John Hope Bryant

Huffington Post ~ Solving Poverty: Fighting Blight and Poverty with Credit Scores

John Hope Bryant

Bestselling business leadership author and philanthropic entrepreneur

In the 50 years since the civil rights movement and Dr. King's dream, one problem (racism) has been replaced or at least matched by another -- poverty. Urban poverty, rural poverty, and poverty that hits blacks, whites, browns and others alike. As I have said previously in the Huffington Post, poverty is the new racism. If you are poor, everything pretty much sucks.

The old model of racism was based on race and the color line. The new model of racism is rooted in class and poverty. The old racism was obvious in signs that read White Only, from the southern states in the U.S. to South Africa. The new racism is more obvious in Misery Row.

Whether it is a feature on a boulevard in an urban city or a rural town, or whether it is at the entrance of a military base, the Misery Row looks pretty much the same. Predatory check cashers, next to rent to own stores, payday lending stores, title lending stores, and liquor stores.

One group of financial predators takes advantage of your financial problems and misfortune, while another associated group benefits by helping you to forget you actually have any.

Read, comment and share the complete article here.

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John Hope Bryant

Bestselling business leadership author and philanthropic entrepreneur

As I noted in another 'Solving Poverty' piece for The Huffington Post, the new racism today is actually poverty.

Yes, it feels really bad if a racist calls you a highly offensive name, but it is completely un-dignifying when you cannot pay your rent, make your mortgage payment, or you find that your car has been repossessed by the lender while you were sleeping. You can walk away from the racist. And more so, when you know who you are, there is actually very little the racist can say or do to change the way you feel about yourself.

You cannot walk away from poverty.

The reality of poverty faces you as a parent every morning when your child looks up at you for lunch money, and as you reach into your pocket, finding only lent and marked up job wanted ads instead.

Or every time you stop for gasoline and have to stop the pump at $6, or you're at the grocery store, intent on collecting the ingredients for that special meal for your family, but finding that you are $20 short and have to put the healthiest choices back.

Poverty faces you in the unfortunately regular arguments you have with your spouse or mate (money is the number one cause for domestic abuse and divorce in America today), or the first time you have to address your teenage child, whose daydreaming about which four-year college they desperately wish to attend. And today, what I am describing is not a 'Black thing,' it's a 'green thing.'

Whether you are white, black, red, brown or yellow, today you just want to see some more green. U.S. currency, that is. We are all in this mess together.

Read, comment and share the complete article on the Huffington Post here.

 

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Atlanta City Council President Ceasar Mitchell to Lead Discussion with U.S. Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry on Tuesday, April 16th, 2013, at the HOPE Center, Ebenezer

Investor's Business Daily: Dignity Mortgages Are No Leftist Scheme—They're A Mainstream Housing Product

By JOHN HOPE BRYANT

 Posted 05:23 PM ET

Investor's Business Daily, in its article of Feb. 25, 2013," 'Dignity Mortgages': Welfare By Another Name," is a surprisingly fictitious attack on a concept designed to bolster the economy and help promote a responsible ownership society.

The basic contention of the article is that the Dignity Mortgage "is the left's latest scheme to make amends for its disastrous experiment to socialize mortgages."

Apparently, the authors are unaware that most of the concepts in the Dignity Mortgage have already been adopted by major well-respected financial institutions that believe originating loans to middle-income families who are financially literate is a sound business practice.

For example, one of the top three home originators has a well-performing mortgage product that requires just a 3% down payment, available to low-moderate-income families, or any family residing in a low-moderate-income census track. And, there is no minimum credit score required.

In contrast, the Dignity Mortgage is seemingly far more conservative, since it requires three times as large a minimum down payment (10%) and requires a minimum credit score of 620. It's worth noting that the Dignity Mortgage also evidently meets the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's new qualified mortgage rules.

Although IBD appears to believe that the vast majority of the beneficiaries of the Dignity Mortgage would be high-risk minorities, it should be noted that the vast majority of those most vulnerable to predatory practices in the recent past were white families.

Over the next few months, we expect many financial institutions to develop their own versions of the Dignity Mortgage that help promote an ownership society and that could provide up to one million additional well-informed and responsible homeowners per year.

