Our Continuing Commitment to Refugees and Asylees
For over 20 years, since we were founded, we have administered a specialized savings program for refugees and asylees. That individual development account (IDA) program has now helped over 1700 clients to invest more than $24 million dollars from savings and matching funds in their dreams of home and small business ownership, or further education through degree programs and recertification.
The next round of funding from the Office of Refugee Resettlement will enable Accompany Capital to provide financial education and match grants of $6k to $3k to up to 25 families and 26 individuals per year for four years.
As part of the program, we recently offered a financial education workshop, The Basics of Money and Assets, which was hosted by Santander Bank at their Williamsburg Work Cafe for over 30 of our refugee clients from Burkina Faso, Liberia, Togo, Niger, and Afghanistan. Francess Smith, who has been the Manager of our IDA Program since its inception and Zach Logan, Loan Officer for the Refugee Program, presented a session on the importance of building and maintaining a good credit score and developing a household budget.
An additional generous grant of $750,000 from the ORR has enabled us to support 66 Afghan evacuee families with rental assistance of $1000 per month for a year for 60 families, and for 6 months for the remaining 6 families.
As part of that program, we offered a Tenants’ Rights workshop this week taught by Sujoy Krishna, a Tenant Counselor from Chhaya, which was attended by 31 evacuees who are currently participating in our program.
Thank you to the Office of Refugee Resettlement for their generous support of the IDA program, thanks to Chhaya for a terrific workshop, and special thanks to Toby Singh Baba, VP, Sr. Associate, Community Partnerships, and his team at Santander Bank for their assistance with the workshops and the management of client accounts, and to Accompany Capital refugee team members Calvin Fletcher, Manager of Refugee Program; Francess Smith, Asset Development Specialist; and loan officers Zach Logan and Cheick Diallo for the excellent work they do.