The Financial Clinic
The Financial Clinic (“the Clinic”) builds working poor families and individuals’ financial security by addressing their immediate financial challenges and helping them create trajectories for long-term goals and financial mobility.
The Clinic’s vision is that of systemic change by leveraging its on-the-ground lessons to creating system-level solutions that impact our customers at scale. The Clinic works towards this mission via a combination of services that include: immediate access to tax preparation and financial education workshops; “on-ramp” services around budgeting, improving banking engagement; legal assistance with bankruptcy, foreclosure and consumer law; and, long-term, one-on-one financial coaching aimed at identifying goals as well as creating and maintaining the financial habits necessary to achieve those goals.
Beyond direct service provision, the Clinic also has three additional major areas of work. Our Business-2-Business consulting services is designed to build capacity at organizations working with similar populations, both at the local and national level, for the purpose of better positioning them to achieve their mission and work towards their vision. The Clinic's Research and Policy work partners with organizations like Appleseed to explore potential policy change impacting cash earners in New York State. The Financial Clinic Fellowship is a new emerging program that is a low-cost, high-impact scale and social innovation model for the delivery of financial coaching services at an exponential rate building upon the Clinic’s existing high-quality, outcomes-driven financial development model.