And this is something that the nation has to do. It's not optional, given that today, unless you have an 800 credit score and a 30% down payment, most people today (read mainstream) cannot actually get a loan. It's not about so-called poor people, but all people.

Sadly, many other comments in the IBD piece are equally off the mark or grossly inaccurate.

For example, IBD opposes our 10% minimum down payment (which is also three times higher than the minimum at FHA), saying that "inner-city housing groups could front them the money" at an average down payment of $25,000 and one million families.

To do so would require inner-city housing groups to have $25 billion a year available, every year, for down payments.

Any examination of the very modest budgets of inner-city groups would show the absurdity of such an argument. Twenty-five billion dollars is probably close to a thousand times more than the total net assets of these nonprofits.

Read, comment and share complete Op-Ed on link below.

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/032513-649257-dignity-mortgages-arent-a-far-left-idea-but-a-mainstream-one.htm#ixzz2OcH3Bv1o 
Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook

 

The American Banker: Making Customers Out of the Financially Underprivileged

 

Over 40 million Americans are under- or un-banked. Operation HOPE Chief Executive John Hope Bryant discusses how banks can make customers out of this under-served market and do well by doing good in the process.

A focus on the HOPE 700 Credit Score Initiative, what comes next for bank branches: HOPE Inside.

 

Busy on a Saturday: HOPE Financial Dignity Center, Anacostia-Washington, D.C.

This weekend our own Jena Roscoe, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at Operation HOPE, stopped by our HOPE Financial Dignity Center, Anacostia-Washington, D.C. with her mother, Ms. Wilma Roscoe.

The DC HOPE Center was filled with individuas using the computers in the HOPE Inner-City Cyber Cafe, and the conference room was full of an aspiring entrepreneurship class. Our own Kevin Parker taught the class.  On Friday, March 8th, 2013,  the HOPE Center, Washington, D.C, will host the National Consumer Protection Week Session where Dr. Camille Bussette, Director of the Office of Financial Education at the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will return for the second year to speak. Dr. Bussette will meet with and engage with local residents and attendees about the agency's work, and answer questions regarding consumer protection issues, such as student loan debt, credit card and identity theft concerns, amonst others.  Our own Keith Parker will be leading our discussion during this session.

For information on the HOPE Center, Anacostia-Washington, D.C., and how you can get involved and engaged check here.

Huffington Post: Solving Poverty ~ Poverty Is the New Racism

John Hope Bryant

Bestselling business leadership author and philanthropic entrepreneur

Solving Poverty: Poverty Is the New Racism

Racism use to be the worst thing that those outside America's corridors of power had to deal with. But today, racism is sorta like rain. Racism is either falling somewhere, or it's gathering. So we might as well get out an umbrella in a color we like, and start walking through it; because it's not going to change -- so we must.

In Dr. King's day the issue seemed to be one of love or hate, but today the issue is less about love or hate, and more about of what I would call "radical indifference." Today, folks don't even care enough about you to hate you.

I remember a young man, years ago, going on and on to me about how then President Reagan hated black folks. That he was a racist. I had to correct the young man. I told him that to the best of my knowledge, President Reagan didn't know any black folks (well), didn't grow up around any black folks, didn't have any real lifelong relationships with black folks, and there were no black folks in his immediate family. When he awoke in the morning, it's not that he hated black folks -- he wasn't even thinking about black folks. It was not love or hate, but simple indifference. With no real relationship with black and brown America, no rational link, and no reason to be compelled to really care, this situation doesn't so much suggest he was a good or a bad man, but rather a human one.

Today I look at what's going on in Greece, where 150 immigrants were recently attacked, and it becomes obvious that underneath the violence was a corroding economic tension. A country that was broke, and people who were quickly losing hope, and jobs too. They saw 'those immigrants' as a threat to them, their prosperity, their stability, and the future aspirations of both themselves and their families. The problem was economic. The problem, was poverty.

There is a difference between being broke and being poor. Being broke was economic, but being poor is a disabling frame of mind and a depressed condition of one's spirit. And we must vow to never, ever be poor again.

