Bryant Operation Hopes to Build a Financially Literate AmericaPaige McKenzie
Thursday, Jan. 29, 2004
Remember 1992? The acquittal of the policemen in the Rodney King beating had led to riots in Los Angeles' South Central neighborhood. The melee led to around $1 billion in property damage, 3,000 burned structures, and thousands of lives – 55 people died and 8,000 more were arrested. But the South Central story would have gone from bad to worse if not for a 26 year old African American who entered the picture.
Today, John Bryant is not on the Forbes 400. He doesn’t run a Fortune 500 company. But he is already poised to make a billion dollar impact on the future American and global economies – while improving communities like South Central.
Just two months after the riots, Bryant launched the non-profit Operation Hope with $20,000 of his own money.
An entrepreneur, Bryant had just started has own financial services group, The Bryant Group Companies. But he saw more pressing needs in South Central. At one point he discovered that there were more liquor stores in South central than in 13 states.
Bryant’s answer to the problems in South Central was not another government program. Instead, he wanted to empower the citizens there by spearheading a different kind of literacy campaign.
From South Central, Bryant has been driving the only national effort in America – the most capitalist society on the planet - to make children and lower income segments of the population financially literate.
“There are 20 million kids in this country not equipped to go out there and operate in a capitalist, democratic society. It’s what they don’t know that they don’t know that’s killing them,” Bryant states.
Bryant’s Operation Hope Inc. has done something an army of bureaucrats never could - taught hundreds of thousand of children economic literacy at a cost of $20 per child, but no cost to the government.
Through programs like the Banking On Our Future initiative, a growing network of inner city banking and “one-stop economic empowerment” branches known as HOPE Centers, numerous government and private enterprise alliances, and bankers-turned-volunteer teachers, “OHI converts check cashing customers in to bank depository customers, renters into homeowners, small business dreamers into small business owners, and minimum wage workers in to living wage workers,” says Bryant.
Now spread throughout the major cities of ten states and the District of Columbia, Bryant’s nine-year-old non-profit relies on volunteers, CEOS and former OHI clients to teach America’s youth and inner city families the basics of how to manage a checkbook and savings account, how to achieve good credit and how to become homeowners and investors.
“In the economic age we live in, the majority of people are not financially literate, and that creates a tax on society,” Bryant explains.
Making Homeowners and Voters
“CEOs drove by these communities for 15 years and never got off the freeway,” says Bryant. “When I founded OHI we had a $61,000 budget, one employee and a vision to eradicate poverty and everybody laughed at me. It was America’s first nonprofit social investment bank. People said it would never amount to much.”
Nine years later in 2002, OHI created U.S. banking history when it sold three of its mature HOPE Centers to traditional private banks, converting them into full service bank branches featuring hard and soft banking services.
And, Bryant says, some 35 percent of South Central citizens are homeowners and 38 percent vote.
“Everybody’s benefiting which is really the way capitalism is supposed to work,” says Bryant. “We have created 500 homeowners in South Central LA. That’s $800 million in lending. According to the Greenlining Institute we made more loans for home ownership in South Central LA to blacks and Latinos making $35,000 or less than the top eight banks in California combined, and not one home loan has ever gone bad.”
A social investment, says Bryant, should have a “return” associated with it, and should be “hand up rather than handout oriented.” The education, empowerment, wealth development and conversion work of OHI is an example of a social investment with a tangible return.
The benefit of this social investment is simple: It reduces public subsidy and increases economic independence. This ultimately can lead to lower crime rates and higher levels of community esteem.
For the private sector, it can also lead to the creation of new and emerging markets and opportunities for the procurement of viable new customers and related revenue. “This is about building a stakeholder class in the 21st century,” says Bryant. "If you own a house you’re not going to burn it down.”
Bryant’s “who’s who” OHI priority alliances include E-Trade Bank, Bank of the Orient, Citibank, the Independent Community Bankers Association, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, American Bankers Association, several Federal Reserve Banks, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and numerous others.
But Bryant doesn’t like to talk so much about OHI’s impressive partners, its $6 million annual operating budget, its 100 percent a year growth rate, its hundreds of volunteers, or its national board of directors, consisting of the 38 major bank CEOs and people like Jack Kemp.
