Charity Creates Financial-Coaching Site

The Financial Clinic, a New York nonprofit, has created Change Machine, an online platform that other groups can use to provide financial coaching to the people they serve.

The new site helps employees work with clients to identify and prioritize their financial problems, develop a plan to deal with them, and monitor progress. Interactive lessons teach staff members how to be successful financial coaches, and the community section of the platform lets them share ideas with one another.

Besides serving nonprofits that focus specifically on financial empowerment, Change Machine is also designed for social-service groups—like job-training programs, organizations that work with ex-offenders, and domestic-violence shelters—that want to integrate financial counseling into their services, says Mae Watson Grote, executive director of The Financial Clinic.

Helping clients overcome financial obstacles improves their economic well-being, and that, in turn, enables the organization to better meet its primary mission, she says. “You can also get better work-force outcomes, lower recidivism, and make domestic-violence survivors safer.”

One reason The Financial Clinic created the platform was because it couldn’t keep up with questions from antipoverty organizations that wanted to learn more about financial coaching, says Ms. Grote. “We had a sales pipeline before we had a product.”

More than 350 people are now using the site. In December, the Prudential Foundation made a $500,000 grant to support the continued development of Change Machine.