lender. We hold a loan license in the state of Iowa. We are a microlender, which means we are the smallest lended in the state of Iowa, which just maxes out the dollar amount that you can lend out, and we do not hold a loan license.
I will get into detail later with what we lend for and the programs that we work with, with the lending piece. But we are an accessible borrowing option. We are an alternative to a bank. We are typically working with folks that are either underbanked or unbanked, maybe don't have a credit score or they maybe have a really bad credit score. They have maybe had some financial troubles in the past and need help repairing. Our financial piece is the education that we provide to all of our perspective and current borrowers. We have two financial coaches on staff that are working alongside of individuals one on one. We don't have generalized goals. We have individualized goals. So we are working directly with an individual, taking a look at what's on that credit report, taking a look at that debt versus income, seeing what's left at the end of the month and planning accordingly with goals and goal settings.
The advancing piece is really focused on our final goal of advancing Iowans into mainstream lending. Our goal is to help make Iowans educated and become bankable so that they can go to their local credit union or bank and open up a checking account or open up a savings account or take a loan out, while going back to the education piece of making smart decisions while doing that. For example, staying away from petty lending and things like that, working with reputable organizations that are reporting to credit bureaus and helping them build assets.
So a little bit of history about the Iowa Able Foundation here. Iowa Able serves all of Iowa. We are located in Ames, which is central Iowa, near Des Moines. We are serving all Iowans with disabilities and their families and the aging community. So when folks come to us, they usually have is a need of a thing or a device or a repair, whether it be a home modification or a vehicle modification. Maybe they are just trying to build credit and they need a credit builder loan. Whatever it is that they need just needs to correlate with their disability.
For example, an individual who needs a ramp on their home obviously needs that so that they can get in and out of their house. In terms of credit building and credit loans of $100 to $500, we designate those funds to loan out to folks that have no credit score or a lack of credit. So in addition to the loans with the flexible terms, we also offer, like I said, the financial coaching and education. We do report to the credit bureau, which is a huge asset. A lot of folks that we work with are renting, maybe borrowing from places like payday lending, and nothing positive is getting reported to their credit, to their credit reports, so that is a big piece of what we do. And then we are also a referral source to other resources in the community.
Just a quick little tidbit of history here. We were established in 1993 by the Iowa program for assistive technology. We still have a contract with them. We are providing loans for things like assistive technology with the funds that they give us every month or every year, rather, through that contract. Some of our supporters and sponsors are Walmart, BANKERS TRUST, Principal Finance Group. We just recently became a partner with the United Way of Story County, High Path Credit Union.
Into the loan uses, when folks come to us, like I mentioned earlier, they have a need. They have something that they need to purchase. An assistive technology, we work very closely with the Easter Seals AT program, and that is any device, piece of equipment, product, anything that you can think of, and assistive technology is so wide. Anything that is used to improve functional capability, mobility or quality of life. This can be a hearing aid. It can be computers. It can be a piece of a medical device. Gosh, we have had dentures. We have had like orthotics for your feet, down to more specific medical devices. Home modifications, any modification made to the home that allows for greater accessibility, independence, and quality of life. Maybe taking out that carpet to put hardwood floors because someone is in a wheelchair in the home. Widening doorways, adding the ramp to the home, making an accessible kitchen, things like that. Self-employment, start-up and expansion, which I will focus on just a little bit a couple of slides later, so I don't want to go too far into that. But we do provide loans to Iowans that want to start their own business or just want to work but they need some kind of an accommodation or they need tools or something like that to help them become more employable, and I'll talk about our partners with that as well.
Home repair loans. This is another one that we usually see with the aging community. They're coming to us needing a roof, needing a window that's been broke, they are getting water in their house, anything that's going to inhibit them from staying in their home or that they are at risk of losing their home because of the situation. That's where we come in and can help with that type of a thing.
And then we also have our credit builder loan, which is $100 to $500, paid back over to 6-12months. We are offering intensive financial coaching with the individuals during that payback period. We are reporting their monthly payments to the credit bureau to start that process of positive marks on a credit report. And then once a loan is paid off, sometimes we will look at a series of them and do another one, two $500 ones over a year or two years, whatever the situation may be. Okay.
I can give you some examples of some of the assistive technology that we have lent money out for, and this is just a list. Braille equipment, voice systems, scanners, like I said computers or any type of adaptive device for someone to be able to see their computer, communication systems, all of those, like I said, assistive technology is so big. We do a lot of-- we work in partnership with a lot of audiologists on hearing devices as well.
Home modifications, repairs, I kind of went over this as well. We have a lot of folks needing like, for example, an air conditioner in the summer, and they have breathing issues. They may have COPD or something like that and they need a window air conditioner, new roof, flooring, ramps, things like that.
