On a brisk Sunday in November, seventeen members of JIFFI’s staff caravanned to Green Bridge Growers to spend the morning volunteering. Green Bridge Growers is a sustainable farm whose mission is to create jobs that harness the skills of young adults with autism. Essentially, they grow organic vegetables for locals, while providing jobs for people…
Breadth of JIFFI Opportunities By Megan ’17 One of my favorite events I have attended with JIFFI was a talk with Professor Judy Fox of the Notre Dame Law School. This discussion really opened my eyes to the everyday problems people living in poverty in South Bend experience. We talked about transportation, difficult access…
JIFFI Thought Bubble with Prof. Judy Fox By Emily Campbell ’17 On a cold Monday evening, JIFFI members gathered for the weekly Thought Bubble. 122 Mendoza filled with members as they anticipated the arrival of Professor Judy Fox, a law professor at Notre Dame. Professor Fox was invited to discuss her work with predatory…
JIFFI’s First Financial Empowerment Training Session! By Amanda Conklin ’17 For the past few months, I have been fortunate to work with the financial empowerment team here at JIFFI. We have been working to create a six-module financial literacy program for our clients. Through these six modules, we hope to assist our clients in…
Living Out JIFFI’s Mission: An Associate’s First Client Meetings By Aaron Bode ’17 Before talking about my experience with a client, I should first give a disclaimer: my personal finances have never been… how should I phrase this… “orderly.” My parents tell stories of me wasting my small allowance as a child the day I…
The Crossroads of Finance and HOPE By Jack Markwalter ’17 Now that my first school year of involvement with JIFFI is about three-quarters of the way done, I am able to reflect on how fortunate I am to have had the experience that I had prior to working with this great organization. During the…
JIFFI’s First Thought Bubble By Helen ’17 In order to guarantee our clients our best possible service, JIFFI is constantly looking for ways to improve the knowledge base of our members. A major part of this is, of course, having the basic financial background to be able to teach clients, assess risk, and grant loans,…
Loan #9: Flexibility vs. Standardization By Andrew ’15 It’s tax season in America. For those living paycheck-to-paycheck, that means a one-time bump in income from their tax refund gives them some short-lived breathing room. It’s also winter in America, and a brutal winter at that. Beside heightened heating costs, many workers have also lost…
An Associate’s Experience with JIFFI’s Loan #10 By Samantha DiMaggio ’17 On call during my Tuesday office hour shift last week, I spent the time working through some accounting problems in an effort to prepare for my upcoming exam. My computer, logged into the Google Voice account that the staff uses in order to…
Starting Off the Semester with Two Loans! February has been a busy month for JIFFI, as we made our ninth and tenth loans on consecutive days this past weekend! Thanks to the efforts of Andrew Weiler, Aidan Dore, Samantha DiMaggio, and Peter Woo, two more clients in the South Bend area are closer to…