Read, comment on and share the full article on the Huffington Post here.

A Personal Letter from Operation HOPE Founder, Chairman, and CEO John Hope Bryant and Ambassador Andrew Young

Operation HOPE is "the private banker to the working poor, the underclass, and the struggling middle-class," and the impact of our work can be felt on-the-ground, everywhere we operate.  Our mission is 'silver rights,' or making free enterprise and capitalism work for all.  Financial literacy is the tool, financial dignity is the goal and financial inclusion is the way. 

2012 marked new heights for HOPE's silver rights movement as it continued to reach out and empower underserved populations in new and innovative ways. HOPE divisions currently serving the community include:

 

• Banking on Our Future, focused on keeping the most at-risk youth from repeating the cycles of poverty and despair that has trapped so many in their families and communities by teaching them basic financial literacy, or what we call "the global language of money." 

 

• HOPE Business-In-A-Box/Gallup-HOPE Index, focused on inspiring a generation of young people to become future American assets of economic energy, small business and entrepreneurship.

 

• HOPE Financial Dignity Centers, including our newest HOPE Financial Dignity Center at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr''s Ebenezer Church in Atlanta, Georgia, are where we approve clients day one, subject to the resolution of their primary denial factors, and raise credit scores on average 120 points over 18 months of active counseling. We call it the 700 Credit Scores Communities Initiative.  The HOPE Center at Ebenezer marks our 11th HOPE Center across the nation, and is the proud anchor for the new Martin Luther King. Sr. Community Resource Complex next to Ebenezer Church.  Most people know that Daddy King, as he was lovingly called, co-pastored Ebenezer Church with his son, Dr. King, but what they don't know is that Daddy King served on the board of a bank for 40 years.  Even more than 50 years ago, the King legacy was alive with civil rights, and silver rights empowerment, too. A special thank you to our HOPE Center signature partners, including Bank of the West and Union Bank on the west coast, E*TRADE FINANCIAL in New York City and Washington, DC, and at Ebenezer in Atlanta, FINANCIAL SERVICES ROUNDTABLE members SunTrust Bank, State Farm Insurance, LPL Financial/NestWise, Wells Fargo Bank,MasterCard, and BMO Harris Bank, along with supporting partners including the Coca-Cola Company,Kaplan University, Equifax, the United Way of Greater Atlanta, amongst others.

 

• HOPE Coalition America, which is the national partner with FEMA around emergency financial disaster preparedness, response and recovery, or the "economic Red Cross" for the nation.  HCA responded to, and served, more than 200,000 survivors following Hurricane Katrina, and we are responding to Hurricane Sandy now. 

 

• HOPE Government Relations & Public Policy, and HOPE Forums, which both advance responsible public policy and help to shape, engaged public opinion.  The recent HOPE Global Financial Dignity Summitfeaturing U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, with more than 1,500 delegates from 30 countries, covered by 50 major media outlets, is but one example of our focus here.

Read the complete personal letter on the HOPE Blog here.

John Hope Bryant "Silver Rights" Quote of the Day

"When you transform a neighborhood to become a 700-credit score community, liquor stores become covenient stores, and title lenders, payday lenders and rent-to-own stores become credit unions and community banks."

John Hope Bryant, founder, Operation HOPE

 

 

The Huffington Post: A Fiscal Cliff for All

 

 

John Hope Bryant

Bestselling business leadership author and philanthropic entrepreneur

 

I am confident that President Obama and members of Congress will find at least a temporary solution for the coming fiscal cliff. 

Why? Because they are our leaders and I have confidence they 

This said, as I said recently on CNN, most Americans are experiencing their own unique "fiscal cliff" every month. t's called having "too much month at the end of their money."will act, and secondly, well... they have to. Simply put, too much is at stake right now, even for traditional political games.

Everyone I know, knows someone in financial trouble, or dealing with some form of economic stress. And I am not talking about so-called poor people. This global economic crisis is and always has been a solid middle-class crisis. That's why the crisis has gotten as much attention as it has from political leadership since its onset in 2008. Simply put, "poor people don't have $20 trillion dollars to lose."

Read the complete article here at the Huffington Post.