City’s financial empowerment program expanding

Tyler Carr and Jordan Howerton appeared before the Jackson City Council at their monthly meeting on Sept. 3.

Carr is the director of the City’s Financial Empowerment Center, and Howerton is the regional director for Greater Jackson Financial Empowerment Center.

Before Carr was hired by the City earlier this year, he was already involved in financial counseling for families in need of it.

“So my passion is to have a direct impact on families and give them an upward trajectory financially and give them more mobilities when it comes to their finances,” Carr said.

While Carr is the director of the entire initiative, he had Howerton present to give the Council the bulk of the data from the past year of their work.

“More than 48 percent of West Tennessee struggle to make ends meet according to ALICE research,” Howerton told the Council. “This means that something like a flat tire could mean a financial emergency for nearly half the families in our region that could set them into a negative financial spiral that is difficult to get out of.

“It’s our job at the Center to help them make better decisions to get out of that spiral or stay out of it if they’re not already in it.”

In the past year, which is the second full year of the Center’s existence, their counselors have had 117 counseling sessions with 138 clients, and that work has helped the group as a whole improve their credit rating by an average of 50 points. Each family has also been able to cut their debt by an average of $2,000 and increase their savings by an average of $1,000.

“And that’s without trying to quantify the generational impact of these sessions,” Howerton said. “As these families are making better decisions and cutting out bad habits, they’re teaching their children and grandchildren to do the same thing as they’re raising them.”

Howerton told the story of a man named Orlando, who went through Jackson Recovery Court. One of the requirements of recovery court is to attend at least one session with the FEC. Howerton said that one required sessions usually parlays into multiple sessions more than 90 percent of the time.

Howerton said that Orlando did so well in his training that he improved his credit score by more than 100 points and had grown so much that he’d outgrown his original financial goals for the counseling and had developed new bigger goals and was going through counseling to learn more about achieving those things.

The FEC has received two years of funding from the state’s department of human services to fund half of the staff’s pay, all of their benefits and all of their training for the next two years.

In addition to that, the FEC’s efforts to reach outside Jackson have proven fruitful in the next county as the City of Brownsville and the philanthropic arm of Ford Motor Company have partnered to bring its own FEC to Brownsville.

“This program has helped so many families, and it’s changing lives for those who go through the counseling and apply it to their own lives,” said Jackson Mayor Scott Conger after the meeting. “Hopefully we’ll continue to see more and more families transform their lives as they gain financial education for themselves.”

Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news