Life changed quickly for Ernesto Olmos when he left the U.S. Marine Corps. After being stationed in North Carolina for four years, the corporal and his wife moved to California — and were hit with a drastic increase in housing costs. “My wife and I had prepared for some of these financial differences in advance, but the hike in rent was substantial. We went from paying $750 for a townhome to seeing one-bedroom apartments for about $1,500 in Santa Clarita,” he says. Olmos’ mother suggested the couple apply for a four-bedroom house with Homes 4 Families. The Citi-supported organization provides affordable housing to low-income, honorably discharged veterans. Their application for a new home in Santa Clarita Valley was accepted in 2016. In addition to providing housing assistance, the Homes 4 Families’ initiative offers a free financial education program called Clearpoint Reconnect, operated by Money Management International. The program includes online courses, workshops and counseling for military families transitioning to civilian life. While Olmos’ home was being built, he completed a financial planning exercise to reduce credit card debt, took educational courses to increase his long-term financial security and learned to manage his new home as an investment. “I have never been one to think about retirement, but the but the worksheets made me realize that we need to plan for the future,” Olmos says. For veterans early in the transition stage, counseling programs like Clearpoint Reconnect can offer a particularly helpful field guide for understanding unfamiliar financial processes. “Having that financial education stays with them long-term,” says Ruth Christopherson, Senior Vice President of Citi Salutes and Citi Community Development, which has supported the Clearpoint Reconnect program since 2012. “Things can change, but understanding their financial plan prepares vets for bumps down the road. If one’s car breaks down or if a vet loses a job, this counseling program can keep them out of debt, and they have the education to keep moving forward.” The program includes phone, online and in-person sessions on subjects like understanding credit and debt, and avoiding bankruptcy. Clearpoint Reconnect also offers student loan and home mortgage consulting. “Many veterans find it challenging to adapt to the world of civilian finances, and it might take two or three years to sort things out,” says Kate Horrell, a military finance coach. “Most people don’t understand the many ways their finances will change when they leave the military. Certain benefits will no longer be free, and your entire paycheck will be subject to taxes.” Jeffrey Lodick, a former Army master sergeant and current host of the “On the Other Side” podcast, is no stranger to the challenges of decoding a civilian paycheck. After retiring in September 2017, Lodick’s shift to the private sector included a salary learning curve. “I couldn’t tell you what my salary was in the military,” he says. “I knew what I got paid on the first and the fifteenth of each month, not what was going to the GI Bill and my taxes.” As someone who hadn’t scrutinized his military paycheck for 20 years, navigating private sector tax paperwork took effort. “As silly as it sounds, I didn’t know how to fill out a W-4,” Lodick says. In addition to a new salary, Lodick entered a different tax bracket, which created another set of unknowns. “I never had any assets to deal with. It’s going to be a learning process.” Lodick’s situation is not unique. “Military retirees are stupendously unprepared for changes in their tax situation,” says Horrell. When they return to civilian life, vets are often unaware that they need adjust their taxes to account for military retirement and avoid under-withholding. “You could end up owing more than $10,000 because of under-withholding two different sources of income,” says Horrell. “Any income changes need to be reflected in a W-4. This doesn’t seem to be immediately apparent to everyone.” The upside? Veterans and tech communities are responding to the challenges with a growing set of tools to ease the transition. In addition to Clearpoint Reconnect, whose services are free to all military personnel, Military.com, TheMilitaryWallet.com, and LaceyLangford.com are excellent resources that focus on military money issues.
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This article is paid for and produced in partnership with Citi. Through Citi Salutes, Citi collaborates with veterans’ service organizations and leading veterans’ champions to support and empower veterans, service members and their families. This is the second installment in a series focusing on solutions for veterans and military families in the areas of housing, financial resilience, military transition and employment.
Mindfulness, the practice of being awake to the present moment, is now in vogue in American workplaces as varied as Google, Goldman Sachs, Aetna and General Mills. Backed by scientific research of the cognitive benefits of ancient Buddhist meditation, corporate types thinking of productivity and the bottom line quickly trained their workers how to focus using mindfulness. Outside of finance, tech and manufacturing industries, NationSwell found seven more workplaces where you find employees reaping the benefits of meditating on a regular basis.
1. Concert Hall
Where: Tempe, Ariz.
After studying mindfulness for four decades, Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is renowned as the field’s mother. Her concept of mindfulness differs from the common practice, in that she believes no meditation is necessary to change the brain’s chemistry; instead, she achieves mindfulness by existing in a state of “actively noticing new things,” she tells NationSwell.
