Three nonprofits help women gain financial independence
“Faith” was afraid to open her mail. She used her debit card without knowing how much money she had in the bank. The consequence? Faith racked up a large number of overdraft fees and went deeper into debt.
A 35-year-old Burlington woman, who described herself as a “hard-core, angry person,” had relied on welfare benefits her entire adult life. Her teenage son was truant.
Another woman who quickly rose through the ranks at a bakery was terrified she would make a mistake, so she purposely sabotaged her own work and lost her job. She hadn’t been employed since.
Each woman was on a downward trajectory, financially and psychologically, until three nonprofit groups stepped in and enabled them to pull themselves out of desperate situations.
Faith keeps track of her spending and no longer incurs bank fees, and the 35-year-old woman holds a GED, her son is back in school, and she is working for a youth program. The woman who feared her own success? She’s now a star employee of Burlington Airport.
Faith was enrolled in Central Vermont Community Action Council’s “Build Your Money Muscles” program; the 30-something woman was part of a new work readiness program offered by Mercy Connections; and the former baker sought help from a transitional jobs program provided by Vermont Works for Women.
The three organizations received funding for these programs through the Vermont Women’s Fund. An anonymous donor recently gave the foundation $100,000 for community-based programs, spurring the fund to spearhead a strategic partnership initiative. The Vermont Women’s Fund gave each selected nonprofit $30,000 to develop programs over a two-year period that would help women achieve economic security by giving them the support they need to find employment and to overcome entrenched, multi-generational poverty.
The Vermont Women Fund’s targeted, sustained initiative was a first for the foundation, which typically caps its grants at $10,000 a year. Since the Vermont Women’s Fund was created 12 years ago to support the well-being of women and girls, it has distributed $1 million to 127 organizations.
As Catherine Kalkstein, executive director of the foundation, put it at a forum last week: “This initiative was envisioned as a catalyst for social change for Vermont women and girls. We were hoping to create
some long-term impact.”
Each group took a different approach to helping women who lacked the resources to escape an abusive relationship or the skills to hold down a job – let alone balance a checkbook.
But several central themes emerged from the Vermont Women’s Fund forum held at Vermont College last Thursday. The advocates from the three groups, who had compared notes over the course of the grant period, said they often provided intensive psychological support for women through group sessions and mentoring. Once trust is established with women who have experienced extreme hardship they are much better prepared to take practical steps to better their lives, the advocates said.
The Barre-based Central Vermont Community Action Council, which provides emergency assistance and food aid to local residents in need, held 48 support-group style sessions on personal finance. Margaret Ferguson, a certified financial planner, helped more than 50 women cope with their fears about money by showing them how to control their expenditures.
Mercy Connections, an offshoot of the Sisters of Mercy in Burlington, created a community network for women “on the edges” of poverty and a work-readiness program that helped women with troubled histories rethink their life stories and develop the capacity to learn new skills. The program also provides mentoring for women as they look for work.
Vermont Works for Women, a Winooski-based nontraditional employment program, surveyed women in the state correctional system and asked them about their work histories. The group found that 66 percent of those arrested were unemployed at the time of their arrest, and of those who had jobs half had been employed for less than a year. A third had been working for less than three months.
Tiffany Bluemle, executive director of Vermont Works for Women, said, “Most told us they had not given much thought to employment.” For the women they surveyed, she said, the prospect of finding work, much less staying at a job, was an overwhelming prospect.
Vermont Women at Work researched transitional employment programs in urban areas and then launched its own project. In a 10-month period, the organization enrolled 33 women in work readiness programs and placed 21 in jobs with 16 area employers.
One of the Vermont Women’s Fund grant requirements was an evaluation of each program by an independent consultant. Advocates from all three groups cautioned that the overall results should be judged on anecdotal or qualitative evidence, rather than quantitative data. They said the women they serve often have intractable psychological problems made more complicated by patterns of substance abuse, long-term familial poverty and abusive family relationships that take time to resolve.
In the interest of full disclosure: Vermont Women’s Fund is a component fund of the Vermont Community Foundation. Vtdigger.org is a recipient of a $6,000 grant from VCF.
