Wealth & Home Ownership (WHO) Initiative
CDTech’s Wealth & Home Ownership (WHO) Initiative delivers a cost-effective, efficient, and comprehensive suite of financial services to help Los Angeles’ workers become banked, improve their credit, grow their assets, and buy and keep their homes.
The WHO Initiative expands on the success of CDTech’s employer-based Individual Development Account (IDA) program, the Worker Income Security Program (WISP). Launched in 1998, WISP worked with six local manufacturing businesses and enrolled more than 350 low-income workers into the IDA program. In 2005, CDTech expanded our services for employees to include credit improvement and direct access to financial services, including a stored value card for unbanked consumers, bank accounts, mortgages, financial planning, and financial education workshops.
We work with employers to customize a program that meets each company’s goals and the unique needs of its employees. Our tools and services, which are offered “cafeteria-style,” include:
- Consumer education workshops on topics such as improving credit, saving money, and buying a home
- Access to new and useful financial products, such as the Home Savings Fund card, a low-cost, FDIC-insured prepaid debit card with savings features
- Personalized credit improvement services using state-of-the-art, high-tech software
- One-on-one counseling to solve financial problems
- Referrals to banks and lenders for mortgages and other products & services
The goal of the WHO Initiative is to make financial services an essential employee benefit program for employees. Our specific objectives are to:
- Increase the financial knowledge of working families
- Lower the cost of basic financial transactions, including check cashing and remittances
- Increase participating workers’ credit scores
- Expand participating workers’ savings
- Increase participating workers’ assets
- Connect working families with new and useful financial products and services through mainstream, regulated financial institutions
Our partnership with Community Empower, a national mortgage counseling and financial planning firm based in Dallas, TX, enables us to utilize Community Empower’s cutting edge technology to conduct workers’ credit assessments and assist them in increasing their credit scores. Community Empower’s proven credit assessment and score improvement software incorporates underwriting criteria of loan products from participating lenders so clients are matched with appropriate loan products at a click of a button.
CDTech’s other partner is the Mortgage Finance program at LATTC. Through an innovative service-learning program, second-year Mortgage Finance students that apply and are accepted as Mortgage Mentors undergo intensive training to work with WHO clients. Under the guidance and supervision of the WHO Initiative’s senior staff, well-trained Mortgage Mentors conduct outreach and orientation activities, provide individual counseling and refer clients to appropriate services.
For more information about the WHO Initiative:
Call Zoe Ellas at (213) 763-2520 x223 or email zellas@cdtech.org
|
 |
|
|