As part of her research, she once split the Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra into two groups and instructed each to play a piece of music by Johannes Brahms, which she recorded. Langer asked the first group to remember their best performance of the familiar piece and try their best to replicate it. She told the other group of musicians to vary the classical piece with subtle riffs that only they would recognize. Langer taped both performances and played them side-by-side for an audience. Overwhelmingly, listeners preferred the second one. To Langer, it seemed that the more choices we make deliberately — in a word, mindfully — as opposed to the mindless repetition, the better our end-product will be. The most important implication for Langer came later, when she was writing up the study: In America, she says, we so often prize a “strong leader to tell people what to do,” but as the orchestra’s performance proves, when an individual takes the lead instead of doing what someone instructs her to do, a superior result is the likely outcome.
2. Primary School
Where: East Village, New York City
“The research is pretty conclusive: when kids feel better, they learn better. One precedes the other,” declares Alan Brown, a consultant with Mindful Schools where he offers mindfulness training to the private school’s freshman and sophomores. Brown incorporated a serious practice into his life at a week-long silent retreat, after “jumping out of my skin, reading the toilet paper, doing anything but to be with your own thoughts and with yourself.” He now teaches kids how to be attuned to themselves and recognize feelings that may be subconsciously guiding their lives, like when they’re hyped up with sugar or are stressed out about a test. (Solutions: spending a moment in a designated corner calming down, breathing through a freakout to restore higher cognitive functions.)
As someone in the caregiving profession, Brown reminds himself and his fellow teachers they need to adopt mindfulness practices as well. With them, “the way I interact with others comes from a place of much greater compassion for the kids: clearly this young person, who is not a fully-formed, self-regulating adult, is probably trying their best and probably has some really significant hurdles outside the classroom. I’m not going to let that get to me.” If teachers expect similarly enlightened behavior from their kids, Brown adds, they have to know, “You can’t teach what you don’t have in your own body” and better embrace a meditative practice to see the results at every desk. The UMass Mindfulness in Medicine program teaches the benefits of meditation to their staff members.
3. Hospital
Where: Shrewsbury, Mass.
Modern mindfulness was formalized in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn created an eight-week meditation routine to reduce stress for the hospital’s chronically ill patients that’s now replicated worldwide. Back on the medical campus where it all started, a new mindfulness program is being offered this summer for the people on the other side of treatment: the physicians, nurse practitioners and care managers.
The Mindfulness in Medicine program works to combat the frequent feeling of dissatisfaction about a lack of patient interaction among doctors. Instructor Carl Fulwiler gives lectures about the clinical research on meditation’s benefits, teaches 90-minute workshops for busy staffers and leads full-blown courses for a dedicated few. His teachings focus on how to avoid burnout with strategic pauses; by taking a breath immediately prior to seeing a patient, doctors can focus solely on the interaction. “Often they’re thinking about what’s the next thing they have to do or the documentation. They’re not even hearing a lot of what the patient is saying,” Fulwiler observes. With mindfulness, they can see what “might be contributing to a bad encounter, what’s preventing us from being empathetic, compassionate and more efficient in our style of communication?” The whole interaction may be over in three minutes, but having that time be meaningful is vital for helping the healers themselves feel the rewards of a demanding job.
4. Government
Where: Washington, D.C.
Change rarely comes to our nation’s capital, but that’s okay in Rep. Tim Ryan’s mind. A meditative practice equipped him to deal with legislative gridlock and partisan bickering. The seven-term Democrat representing northeastern Ohio practices mindfulness in a half lotus position for roughly 40 minutes daily — a regimen he began after attending one of Kabat-Zinn’s retreats in 2008, after which he gained “a whole new way of relating with what was going on in the world,” Ryan tells The Atlantic. “And like any good thing that a congressman finds — a new technology, a new policy idea — immediately I said, ‘How do we get this out?’” Ryan first wrote the book “A Mindful Nation,” exploring the ways mindfulness is being implemented across America, and today, in sessions of the House Appropriations Committee on which he sits, the representative advocates for more funds to be deployed to teach meditation tactics. The money may not be forthcoming just yet, but that hasn’t stopped mindfulness from gaining more new converts like Ryan every day.
5. Police Department
Where: Hillsboro, Ore.