The business employment loans, loan funds may be used for adaptive equipment or modifications required to work for an employer. Equipment required to start or expand a business, if they are working with self-employment, maybe working with a voc rehab or any other kind of a program like that, and any other start-up or expansion capital.
Now before I go into too many details with some of the examples that we have done in the past, this ADA piece I think is a good intro to working with folks who want to work. And always remembering the key of what the ADA, the core of what the ADA is, so that when we are assisting individuals, this is really at the core, and having them understand what it means, too, so that all rights can be preserved. So I'll just quickly go through the ADA, although you probably all know what it is. It does make it illegal for employers to discriminate against qualified individuals who have a disability. Oftentimes, we hear, well, this person might need modifications that I can't afford or whatever the, you know, situation may be, and that's where voc rehab, the state agencies come in handy. They can help pay for devices. That's where we come in, if they need a loan for that kind of a thing, and it also gives you the right to a reasonable accommodation, such as an interpreter for people who are deaf, readers for people who are blind, modification of a workstation or a position of a paid travel assistance and the central travel.
And I see that this got really small, I apologize for this, but the ADA does not guarantee you a job. It does not give you a competitive advantage or an edge. It does not guarantee that you won't be discriminated against, and it won't make the job search easy.
Are you all able to see the slides okay?
Yes, we can see it just fine.
Okay. Good.
Working with a disability, I threw in some stats here as I introduced some of the folks that we have worked with here at Iowa Able just for kind of an eye-opener and also because it is national disability employment awareness information. In 2013, 34.4% of US civilians with disabilities age 18-64 living in the community were employed, compared to 75.4% of people without disabilities, a gap of 41%. And I don't know about you, but that's a pretty good number to me.
Employment rates are highest for people with hearing disabilities and vision disabilities. The lowest are for people with second of all self-care disabilities and independence disabilities.
In 2014, the median earnings of US folks with disabilities ages 16 and over was about $21,000, about two thirds of the median earnings for people without disabilities. And as we closed out our fiscal year 2016, we looked at stats, and I have to say that I'm pretty impressed at the average credit score of folks that we approved loans for of 634. It's a very average score. It's not as low as I think anticipated when we are working with this population.
28% of the US individuals with disabilities of working age in 2014 were living in poverty. For US civilians of working age without disability, the national poverty rate was 13.3%. And again, I apologize for how small that is on your screen.
Into some of the Iowa statistics, 46% of working age people with disabilities in Iowa are working one way or another. They are working, and this puts us third in the nation, riding behind South Dakota and North Dakota, and this information was pulled from the voc rehab folks over in Des Moines, and I have to say that I'm really proud of that number as well, and it's through initiatives such as voc rehab and the work that they are doing as well that that number is as high as it is, but then we also have to look at that there is a 35.7 percentage gap in the labor force, so we are continually working to help folks with disabilities get into the work force.
Gosh, this is so small, you guys. I am so sorry. I just have a little bit of information here about voc rehab, and I will probably just jump back to this piece, because I am sure that most of you are familiar with the voc rehab services within your state, and I want to move forward and kind of relate back to the voc rehab piece with the individuals that we are working with here.
And Jill, I just would also like to quickly interject that if anybody wants more detailed information about vocational rehabilitation information in Iowa, RespectAbility over the summer hosted two different webinars that you could find on our website. So if you want more detailed information from David Mitchell, go to our website. It's RespectAbilityUSA.org/webinars.
I am actually the chair of the voc rehab program within the state, so I have been involved with that for four or five or six years now, somewhere in there, so I'm pretty closely connected too with the folks over there, so yes, I would love for you to ask questions if you have them.
The first business loan example that I want to share with you is Aaron. Aaron lives down in southern Iowa, kind of in a rural area. There's not a whole lot going on in the town that he lives in. He grew up in this community. He didn't really want to leave after graduation. He struggled with some ADHD issues. Physically, I think he feels good. He's able to work. He just had some problems with some attention and also struggled in school. He didn't really want to go and, you know, get a college degree but was able to go in the trade piece of employment, and Aaron needed a toolbox and some tools to become a mechanic, and I guess I wasn't as aware of this until I started working with more folks in this field, but when you want to become a mechanic, it's pretty typical that you have to have your own tools, and for a young-- Aaron was probably around 19 or 20 when he first came to us five years ago. He was young, didn't have a credit score, didn't really-- I mean he lived at home. He didn't have anything reporting to the credit bureau. I think his parents had a credit card and he was an authorized user just to kind of jump start things for him as he entered adulthood through his transition piece, but Aaron applied for a loan with us, didn't have a credit score, really had no job history. He had Social Security income, and we were able to fund the tools that he needed to become employable so he could go apply for jobs. And when they said, do you have the tools you need, he said yes.