Community Cohort

Financial Resilience Community Cohort Announced

The Institute for Emerging Issues (IEI) at NC State University is excited to announce the five regional teams that will make up the Financial Resilience community cohort. Members of this cohort include representatives from five organizations that are working to increase household financial resilience locally, especially for communities with historically increased barriers to saving and debt management. This is IEI’s tenth cohort promoting community-level capacity building.

Learn more about the five organizations selected for the cohort:

• Fragile Families NETWORK provides support services to grandfamilies, which are created when a grandparent or another family member raises the child of a relative who cannot parent.
  • Participant: Glenda Clare
• Land of Sky P20 Council is focused on increasing postsecondary financial aid awareness among communities and families so that more prospective students, from youth to adults, are knowledgeable about their options for beginning or continuing their career preparation studies at a community college or university.
  • Participant: Melissa Zenz
• Living Better Life is committed to supporting underrepresented entrepreneurs and providing economic development opportunities for eastern North Carolina.
  • Participants: Patricia Clanton, Bridget Phifer
• Robeson County Church & Community Center provides emergency, short-term relief services to individuals experiencing crisis scenarios while developing systemic programming to address long-term solutions to break cycles of generational poverty.
  • Participants: Brianna Goodwin, Brittany Love
• Through the Trees works to bridge the digital divide in Western North Carolina.
  • Participant: Yvette Brooks

Over the next two years, each of the five cohort organizations will:

• Receive an organizational assessment to identify key capacity-building needs for their organization.
• Work with a support provider who will address one or more of those needs over 12-18 months, depending on the time needed to deliver the support.
• Participate in five semi-annual peer learning meetings over a 24-month period. Two in-person and three virtual meetings will include sharing successes and problem-solving challenges.

IEI will share what the cohort learns with a statewide audience to capture lessons learned and inspire others to scale what works.

“IEI believes that local communities—with their traditions, willingness to work and history of coming together in tough times to solve big challenges—are the unit of change to spark action,” said IEI Director of Community Initiatives Samantha Graham. “The members of this cohort are the experts that can lead change and inspire others to raise household resilience levels across North Carolina.”