Financial Literacy for Denver’s Most Vulnerable
How a partnership between a financial literacy non-profit and the city received a 3-year grant to provide free financial counseling to those in need – an interview with mpowered‘s Chad Gentry.
By Erin Vanderberg, Editor
Financial counseling will be more accessible than ever to citizens of Denver in 2013, through a collaboration between the Denver Office of Strategic Partnerships and mpowered, a Colorado-based nonprofit that has provided financial education to the community for the past 10 years. Denver was one of five cities out of nearly 50 applicants to receive a $1.9 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies and Living Cities’ Cities for Financial Empowerment (CFE) Fund.
“We’ve helped people for years with financial literacy,” said mpowered’s Executive Director Chad Gentry, “but in this last recession we’ve gone from financial band-aids to financial triage. Families are not just coming in with some small debt issues and some medical bills. They’re coming in with a foreclosure, a divorce and no job for 12-months.”
Over 30,000 Denver families are functioning outside the financial mainstream. The program will provide financial literacy assistance to an estimated 4,500 low-income Denver households over the next three years. The grant allows mpowered to increase their staff from 13 to 20 by July 2013 — the most support the front range has ever had through a financial literacy program, according to Gentry — and to operate cost-free to participants and host organizations in nine locations in Denver and Colorado Springs. A traditional brick and mortar nonprofit service agency, mpowered will replicate New York City’s Financial Empowerment Center model by embedding financial counselors, or “coaches”, at a human services hub — the Denver Human Services Castro Building at 1200 Federal Boulevard — and satellite nonprofit offices.
”A federal building can be intimidating for some service populations,” said Gentry. “They’re just not going to go inside a building that has a security guard. So we want people to go through their local nonprofits that they’re comfortable with and where they are already using their services.”

Here, personal finance expert, or “coach”, Laura Lascano works with an mpowered client. A $1.9 million, 3-year grant will allow mpowered to hired additional employees to assist families outside the financial mainstream.
One of the three satellite sites will be located in the Tramway Nonprofit Center, a multi-tenant nonprofit center redeveloped by the Urban Land Conservancy at 35th Avenue and Franklin Street in the Cole neighborhood, which currently houses 10 education-based nonprofits: Denver Urban Scholars, cityWILD, Civic Canopy, Colorado Disability Benefits Support Program, Denver Early Childhood Council, Babies Ready For College, Early Excellence, GOAL Academy, High Plains Food Co-op and WorkLife Partnership. Having a financial coach available to the populations that visit these nonprofits will create new traffic toward financial literacy.
There is no poverty-level requirement for mpowered clients, according to Gentry. The organization is open to servicing anyone in the metro area who can find their way to their organization and who is willing to put in some effort
“We tell our counselors the job is not to carry a person, it’s to walk along with them. It’s being an advocate, but not taking the checkbook and doing all the work.”
At the initial appointment, mpowered coaches assess the client’s financial realities and weigh appropriate first steps. Housing takes a priority. “The reality for most of us is that we get so emotionally involved in our finances and/or disconnected that we’re not even able to make those choices anymore,” said Gentry. An action plan is usually created at the second appointment, with two or three clear steps to move forward.
“How do you manage the collection process? How do you manage judgments and garnishments? Why are you hiding from the person who is serving you papers – we need to know when the court date is for this judgment. How is bankrupty protection a tool when you are under garnishment and are about to lose your house? These aren’t 401K, saving-for-retirement, or even kids-college kind of conversations, these are very baseline survival type discussions,” said Gentry.
Gentry earned finance and accounting degrees, and started his career as a financial planner. 15 years ago, he left the bank for the credit counseling industry, and five years later founded mpowered.
“The real shift was the holistic approach to financial needs, being able to look at every situation a person is working through, not just their debts or their student loans. We take a look at their credit, the budget, the debts, goals, family situations. We don’t provide marriage counseling, drug and alcohol counseling, or domestic violence counseling, but we have resources to get those families to if that’s the theme that’s creating the financial hardship.”
The grant application process was stringent; in the end, Denver, Lansing, Nashville, Philadelphia and San Antonio were chosen for thoughtful and creative approaches to the issue of financial literacy as well as its committed leadership and strong partnerships. “This is a huge collaborative effort through DOSP,” said Gentry. “This is the city working through nonprofits and for-profits to get stuff done.”
“The reason Denver did so well (in the last recession), is that we have some good systems in place,” said Gentry. “We’re preparing for the next downturn — not if, but when — and the reason it will hurt your family less is because you have savings, you carry less debt, you have proactive goals, you’re focused on your finances — those types of things. And it’s really neglected. Financial literacy has been neglected in the US from the beginning.”

Gentry is already looking past the three years of solid funding to years four, five and six. Once he gets the new facets of the program off the ground, his goal is to create sustainable funding for the program through foundations, corporations, and the city by illustrating that financial literacy coaching is a need.
“After we get everybody up and running and the process in place, my first goal in year one is to start an advisory board and find out how we are going to sustain this,” said Gentry. “Because in my mind, (financial literacy) is critical to making the next recession less.”
Online at mpoweredcolorado.org, cfefund.org, and livingcities.org.