(upbeat guitar music) (relaxed guitar music) >>Unfortunately, we've created a society with just a whole lot of people just barely surviving.

People are becoming more and more productive, and yet, not reaping any of it, it's all going right up to the top.

>>I didn't understand credit, didn't understand how important it is, how expensive it is to be poor.

>>It's like having a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

>>If I grew up knowing that I'll go to a check-cashing place or, you know, go get a car title loan, I'm gonna do the same thing.

>>The average person in this country can't afford a 400-dollar expense, that means that if the transmission goes out, they lose their job.

>>Folks think about major metropolitan cities, but the rural counties are suffering to great, great, great degrees, as well.

>>There are far more financial institutions lending money to folks in urban communities.

Access to credit is a major issue, and access to credit is access to capital.

>>You do have to think about different ways of doing things and not just accept the way everything's always been done.

>>People often talk about the challenges in rural communities, there certainly are, and then, you have, I think, the opportunities, and what I have found is that there's this tremendous sense of community, interest in looking at ways in which they can diversify the economy.

>>One thing that I've been focusing on is bringing that sense of community into our business, so we've been really good at that with our residents, so let's bring that into the business realm too.

That is all going local.

>>Credit unions were started as kind of an alternative form of financial services, there's no stock price, the members are the owners.

>>Whether it's healthcare access, whether it's domestic and sexual violence, economic justice touches all of these things in one way or another, they're all tied.

To see the intersection, that means there's infinite numbers of solutions.

>>My own experience has helped me to say, "Hey, this person could use just the hand-up, not a handout, but just a hand up."

>>What CDFIs are really aiming to do is to put a lot of those predatory folks out of business.

We wanna move forward, we wanna be in control of our own destiny.

♪ In the heartland, ♪ ♪ we rely on ourselves ♪ ♪ and one another ♪ ♪ Hand in hand, we must stand ♪ ♪ in the heartland ♪ (upbeat guitar music) >>Production funding for "Life in the Heart Land" was provided by the Chrisman Family Foundation, and by... >>My first oil painting, I don't know what inspired me to do it, I just couldn't sleep one night.

I don't see it as a void, I see it as, like, you know, use your imagination of what could have already happened or what's about to happen.

I'm a retired contractor for British Petroleum, unfortunately got hurt at work, so I have to have a car, you cannot rely on medical transportation, we live in a rural area, I mean, we're in the foothills of the mountains and the public transportation here is slim to nil.

(laughs) Now, mind you, I'm no financing expert, but the way they did the financing paperwork for this car, the full duration of the loan term, we'll be paying double the sticker price.

Anyone on social security or a pension, you have to really be frugal, or pinch pennies, or find a way around things.

(relaxed accordion music) >>Auto loans and credit cards are how most people, I think, interact with credit.

Credit card balances in the U.S.

last year surpassed $1 trillion for the first time, and we've seen more and more people having to use credit cards to make everyday purchases.

(relaxed accordion music) (relaxed accordion music continues) >>Department of Justice defines it as deceptive, unfair and fraudulent practices.

The statistics show that there is a higher rate of predatory lending in rural communities.

>>My father, who passed away at the age of 60, throughout his entire adult life never had a bank account, hadn't written a check, he paid his bills with money orders, if people still remember what those looked like.

(faint speaking) It really drove home the point to me about where do people go who really need affordable funding?

There's a bit of shame and embarrassment when you say, "I don't have money to live on," and so, you're reluctant to go to family and friends, but one of my relatives said, "Because they said, 'Yes,' Donna, when everybody else was saying, 'No.'"

>>The people that are predatory are dependent on an individual's pride.

>>You have this repeat cycle of, "Oh, I overspent this month, so I guess I need to get another consolidation loan," and I can remember in my 20s, 30s, late 30s, getting these consolidation loans, I'll never do that again, and then, "Oh, well, it's a birthday."

(upbeat guitar music) >>They know the psychology of this stuff really well.

When you spend so much of your brain power worrying about paying your rent, whether you're gonna keep your job, whether you're... You can fix your car, you don't have much brain power left for a lot of other things like carefully considering whether this is a good idea.

>>And everybody's mind is just, "I just need this little bit and I pay it back, no harm, no foul," just imagine if you took out 500 dollars, right?

And you've been paying 200 dollars for a year.

(upbeat guitar music) >>When I was offered the job here, I started out just working on predatory lending.