He likes to talk about people like Shonelle Blake, who was a single mom expecting twins until OHI turned her into not just a homeowner, but the owner of a four-plex rental unit she now lives in.
“I couldn’t even afford to rent an apartment on the salary that I was making,” said Blake. "Owning the income property has allowed me to start my own successful business and provide a strong foundation for the future.”
Blake recently shared the stage with President Bush when he came to South Central on Dec. 4 and signed the Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act of 2003 into law.
The Act contains provisions that seek to improve the financial literacy of consumers by establishing a Financial Literacy and Education Commission, which will coordinate federal financial literacy efforts, and develop a national strategy to promote financial literacy education.
“He walks his talk,” affirms Bryant of Bush. “There’s no question that his heart is genuine.”
Bush, Clinton Recognize Bryant
Few things unite George Bush and Bill Clinton. But both agree that John Bryant’s work is vitally important for those in the inner city.
Operation Hope has worked with many members of the Bush administration – which is supporting OHI’s mission, including Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, Secretary of Education Ron Paige, and former HUD Secretary Mel Martinez, as well as Representatives Rick Santorum (R-Penn.), and former Oklahoma Republican Rep. J.C. Watts, (R-Okla.).
Bryant also worked with the administration of Bill Clinton who remains his partner in Harlem, New York.
During President Bush’s first visit to South Central, on the 10th anniversary of the riots, Bryant put together an unprecedented round table discussion with Bush.
“It was a smattering of America,” says Bryant. “Jews, Asians, Latinos, whites and blacks were heard. He came in and just talked to them from his heart as a human being and they cheered the man and gave him amens and hallelujahs and a standing ovation.”
Says Bryant’s friend David Horowitz,“It’s the first time that a Republican administration has ever done something like it, which is basically ‘blitz an inner city with hope.’”
Bryant even brought Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan into classrooms in D.C. to talk to kids about financial literacy and the freedom to fail.
“The beauty here is that most of these kids have never seen a senator or a cabinet secretary,” notes Horowitz. “How inspiring . . . for these senators and cabinet members to say ‘My life is not perfect. I used to be a renter. Let me tell you how I became a homeowner.’”
A 2003 survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston showed that test scores of 35 students in the Dearborn After School Academy at Dearborn Middle School improved by 700 percent following a week of one hour BOOF (Banking On Our Future) sessions with volunteer banker-teachers from the Federal Reserve Banking Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
The statistic is even more incredible in light of the fact that a 2002 national survey of 12th graders by the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy found that 68.1 percent of those tested failed a multiple choice examination on basic financial literacy, and so did 57 percent of America’s youth.
Bryant’s mission is to fill the void by teaching every child in America financial literacy by 8th grade.
In 2004 OHI will begin chipping away at that goal in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Pittsburgh. Bryant laments, “We have requests from Kansas City, Cincinnati, Seattle, as well as Massachusetts and Florida. But we don’t have the money to go into those places yet.”
OHI is an amazing story of what someone with a GED and one year of community college can accomplish.
Setting an Example
When he was 18 years old, Bryant found himself broke, homeless and having to live in his jeep for six months in a parking lot before he landed an entry-level job at a merchant bank.
He convinced his bosses to pay him commissions on accounts he managed for wealthy clients who applied for high-interest loans. “The first year I did zero in business,” he says. The fourth year he did $24 million.
Now the author of “Banking On Our Future” has a bio that could give a Nobel prize winner an inferiority complex.
In 2002 WORTH magazine named him as One of America’s 25 Most Generous young Americans.
He says his success just goes to show that the more adversity life throws at you the more you can achieve. This is why Bryant says he resents some politicians and others who “organize victim marching parties.”
“America is the greatest place in the world, and I’ve been to 30 countries,” says Bryant. I’ve seen what real poverty is. I’ve seen what communism does to you. I’ve seen what it’s like to be an immigrant even in countries like the U.K.”
Bryant says he wants to go beyond one of his heroes: “Martin Luther King’s mission was one of redistribution of wealth. My mission is creation of wealth. I just believe you don’t need to cut up the pie, you can create more pie! It’s not about black, red or brown. It’s about green. I would turn orange if I thought it would eradicate poverty in our neighborhoods.”