Our Program
An Approach Built Around the Person, Not the Timeline
Financial stability looks different for every person who walks through our doors. Someone rebuilding a relationship with their children needs something different than someone learning, for the first time, that a paycheck depends entirely on showing up and staying accountable to an employer. Someone managing recovery alongside a budget needs something different than someone who never had the chance to learn basic financial skills at all.
Our program is built to meet each person where they are. Rather than moving everyone through an identical checklist, we shape the work around the specific barriers standing between someone and stability. That might mean teaching someone their first digital skills. It might mean helping someone plan around a return to incarceration by building savings for what comes after. It might mean walking alongside someone chasing a promotion they never thought they could reach. The tools stay consistent. How we apply them does not.
How the Program Is Structured
While each person’s path looks different, the program moves through three phases over 15 months.
Months 1 through 5: Building Awareness The early months focus on understanding, not restriction. Participants track their own spending, examine their decision-making patterns, and learn to separate wants from needs. This phase builds the self-awareness that makes every later goal achievable, including setting short and long-term financial goals, learning to curb impulse spending, and building the foundational skills of earning, saving, and spending well.
Months 5 through 10: Budgeting and Planning With a clear picture of their own habits, participants move into active budgeting. This includes learning the 50/30/20 rule, identifying fixed and variable expenses, setting concrete savings and debt payoff goals, and reviewing progress regularly to adjust the plan as life changes.
Months 10 through 15: Goal Attainment The final phase turns planning into action toward each person’s specific housing and financial goals, whether that means purchasing a home, understanding a land contract or mortgage, navigating a tax sale property, or securing stable rental housing.
Who We Serve
We work primarily with people reentering the community after incarceration, individuals transitioning from inpatient to outpatient recovery programs, people navigating divorce, aged-out foster youth, veterans transitioning to civilian life, and anyone working to build the financial stability needed to secure housing.
Getting Started
If you are currently incarcerated or in a recovery program, your caseworker can help arrange a Zoom interview to begin the process. Otherwise, a phone call is all it takes to set up an in-person interview, typically about an hour. Given how urgent these situations often are, interviews are available outside of standard business hours whenever needed.
What Makes This Program Different
Meeting people where they are, rather than moving them through a fixed script, produces results that a one-size-fits-all approach cannot. Participants have gone on to secure jobs paying well into six figures. Others have stepped into management roles they once doubted they were capable of holding. One participant moved out of state after completing a college program and became a radio commentator. Another, a veteran connected to Sandra’s own former unit, completed a demanding path back into military service, and the changes in him were visible enough that his mother, herself in recovery, was moved to see the transformation firsthand.