I thought, honestly, very naively, it seems like predatory lending, well, it wasn't really called that, payday lending at the time was... Just seems kind of, like, exploitative, so, like, it should be easy to get rid of that.

I didn't know enough about payday lending, I knew it felt wrong, but I also knew that people needed money.

>>It was a huge fight, I mean, it was just an enormous amount, they probably... The other side had 30 or so lobbyists.

>>We were actually able to pass the Fairness in Lending Act and have it so that people had access to credit, but they can actually pay them off, they're designed to be able to be paid off.

Every state has struggled with this, and some states regulate them and some states choose not to.

>>It's not legal in Virginia, and then, in South Carolina, it's legal, you know, and that's where the loan is, like, people have free will, right?

So you get people who say, "Well, I went down the South Carolina and they gave me money," or, "I went up to Virginia, they gave me money," well, they came over to our state and obtained a loan in our state, whose state law supersedes the other one?

>>People who can provide funding very rapidly, who are oftentimes open 24 hours a day, who require little documentation or paperwork, how do you compete?

(people laughing) (upbeat music) >>We're in a society where we're supposed to get everything quick and we're not supposed to wait.

Sometimes, people don't think they have the privilege of time.

(upbeat music) I have been a recipient of predatory lending, and so, I know what it's like and how hard it is to get out of it, and how you have this long contract that you are not gonna read.

(upbeat accordion music) >>Most people are living their lives trying to survive, and when you live like that, who has time to read all this stuff?

Because I'm in survival mode.

(upbeat accordion music) >>LifeWork started in 2020.

We started feeding people out of our living room.

You know, I don't think anybody wants a big old turkey this time of year.

A turkey breast is just enough.

We also saw there were a lot of people who were just struggling, who couldn't make ends meet, and so, we started a micro-grant program.

We decided we were going to just do small things, we started with 50 dollars per person and that really took care of a lot of cell phone bills.

We don't give cash to anyone, we make direct payments to a vendor.

>>The individuals that I have helped, I've helped once, maybe twice, and over the course of maybe three years.

Most of the people that we, you know, come across are individuals who just need to keep their wheels turning.

>>People want to be on their own, they're good and grown, they want to look after themselves.

>>The cost of living just for no frills, basic, putting food on the table, the cost of that has just gotten higher and higher.

>>You can't just tell people, "No, don't do this."

>>What would equity, not just equality, but what does equity look like in this space?

(upbeat guitar music) >>It's an older house, 1960, so when I say everything was original in it, everything was original.

(laughs) I noticed that my kitchen sink and that my bathroom tub and toilet were all backed up at the same time.

Once they gave me my quote, I was just like, "There's no way I'm gonna be able to pay all of that by myself."

The amount that I was needing was, like, $2,500, so probably have to take out a loan of some sort, that would've been my, like, last resort.

I'm definitely glad that I did not have to go that route.

(upbeat guitar music) SERCAP got involved after the septic people came out to take a look at things.

It's a community-based, like, program, but it's usually involving some type of serious home repair.

>>The beauty of community development financial institutions is that they're very organic, communities will say, "Here are our priorities," and that oftentimes is where you see the formation of CDFIs.

(indistinct) >>Unlock a door for you to get into the room... >>Okay.

Okay.

>>'Cause everybody's in their office today.

>>Okay.

I see that, I said, "Wow."

We're at SERCAP, which is a CDFI, so Southeast Rural Community Assistance Project is the full name of SERCAP.

Oh, this is even better.

They've been an ACC member, I'm trying to remember, maybe about five years ago.

Thank you.

Appalachian Community Capital was created primarily because we saw that there was a great need and continues to be a great need for small business-owners in particular to access affordable credit, so we get money and we pass it through to the CDFIs, some CDFIs need loans, others need grants, they need our help in connecting the dots.

I'm in Roanoke today, I'm actually at one of the ACC members' offices, SERCAP.

Our model is unique, we are a community lender, we're a nonprofit organization, we were formed in 2013 primarily to bring new sources of capital to the Appalachian region.

>>I actually grew up in Pulaski County, Virginia.

I think sometimes, living in New York City now makes me wanna, like, get out to, like, the mountains more and... >>Yeah.

There are 26 million people in Appalachia, we're not reaching all 26 million, I'm sure, but we're reaching a fair number, the more you spread that wealth, the more you spread that money out, the greater impact you're gonna have.