Last month, Americans watched videos of officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, La.; St. Paul, Minn; and North Miami, and they read about the five cops who died in a sniper attack in Dallas. While those crises were deeply felt by civilians nationwide, they were only a glimpse of what cops encounter regularly. “Law enforcement is a profession that is deeply impacted by trauma. On a daily basis, we bump up against human suffering,” says Lt. Richard Goerling, head of Hillsboro Police Department’s investigative division and a faculty member at Pacific University. “It doesn’t take very long for police officers’ well-being to erode dramatically,” he adds, ticking off studies that track early mortality and cardiovascular issues among public safety professionals.
Through the organization Mindful Badge, Goerling teaches several police departments in the Portland area and in Northern California how mindfulness can better cops’ performance: sharpening their attention to life-or-death details, cultivating empathy and compassion that’s crucial for stops and searches and building resilience before encountering trauma. The theory goes that once an officer receives mental training, he can sense when a stressor in his environment is activating his flight-or-flight reactions and then check those instincts. “If a police officer is in their own crisis,” Goerling suggests, “they’re not going to meet that person in a way that’s totally effective.” The lieutenant is aware mindfulness isn’t a cure-all for “a landscape of suffering,” but he believes it’s a first step to changing a “broken” police culture that takes its officers’ health for granted.
6. Athletic Competition
Where: San Diego, Calif.
BMX bikers may not seem like a group that’s primed for meditation, but when an elite biker stuttered with anxiety at the starting line, his coach James Herrera looked into any way to solve the problem of managing stress before a high-stakes event. Herrera soon got in touch with the Center for Mindfulness at the University of California, San Diego, and he signed up his seven-man team for a small study into the effects of meditation on “very healthy guys who are at the top of their sport,” lead author Lori Haase tells NationSwell. Over seven weeks, the bikers practiced a normal mindfulness routine, but with extra impediments like having their hands submerged in a bucket of icy water to teach them to feel the sensation of pain, rather than reacting to it cognitively. As the weeks went on, their bodies seemed to prepare for a physical shock, without an accompanying psychological panic. In other words, participants’ bodies were so amped up and hyperaware that they didn’t need to react as strongly to the stressor itself compared to an average person. The study didn’t test whether it made them faster on the course, but it seemed to suggest that reaction times could be sped up by using mindfulness to slow down.
7. Military
Where: Honolulu, Hawaii
Like cops, members of the military have much to gain from situational awareness. A couple seconds’ of lead-time for a soldier to notice someone in a bulky jacket running into a public square could prevent a suicide bomb from taking out dozens of civilians and comrades abroad. But that’s not all mindfulness is good for in a service member’s line of duty.
Before soldiers even leave home, they must deal with leaving family and putting other aspects of their lives on hold. To prepare soldiers for deployment, University of Miami neuroscientist Amishi Jha offered mindfulness trainings at an Army outpost on Oahu to soldiers heading to Afghanistan. To fit the program into an already crowded training regimen, Jha drastically cut down the standard 40-hour model to an eight-hour practice scattered throughout eight weeks. Despite the stress of leaving that could sap the mind’s attention and working memory — “everything they need to do the job well when they’re there,” Jha notes — the mindfulness trainings prevented their minds from wandering. Tentative research Jha’s still conducting suggests those benefits persist post-deployment. Her session was just like boot camp, Jha found, only for the brain.
Shaiza Rizavi sees the world — American culture, politics and economics — from an outsider’s perspective. Raised in Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan, her family moved to Illinois when she was a girl. Rizavi now works as a partner at Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co., a growth equity brokerage firm where she seeks out companies with “disruptive, innovative approaches.” She also serves on the board of Acumen, which invests in strategies to end world poverty. NationSwell met up with her at a cafe in Midtown Manhattan, near the southern edge of Central Park. What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership? I think it’s important to be able to give yourself permission to take a lot of risk and make mistakes as you go along. I learn that in my business constantly. There’s a lot of risk-taking in the stocks that I invest in and pain that goes along with that. It’s a teeter-totter that’s only in balance for a nanosecond — or not at all. Understanding that it’s going to be up and down at all moments, and it’s important to feel those moments, to live in that, to steep yourself in it, accept it and not try to avoid it. What books are currently on your nightstand? I was actually re-reading right now “Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World,” a book that’s written by Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder of Acumen. I am also reading “Superforecasting” [co-written by Phil Tetlock]. It’s a study done over a long period of time to get a sense of who the best forecasters have been and what it takes.
