Apr 30

Apr 30 What to Expect in Post-Covid Financial Education, Counseling, and Coaching

Financial Coaching, Professional Issues, The Big Picture

The global pandemic is impacting not only health and financial systems, but how financial capability practitioners will do their jobs, now and for years to come.

Greetings, Talking About Money Community! As always, I do hope that you and yours are safe and healthy. We are still hunkered down here in Massachusetts, where the “surge” started later than predicted. Luckily, the hospitals seem to be keeping up with the demand, though the health care professionals that we know are wiped out. They deserve crisis pay plus. I hope that we as a country can find a way to thank them when this is over.

This week’s post was inspired by a recent article by Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic called “Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance.” Please read Annie’s work if you haven’t already, because I believe that her words are foretelling the way that we as financial educators, counselors, and coaches will do our work for the next decade, if not longer.

And while Annie’s reporting points to all the reasons why we need to upend our current social welfare policies to protect hardworking households (see my post, “A Welfare State Does Not Make You Lazy” for more details on that), today I want to discuss with you the individual emotional response that many people could have in reaction to the collapse of our economy as we know it.

A Story about My Grandmother

I want to set the stage with a story about my grandmother:

My mother’s mother, Virginia, was born in 1904 in Arkansas to a traveling-preacher father and a seamstress mother. Ultimately moving to Kentucky, my grandmother’s mother died of typhoid fever when Virginia was only nine years old. After years dealing with an evil step-monster, she flew the coop at the age of 18, first to work as a teacher, then to become an assistant buyer for a department store.

Virginia was 26 years old when the Great Depression started, and years later she told my mother of the day in 1935 when she watched a man leap to his death from a Chicago skyscraper, landing on the sidewalk in front of her. She held on to the experience of having lived through the Great Depression and carried its burden with her for the rest of her life.

Recently my mother told me the story about the house that never was. In 1948, with my grandfather discharged from the Army and my mom a little girl, my grandparents became eligible for a VA mortgage that would enable them to purchase a newly-built home in Louisville. My grandmother had not been raised in a home that her parents owned, but my grandfather had. Virginia refused to follow through with the deal, feeling apprehensive that they could not afford the monthly payments.

Ironically, a few years later my mother and her parents moved to the very same street where “their” house was, but instead of buying, they rented a snug attic apartment a few blocks away.

I wonder what my grandmother thought when she walked by that house that could have been hers, if she had believed that she could have afforded it.

This story leads me to think about the people that you are going to be serving in your practice in the coming years. How will the experience of such an abrupt economic downturn impact their hopes and dreams about their own futures? And in turn, how will you need to adjust the delivery of your services to confront this new possible reality?

My Experience Working With Refugees

In the early 2000’s I ran a Refugee Individual Development Account (IDA) program. Prior to that I worked as a microenterprise trainer where I also served refugees; this time my clients were aspiring entrepreneurs. If there was one thing that the Russian seamstress, the Congolese taxi driver, and the Afghani sales clerk had in common, it was that they had each suffered some trauma so intense that it forced them to seek refuge in a brand new country far from the land of their birth.

In an important read on the website of the Refugee Health Technical Assistance Center, a passage states:

Perhaps the most significant effect from all of the experiences refugees endure is having been betrayed, either by their own people, by enemy forces, or by the politics of their world in general.

Someday will people describe the experience of living through the economic fallout of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic in the same way?

In both of the jobs that I had serving refugees, I interpreted my professional role not just as a teacher and a counselor, but also as the person who was in my client’s corner. I could be the one who believed that they could accomplish things that they might have doubted in themselves. I walked with each of them through the program, matching their pace, while they traversed the bridge from the world that they once knew, to the new world that they found themselves in.

Looking at Trauma-Informed Care as a Guide

With the global pandemic coming down hard on American households, peoples are experiencing a range of health, financial, and emotional consequences (and is it just me, or are you having a multitude of strange dreams right now?). We are still in the thick of it – to be sure – but as an ever future-looking person I wanted to explore how we as financial educators, counselors, and coaches might start to adapt our practice to best serve the clients who will be coming through our doors…if they are not already.

This jump down the rabbit hole lead me to a 2018 webinar produced by AFCPE and conducted by Dr. Donielle Prince called “Coaching in Crisis: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Financial Coaching and Counseling” (just what I was looking for!). In her presentation, Dr. Prince shares five things that non-clinical staff (that would be you and me) can do to integrate elements of Trauma-Informed Care into our work:

Create a space for your client to exercise their agency and autonomy. In the time that you spend with your client, hold open a space where they can discover and practice using their strengths and personal power with regards to how they manage their money.
Give your client choice. By presenting various options for your clients to choose from, they are able to retain a sense of control, thereby reducing anxiety.
Work in partnership with your client. By creating a sense of teamwork with your client, they will feel a sense of ownership in the work that they accomplish.
Maintain emotional safety for your client. Begin relationship-building with your client from the first moment that you meet. Create activities that help you to establish rapport so that they can do their best work in a calm and attentive way.
Be a trustworthy person in your client’s life. Articulate clear expectations with your client including but not limited to clearly describing activities and timelines. Be sure to include reminders to help your client stay the course. Do what you say, and say what you do.