>>I'm Daniel Wallace, I'm the CEO and president of the Green Bank for Rural America, this is about lowering energy costs, creating jobs, supporting resilience in rural communities.

>>If I make a loan to you and you pay that loan back, then I give it to somebody else, I make a loan to somebody else, it stays within that community and that is the beauty, I think, of just what not only CDFIs do, but the whole concept of what community lending is all about.

>>Generating the types of economic impacts, we're looking for building health and wealth in rural communities.

(relaxed accordion music) >>There was a time when there wasn't as much access to credit, when the money ran out, you know, it was really out, and there was nothing to go around.

>>When you go back as far as the '40s, you saw cooperatives, you saw credit unions, community development credit unions.

(relaxed accordion music) >>People wanted another way to access credit, so many came together, workers in a factory coming together and starting their own pool of deposits and loans.

(upbeat string music) My first 9:00-to-5:00 was as a law clerk for a judge, which was really eye-opening for me, whether it was a criminal case, whether it was a civil case, family law situation, there was always money at the heart of it.

(upbeat string music) So a credit union is a not-for-profit, member-owned financial cooperative, you can get a savings account, you can get a checking account, you can get a debit card.

So many of these products and services are what we often associate with banks, and there are some similarities, but if you're at a for-profit commercial bank, your duty is to maximize profits for your shareholders, but at a credit union, the members are the owners and there is no share price.

(upbeat string music) Credit unions are themselves individually cooperatives, but one of the seven cooperative principles is cooperation among cooperatives, and so, credit unions work together.

We have a big gathering of credit union people here in Richmond in January, we get usually around 150 employees from credit unions all around Virginia, and we go up to meet with our lawmakers, we're able to say, "Hey, we saved our members, your constituents, this much money on their car loans, this much money on their credit card."

(upbeat string music) (upbeat string music continues) Today, there are 99 credit unions throughout Virginia, from Northern Virginia to Virginia Beach, all the way out to Bristol.

(faint speaking) >>So we're gonna have a great time today, we have more of the handout sheets, the leave-behinds, but truly, this is just about sharing your story, you know, this is laying the foundation, you know, hopefully get this budget amendment over the line for public deposits.

Nobody knows credit union better than you do, nobody knows your story better than you do, because that's what it's about, it's not about, you know, either myself or JT, or the external lobbyists talking, it's about you all talking and meeting with the elected officials, but I guess it's cold outside... (people laughing) Like, numbingly cold outside.

(upbeat string music) (upbeat string music continues) (upbeat string music continues) >>There are absolutely situations where a bank would be a better option, but what is undoubtedly true is that the best thing is a thriving financial ecosystem where you have credit unions, you have community banks, you have big banks, and everyone is bringing different things to the table.

(relaxed string music) I think what holds society together is, in the simplest term, trust.

When you take your money to a credit union and you deposit it, that credit union is going to oftentimes loan that money out to someone who needs it.

You think about this famous scene in "It's a Wonderful Life," right?

"We don't have your money, it's in this person's house, it's in this person's house," that's how our financial system works.

Trust is imperative.

>>Trust in the financial system is critically important, but I don't think that it's equally shared across everybody in the country, and I think that that kind of touches on the differences in access to credit, how they're treated by financial institutions in the country, there's a lot that wraps up into it.

How the private banking sector has evolved over the last few decades, a lot of consolidation, a lot of mergers, a lot of moving away from community and regional banks.

These community development financial institutions cropped up as community lenders, groups of people coming together with like interests and similar lack of access to credit, and recognizing those two things, I mean, people being able to pull together funds, resources, and then, turn around and be able to make loans out to their communities, that has been true in so many places across America for the whole history of the country.

>>The Philadelphia Fed did a banking deserts map and found that of the 2,100 banking deserts in the country, over 1,500 of them are in rural communities.

Very few banks, few credit unions, and some community development financial institutions.

Rural communities themselves tend to function on relationship-driven transactions.

>>How many people do you have working now?

(indistinct) So a lot of local artists here, and then, they... This is a trying time to run a small business, and we wanna come alongside them.

There are our own people out there saying, "Hey, I'd like to serve your coffee every morning."

(upbeat music) Bridgewater's population is about 6,500 people.

This is one of Bridgewater's newer establishments that just opened last fall.

>>Do you want that small or large?

>>Small.

(upbeat string music) we call it River Roos, our hyper local currency.