I’m also reading Ron Chernow’s “Hamilton” again because I just took my kids to see the Broadway show. I think I first checked it out in 2005, but it’s been interesting to revisit, especially with this election and what’s going on in the world. It’s made me think about how sometimes we have to go backwards in order to go forward to understand that these moments of tension lead to greatness over time. It’s the same idea as having to steep in the uncomfortable sometimes — looking back we may see that this election moment is one that the country has seen many times. It’s not new; it’s part of the process. What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job? I suppose, in a job or in life or anything, how you approach the unknown has to be done in partnerships. In looking at stocks or nonprofits or assessing whether something’s going to be successful or not, it’s always important to step out of your shell. It’s really about connecting people and trying to figure it out together. It’s a powerful way of looking at it, to see all of us being in it together. I think it helps see what the real issues are, as opposed to what your perceptions are. What inspires you? Well, at 4 o’clock each morning, I get a quote emailed to me. I go to a Unitarian church, All Souls, on the Upper East Side [of Manhattan], and the minister sends out a part of a poem or a quote to people who sign up. So, I have a little ritual surrounding it. On the flip side, how do you try to inspire others? Be true to your beliefs. Knowing what you stand for and standing by it, people actually see that’s your truth. And I also think it’s really important to be a cheerleader and not a de-constructor constantly. There’s so much dart throwing, as opposed to actually wanting to help. So many people are taking critical chances in this country. There’s so much progress, but what we hear about is the lack of it. I think it’s important to remind people — that’s one narrative, but not the only narrative.
[ph] What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now? I’ve been thinking a lot recently about software and faster processing speeds. I got my first computer in 1984. My mother was studying at the University of Chicago, where they had computers available for a greatly reduced price, and she brought one home. It was just such an immediate increase in productivity through technology. All my friends were using typewriters, and all of a sudden, I was writing on a word-processing machine. In college, I didn’t have to go to the computer lab like most of my friends. Eventually my machine connected to the Internet, and there was an incredible unleashing of ideas. By delivering software to so many different devices today, we’re at an inflection point. We saw the number of people connected to the Internet double since 2008. We now have over 3 billion people connected, but that’s only 40 percent of the world. Over the next five years, we may see well over 2 billion additional people come online. As a growth investor, I see this and think growth happens during the most difficult times. We don’t know what new services or inventions will be created that will benefit us all. What’s your proudest accomplishment? I think probably, in my life, I’ve been interested in understanding different perspectives, particularly of an outsider entering the country. I think we’re having a lot of that discussion on refugees: we versus them. I moved from Karachi to America, to just outside of Chicago. My family and I arrived in the middle of winter in the middle of nowhere. I experience the world around me as an outsider with fresh eyes, but I always felt like that was an opportunity, to see new perspectives in a new land that I’d never been to.
When I worked in Thailand, I tried to provide that too. I worked on a project where I asked Kodak and Fujifilm to give cameras to street children and then put on a big photo show. The perspective that gave me was really powerful. They were able to show me what they see, instead of me trying to understand from far away. I think that’s very important to me — that commitment to understand the complexities of a person or place from several sides — and I work on it as a personal accomplishment, as a way to live life. It’s fluid. It’s not something that will ever end. You hope that you continue that accomplishment on an hourly, daily basis. To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
Raise your hand if you remember that time the Kardashian sisters got sued for racking up $120,000 in charges on their employer’s credit card. No?
Well, for the high school students participating in the Chicago chapter of the financial-literacy program MoneyThink, the celebrity snafu serves as a teachable moment. In a seminar called The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Plastic Money, a MoneyThink mentor uses the reality stars’ mishap to help teens understand how important it is to create a budget, especially to keep from spending money they don’t have.
The lesson seems fairly obvious: If you don’t want to end up in a financial hole, you should know how much money you’re earning, and not spend more than that. But “there’s a difference between knowing something and doing something,” notes Sarah Gordon, vice president of nonprofit investments at the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) in Chicago, MoneyThink’s biggest funder. Gordon also sits on MoneyThink’s board. “I know I shouldn’t eat bacon cheeseburgers, but sometimes I do. I shouldn’t speed when I drive my car, but sometimes I do.” MORE:This Former Presidential Advisor Is Using a Proven Way to Lift Americans Out of Poverty
The goal of MoneyThink is to close the knowing-versus-doing gap, and to teach young people, especially those who come from low-income backgrounds, a more sophisticated way to think about money. By all accounts, they need the help: According to a national report from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), millennials aged 18 to 34 have significantly lower financial literacy than older cohorts. When asked five standard questions about personal finance, FINRA found in 2012 that millennials answered 2.3 questions correctly, compared with 3.3 of those 55 or older. A 2009 report from the National Endowment for Financial Education found that in a survey of about 2,000 college students, 73 percent had engaged in “risky financial behaviors,” like taking on additional debt after graduating from college when they were already sandbagged with hefty student loans.
