The Financial Clinic

Building financial security for low-income Americans through direct service, capacity building, and systems-level solutions and social innovations enabled by technology.

The Financial Clinic is committed to creating systems-level solutions to build financial security and improve financial mobility for working poor families. The Clinic has created the financial security ecosystem or 'ecosystem,' a holistic partnership approach that builds financial security for the working poor at scale and accelerates sector-specific missions and outcomes. Borrowing a popular metaphor from the high-tech sector, 'business ecosystems' leverage the power of connections, collaborations, and continuous evolution to create and capture new value, thus advancing not only our vision and our partners' unique missions, but the anti-poverty field as a whole. This complete bundle of the Clinic's best practices and services is designed to seamlessly collaborate with a partner organization's existing services through capacity building, direct services and lasting change - seamlessly connected through the use of Change Machine.
The revolutionary online platform that significantly improves service to America's working poor, Change Machine contains all the tools and resources practitioners need to address their customers' underlying financial insecurity. Built by practitioners for practitioners, Change Machine offers unprecedented opportunities for dramatically increasing the impact of financial coaching. Change Machine provides a single platform where practitioners can learn best financial coaching practices; access all the tools and worksheets they need to coach their customers; a professional social network specifically designed for the field to share best practices; and special access for supervisors to manage their staff, customers and data.

Change Machine is the first of its kind in that it provides one single platform for the full financial coaching journey
- core and specialty training modules and quizzes to learn and build financial knowledge
- interactive case management system, built on Salesforce to easily integrate with an organization's existing CRM
- social network connecting practitioners nationwide to ask questions and share best practices
- extensive and customizable reporting for program managers to track impact for funders and stakeholders and further improve service delivery. Change Machine is the only publicly-released product to bundle them all into one easy-to-use dynamic platform.

Within the next two years, the Clinic is translating Change Machine into a version for the Salesforce App Exchange, which will make the platform available to the 31,000 nonprofit organizations currently using Salesforce. Translating Change Machine into a Salesforce App would make the platform more accessible to current and prospective Salesforce customers, allow the platform to communicate with organizations' data collections, enable partners to create and customize thousands of reports and dashboards, analyze and manage data independently, and make it possible for Change Machine and its partners to track the relationship between financial security outcomes and partners' mission outcomes.

The Clinic's strategic goals for the next three years are to focus on the sustainability of our web-based financial coaching platform, Change Machine; to leverage the lessons we are learning on the ground for systems-level solutions; and to work towards our National Policy Agenda. The Clinic measures success outcomes around financial coaching tracked through Change Machine around assets, banking, credit, debt, taxes, and financial goals. The Clinic's financial coaching model was rigorously evaluated via an RCT.

The Clinic works toward its vision of a nation where everyone is financially secure by transforming lessons learned on the ground into large-scale, systems-level solutions and social innovations, like it's web-based financial coaching platform. After 12 years, The Financial Clinic has demonstrated a 'gold standard' model for building financial security for working poor families.

In five years, the Clinic plans to leverage the one-on-one successes we've had with thousands of customers to produce large-scale change that will have an impact on millions of working poor people across the nation.

The Clinic focuses on these one-in-three working American households, 10.4 million families‚ who are supported by full-time workers who have earnings below 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Level, and the organizations who serve them.
Because Clinic cannot serve everyone, the organization built Change Machine to make financial coaching model and approach available to the more than 1.8 million practitioners on the front lines of anti-poverty work. Change Machine was created for nonprofit, social service, and government programs serving low- to moderate-income Americans across a variety of sectors, including but not limited to financial coaching, workforce development, domestic violence, and re-entry.

In a recent two-year partnership with eight NYC organizations , outcomes on Change Machine showed an increase in workforce participant financial security, an increase in workforce frontline staff financial security, and an increase in workforce development outcomes, including placement and program completion rates. In addition, we study the data collected in ChangeMachine to create lasting change by defining field best-practices and influencing policy-change.
To date, more than 1,200 practitioners from 400 organizations in over 40 states utilize Change Machine. They have served more than 36,000 customers and returned more than $20 million in cash value to working poor Americans.

The Clinic is led by Founder and CEO Mae Watson Grote. As a former welfare advocate, Ms. Grote saw firsthand the need to help working poor Americans break the cycle of intergenerational financial insecurity, and so she founded The Financial Clinic to give people the tools to be empowered in their own financial lives. The Clinic's financial coaching framework was built into a three-ring binder Toolkit, which quickly gained such popularity that the team was mailing these cumbersome binders across the country. Realizing the need to move the Toolkit online, the idea for Change Machine was born.

Change Machine is revolutionary in building financial security at scale by bringing proven financial coaching strategies to a web-based platform, thus democratizing access to the field's most effective methods of financial inclusion.

Given the highly dynamic nature of financial security strategies and financial coaching techniques, Change Machine makes the latest best practices readily available to the entire field and sets a new bar for how coaches and managers deliver and evaluate their services. It provides flexibility within its structure of tools and resources that translates across the sectors of social services, easing program implementation, empowering staff to lead inquiries and achieve outcomes, and inviting organizations to embrace continuous quality improvement to best serve communities in need. It also embraces the importance of social networks by giving practitioners and managers a forum to connect with others nationwide to share best practices and solve common issues as they arise.

If we receive support from Solve, the Clinic will use the prize money to bring its development team in-house in order to improve the platform and make it more accessible to a broader population of social services, and to build out our customer success team to ensure that users of the platform are able to utilize Change Machine successfully in their work.

Financial insecurity is pervasive. It often stymies nonprofit organizations from fully and effectively serving their communities. Social service organizations are ill-equipped to help their customers overcome the financial barriers standing in the way of economic independence. By understanding these unique economic barriers, such organizations can identify strategies that resonate with customers and provide a more complete solution to those in need. Change Machine places proven financial security building strategies at practitioners' fingertips, making it easy for programs to adopt these strategies, seamlessly integrate them with their existing services, and sustain them far into the future.