Oh, and you're gonna see my card and everything... >>I'm not gonna see... I will... (Gwen laughing) >>It works just like a MasterCard, so you get the full number on the back of... Like, it would be on the back of your card, I approached our banks last year, and Farmers & Merchants Bank in town said, "Oh, my goodness, this is right up our alley, we love the idea," so they contributed and the town contributed.

If you bought a $100 River Roos gift card, you'd get a $50 River Roos gift card, and this was funded by F&M Bank in the town of Bridgewater.

North River Marketplace accepts River Roos.

Sugar & Bean, they have great desserts, like, really, really good.

You can do anything from getting your coffee to getting your car detailed or buying your fertilizer.

The program started November 1st, and since then, we have seen $19,300 poured into the program, so all of that money goes to local businesses.

You are the top in sales for River Roos.

>>Oh, really?

>>Yeah, yeah.

(laughs) The main goal is just to foster that feel of shop local, support our local businesses, it's helping them to thrive, not just survive, but to thrive.

>>The wintertime, like, ice-skating, the summertime, they have a lot of people just to open the door, yeah.

>>It's great to see the money being spent, you know, here, and I'm a town resident too, so it's nice to see the money being spent in town.

(upbeat music) >>My concern now is, like, where are we going, you know, as a country now in the financial system?

Anything can change at any given time, that's what I've learned.

(upbeat music) >>One thing that often doesn't get mentioned in the sphere of, "Why isn't it okay for everybody to make as much money as they possibly can and exploit people?"

Well, the problem becomes that it drags down the whole system, you have a business over here who's operating legitimately, and then, the guy over here cheats, and doesn't follow the law, and lies to people, and he makes twice as much money, what do you think's gonna happen to the fair business?

You can't do this work unless you're optimistic, but feeling like it's never gonna work is pretty much a daily thing.

(upbeat guitar music) >>We've seen it... The numbers increase in terms of calls.

Yesterday was the 30th, and generally, I've run out of funds by the 16th or 17th.

(upbeat music) I can't get what I don't have.

It's just ongoing.

Yeah, yeah.

(upbeat guitar music) (indistinct) Okay.

(upbeat guitar music) The credit that we give folks is that folks are really trying.

There's this kind of prevailing thought that folks are just lazy, like, nobody wants to work.

When I'm not working my full-time job, I'm here about 5:00 in the morning, that's my time to look around and say, "We created something that wasn't here."

That gives me hope, and the people, the community that comes alongside us and says, "Hey, I got a couple hours I can spare, I have a few dollars I can spare to help you with this cause," that gives me hope there are still good people.

(laughs) (upbeat music) >>The things that our quality in our lives take time, takes nurturing.

>>In my elementary school years on up through junior high and high school, we were actually taught to be consumers and not necessarily about taking care of your financial health, I... Those entities out in the community that want to get in your pocket and not just take the cash that you got, but when you borrow, you're borrowing against the future.

>>I teach marketing and entrepreneurship at the local high school of Franklin County.

Financial literacy is a priority for us.

Each student at the high school has to pass economics and personal finance.

(upbeat guitar music) You know, I wish I had somebody to tell me, like, in my teens, kids are getting debit cards and, you know, checking accounts and saving accounts earlier, you know, now than ever, you need it early on.

(upbeat accordion music) >>Most people don't need extravagant things.

Most people just want to be able to have relationships and time with their family, and an economically just world looks like the capacity to do that.

(upbeat accordion music) (indistinct) >>How are you?

(upbeat accordion music) Today, I'm off to Washington, D.C., and then, Uganda, Africa.

(laughs) (upbeat accordion music) It's like the ripple effect, you throw the stone in the lake, the world is small.

(upbeat accordion music) >>I always go on the side of hope, like, that's what the fight is for.

You know, you hope that better times are ahead.

(upbeat accordion music) >>Production funding for "Life in the Heart Land" was provided by the Chrisman Family Foundation, and by... ♪ Babbling brook reminds us ♪ (♪ flowing holy ♪ ) ♪ Plow the earth and plant and weed ♪ ♪ Watch your children grow ♪ ♪ Day breaks into nightfall ♪ ♪ Soon, we're reaping all we've sown ♪ (♪ And who belongs ♪ ) ♪ Is it you, is it me ♪ ♪ Is there room for us in the heart of the land ♪ (ethereal piano music)