Leadership Training Institute in Hempstead teaches skills to financially get ahead

Knowledge about key financial principles could have saved Tamara Simpson errors that mired her even deeper in debt, forcing her to delay plans to purchase a home. And better information about the home-buying process could have saved years of frustration for Janine Ellis-Davidson.

But under the tutelage of a team of experts at the Leadership Training Institute, a nonprofit organization in Hempstead, Ellis-Davidson and her husband were able to buy a home last summer in East Meadow, after renting a one-bedroom apartment in a house in Hicksville for six years.

And Simpson, who lives in Deer Park, also in an apartment in a house, with her husband and two college-age children, said they have pared down their debt greatly, and can now "see the light at the end of the tunnel, based on how the program has taught me how to do the finances."

Both women participate in a new Institute program called STEP — or Skills and Techniques to Economic Progress — that is focused on bringing financial literacy and strategies for increasing the incomes of low- and moderate-income residents in the Island's Black communities.

The Institute's program is financed with a $100,000 grant from the Long Island Racial Equity Donor Collaborative at the Long Island Community Foundation. The collaborative's goal, officials have said, is to address "the ongoing social and economic exclusion of Black Long Islanders" that they said has led to "deeply rooted racial inequities on Long Island."

Blacks denied chance to build wealth

"This is a program that addresses the racial wealth gap," said Frantz LeGrand, the institute's project director. "It's important to understand that the racial wealth gap is not necessarily because of what people do." Rather, he said, there are racial inequities built into some societal systems. 

"We understand that after the war [World War II], certain whites were given opportunities to get homes that increased in value," LeGrand said, alluding to government home lending programs that benefited white returning soldiers but were not always available to Black ones. As a result, he said whites who were able to purchase homes using government aid, saw those homes increase in value over decades, building up wealth for their families. "Blacks were not able to get that."

And then, LeGrand continued, there were "systemic racist policies, where you could have the same credit score, same income, but Blacks would get a higher interest rate, which sometimes locks them out of purchasing a home. Those are systemic. What we're doing is we're cutting through that with solid programs through entrepreneurship, financial literacy, analysis [and] workforce development strategies."

Aster Mehreteab, president and chief executive of the institute, said workforce development was "essential" to help participants who have a particular need to increase their income to meet their goals. 

That means some program participants are referred to the workforce development team to learn ways to boost their income that, for some, might mean starting their own businesses. And the institute has experts to help guide them on that. 

"When we meet with the individuals one on one, we see what their goals are, what their needs are, what they want to get out of this program, and everything else is driven by that," said Pamela Parkes, the program's financial coach. "When they're having one-on-one coaching, we're going through all the foundations of finance: cash flow, budgeting, debt solutions."

Seeking to buy homes

Several participants had a goal of purchasing a home.

By the time Ellis-Davidson, 50, a senior pricing analyst for a security alarm manufacturer, came to the Leadership Training Institute in April 2022, she and her husband had spent two fruitless years trying to buy a home. She said they often never got callbacks from sellers, or didn't receive answers to their offers. They were also frustrated by the real estate agent they were working with.

Ellis-Davidson said while she had already raised her credit score before joining the program, "Coming to LTI gave me more insight on the different areas [of Long Island], the tax brackets, and how my finances had to be in order to prepare to purchase a home."

Simpson, 45, an insurance broker, said her sessions with Parkes were not only revelatory, from a practical standpoint, but they also gave her hope.

Simpson said she had accrued $80,000 in debt through credit cards and a $40,000 loan. But under the guidance of Parkes and her team, Simpson said the debt has been cut down to $56,000 in less than a year.

Parkes said Simpson was only paying the minimum on her credit card balances, thinking that keeping up with the payments alone and focusing on cards with the lowest balances would be sufficient. However, she said the better strategy was paying off the cards with the highest interest rates.

Simpson said Parkes "taught us how to use the same income ... to pay the bills and still put away money in the bank. And with us doing that, we start to see savings going in."

Simpson said she was teaching her children about the financial principles she learned from the institute. She told them: "This is how we're going to obtain a better life financially because now we have the tools to see what we can do and how we can save money and not go with high interest rates."

By Olivia Winslow

olivia.winslow@newsday.com@newsollie