We are a small team of dedicated professionals, here to assist you in a time of need. We were inspired to come together by the words and actions of Arlo Washington of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Arlo Washington of Little Rock, is a barber who built a Barber College that helped create professional opportunities for more than 1,500 individuals.  He found a need in his community for small amounts of capital to pay that helped entrepreneurs cover the last mile between what they were earning and their bills.  He realized that the wealth gap his community was experiencing was preventing people from participating in generational wealth and literally destroying the area around them.  He starting loaning small amounts to people so they could get gas, pay a light bill, catch up on back rent, or buy equipment and business supplies.

Arlo found that the small loans he was making were getting paid back regularly.  He saw the positive effect that these relatively small amounts were having on people.  He created a local financial institution that assisted his community.  Soon he applied for the CDFI program through the federal government and founded People Trust, a nonprofit community bank.

Arlo was featured in a documentary called The Barber of Little Rock, directed by John Hoffman and Christine Turner, produced by former NBA star Dwayne Wade’s 59th and Prairie Street Entertainment and distributed by The New Yorker.

"Too many generations of Black Americans have been deliberately and systematically excluded from the financial system in our country,”

"One man, a barber from Little Rock, saw a way to upend the system and create opportunity for families and small businesses where others only saw too much risk -- and he started it all in a converted shipping container in the parking lot of his barber college.” Directors John Hoffman and Christine Turner

“[Our mission is] to develop world-class professionals. Washington Barber College is a barber school that gives people an opportunity to get into a trade, get into a profession that will pay you and help you to be able to serve the community in a very significant way.” Arlo Washington

“It’s a lived experience for me, you know, starting my first barber shop when I was 20 years old, and experiencing generational poverty, and not having a bank in my neighborhood or community that I had a relationship with. That created a lot of barriers, because I didn’t have access to the financial literacy that I needed to understand my credit, and to be able to qualify to be able to get a loan to start a business, any of that. So that’s why I’m able to relate to my community members that experience hardships when accessing capital at traditional financial institutions.”

“Now, if we had a People Trust around, I would have had an opportunity to be able to at least get onboarded into a financial institution that understood generational poverty and had a mission of serving the community.”

We believe this can happen anywhere and that it can happen here in California, in Compton.  Long known as a underserved, underbanked area, we can create an empowering situation for people by creating a CDFI right here in Compton.  The region has many people who are working and not able to keep up with their needs but still generating income.  Many of them could use the kind of Micro-loan that helped thousands of people in underdeveloped nations around the world, and in Arkansas.  Compton needs that kind of help and we can provide it.  We are the solution.

Our mission:

“To provide financial resources to people seeking knowledge and advocacy support to facilitate changing the course of their future and build a self-sustaining community through their triumphs.”

Help us make this miracle a reality.