Topeka K. Sam Launches EPIC Financial to Address the racial wealth gap
Topeka K. Sam Launches EPIC Financial to Address the racial wealth gap
In 2015, Topeka K. Sam created a transformative and transformational criminal justice reform nonprofit organization whose vision is to end poverty and incarceration for women and girls. Since its launch, her Ladies of Hope Ministries has provided a new model and new pathways of success for the 1.3 million women and girls who are presently incarcerated in this country. Sam’s social enterprises and advocacy center the voices and experiences of impacted women most affected by a deeply flawed criminal legal system and creates solutions that allow them to rebuild their lives and thrive.
As The LOHM continues its vital work, Sam stands ready to address one of our nation’s greatest persistent crises: the racial wealth gap and the lack of financial equity in communities of color. EPIC Financial is a new fintech B Corporation that will offer the first-ever comprehensive, non-predatory banking and financial services solution aligned with the vision to end poverty and incarceration for all. EPIC Financial is a pathway to equity in all its forms: creating the foundations of financial wellness, addressing the historical injustices that established and reinforced racist and predatory banking and housing practices, and leveraging tools most known to establish intergenerational wealth.
The United States is truly a nation of two financial systems. For families and communities with ready access to safe and stable banking and credit, the dream of home ownership, protected retirement assets, and the ability to help the next generation along their path to financial wellbeing feels close at hand. For our nation’s “underbanked” communities, fees and fines, use of tools like money orders for basic transactions, onerous credit, and exclusionary practices make this pathway almost impossible. And the causes and ramifications to the barriers to even the most basic affordable banking can make the shift from predatory lenders and accounts to inexpensive banking feel almost impossible.
These people – and their parents, partners, and families – comprise a large and reliable customer base. However, they may have a deep distrust of banks and other formal financial institutions, and they have almost certainly been ignored or actively excluded from affordable and reliable financial services.
These exclusions are not just shortsighted in terms of increasing roadblocks to successful reentry; they feed predatory financial services that have rippling impacts throughout communities. To compound this, people returning home have few options to conveniently pay the fees and fines that often accompany parole and probation. Moreover, without credit, they are often excluded from favorable rental agreements and have almost no options to purchase a home, one of our nation’s most reliable modes of building and protecting wealth and ensuring long-term financial stability. And while the release and prepaid debit cards accessible to people coming home from prison may appear to be competition for our more comprehensive solution, they are, in fact, a reflection of the failures of the current system and an open invitation to innovate.
EPIC Financial deploys the most up-to-date fintech tools and modes to address this issue at its root. Through EPIC Financial, Topeka K. Sam proposes to unlock a wholly underserved market and build towards a more just and equitable world. EPIC Financial opens this market through an understanding of the unique needs of people in poverty and prison, and their families and the related services and solutions that can support people as they begin to build their financial legacy.
This is not just good business; it creates financial equity and inclusion, removes barriers for our members by educating, activating, and empowering our community to take their first steps towards true financial independence, security, and personal wealth.
In the United States, 1 in 10 people live in poverty,1 and many people can’t afford things like healthy foods, health care, and housing. Healthy People 2030 focuses on helping more people achieve economic stability.
→ 38.1 million people lived in Poverty USA, 2018
→ 14.1 million American adults, are unbanked
Though the official census data gives seniors a 2018 poverty rate of only 9.7%, the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for expenses such as the rising costs of health care, raises the senior poverty rate to 14.1%
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