“Every headline for the past five years has been talking about how broke our generation is, how the income gap and the wealth gap continue to grow, and how low- and middle-income Americans are becoming more and more marginalized,” says Ted Gonder, 23, a co-founder and executive director of MoneyThink.
The nonprofit, born in 2007, started as a mentorship program at the University of Chicago, whose home city has one of the highest rates of extreme poverty in the nation. Gonder and four of his fellow students started mentoring poor kids in the neighborhood, with the goal of increasing financial literacy. The program gained traction quickly, and before long the founders were at the helm of a nationwide student movement. There are now 30 MoneyThink chapters on college campuses in low-income areas in 10 states, including the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Columbia University in New York City and Washington University in St. Louis. In 2012, President Obama recognized MoneyThink as a “champion of change,” and in October the program won $100,000 in funding through MassChallenge, the country’s largest business accelerator. MORE: Online Money Pooling Could Build Credit History for America’s Working Poor
Gonder buzzes with ambition and energy, his mop of brown hair never perfectly in place. In a sea of Gen Y’ers with a vision, his relentlessness stands out. “We’re on a hunt for the holy grail of youth financial-education effectiveness, and we won’t stop until every student in America enters adulthood with the knowledge, skills and tools to navigate real-life financial decisions on the pathway to prosperity,” he says.
MoneyThink is a modern-era money-management program; its curriculum goes beyond teaching students how to balance a monthly budget or checkbook (though they do that, too). The nonprofit focuses on value creation through entrepreneurship and personal branding. In program units titled Marketing Yourself, Networking, Jobs and Entrepreneurship, students create a resume and fill in a worksheet that helps them articulate their character assets and what skills they personally bring to the table. MoneyThink also strives to instill in students the confidence that they have the skills they need to succeed — confidence itself being a real asset in a marketplace that values self-promotion.
“What it takes to get and keep and create a job in the 21st century is vastly different than it was 100 years ago, 50 years ago or even 20 years ago,” says Gonder. “Even if you work for a big company or government, your job is not secure, and pensions are a thing of the past. Self-reliance has to be at the front of mind and the front of action.”
MoneyThink mentors, who are all college-age volunteers, make good use of current events, pop-culture case studies and technology (stay tuned for a MoneyThink smartphone app coming soon) to engage their 11th- and 12th-grade pupils. Classes are structured in a small group setting, with a 5-to-1 student-to-mentor ratio, where mentors can get to know students personally, and customize their lessons. The program lasts 21 weeks, allowing relationships of trust to form between the college and high school students. The fact that they’ve made it to their junior and senior years of high school in itself demonstrates that they have what it takes to succeed, explains Gonder. MORE:The Bay Area’s New Boom Will Change the Face of Silicon Valley
“I have a goal each day,” says Nnaji Iwunza, 19, a MoneyThink graduate from Chicago who, after being accepted to 21 universities, many on full scholarship, is currently attending Baldwin Wallace University and studying marketing. “I set myself a spending limit, and have goals for savings.”
Nnaji, who is also a forward for the university basketball team, says that most people refer to him as “Nnaji, the basketball player,” and requests of this reporter, “Can you please put ‘Nnaji, the student?’ ”
MoneyThink tallies between $300,000 and $500,000 in funding each year from CFSI and other firms, including Blackstone, Pimco, State Farm and Chase. The nonprofit has plans to become self-sustaining by creating a membership base of alumni who would pay for access to an internal professional leadership network, job board, events and the like. Gonder is also hoping to make the mobile app profitable, though he’s still trying to figure out how. He has ambitious goals to scale up in the meantime, aiming to establish MoneyThink chapters in every city in the United States by 2019.
CFSI’s Gordon thinks the program has potential to grow while keeping costs low. Financial coaching is expensive, but MoneyThink is driven by a volunteer movement of young people teaching other young people. That’s an infinite and renewable resource. MORE:Why Prisons of the Future Will Look More Like College Campuses
Money pooling is an international phenomenon that strengthens the purchasing power of the world’s poor by sharing income. But until now it’s been done exclusively offline: people travel to and from the ATM, then to and from each others’ houses. eMoneyPool is making this easier and more transparent by putting the process online. Started by brothers Francisco and Luis Cervera, the service lets users create their own pools and see when and how much each participant contributes. Because the site creates a record of each user’s commitment, it doubles as a source of credit history, empowering participants to secure loans from banks. So far 391 people have signed up; they have collectively pooled more than $280,000. Banks have expressed interest. The site could be key to newfound mobility among America’s working poor.
