Hi, and welcome to Nick's podcast! My name is Nick Canfield and today I'm going to be
talking about my experience with the
Stevenson Center, how I got to where
I am, my experience with my professional
practicum here in Washington, D.C., and
just a little more about me. So
to give some context to where we're at
here in the world situation: it is
November 11th
and just about three
days ago we had our Mr. Donald Trump
elected as president elect of the United
States and I have been sick, so please
pardon any coughing, hacking, or just
general malaise of the mental capacity
due to this past week. But given that
note, let's start off with how I
got to where I am, who I am, and
everything like that. My name is Nick
Canfield. I was born in Texas.
I've lived in Colorado, Kansas, Spain for
three months. I served as a Peace Corps
Volunteer in the Federated States of
Micronesia.
I've lived in Costa Rica and
of course in Illinois to attend Illinois State
University. I'm currently in
Washington, D.C. So how did I get here to
Washington, D.C.? Well, after college I
wanted to continue my work in-- I was
really interested in culture and
business and international relations, and
so I decided to become a Peace Corps
Volunteer where I served in the Federated States of
Micronesia as I said before. I was an
English teacher and trainer and I also
got to do a lot of other cool projects
such as coaching sports teams, writing
textbooks, doing after-school programs
for children, high school kids, young kids,
and so I really enjoyed the experience.
When I got back from Peace Corps
I really wanted to continue
that kind of work and I was lucky enough
to find the Peace Corps Fellowship
program at Illinois State University
through the Stevenson Center. I felt really good about it--
the staff was extremely friendly, the
program, the courses, the professors all
looked great, and it was also the
best financial offer, as well as
having a professional practicum
experience as far as in coursework and
in fieldwork. I thought that was all just a
killer combination that I couldn't give
up, so I decided to attend Illinois State
University starting in the fall semester
2015 in political science and community
development. I completed my first
year, and for the professional practicum
I was sent to work at two nonprofit
organizations here in Washington, D.C. One is called Credit Builders Alliance
and the other one is called Center for
Financial Services Innovation. For
shorthand, I'll refer to Credit Builders Alliance as "CBA," and Center for Financial
Services Innovation as "CFSI," as they do
have super long names and I don't like
saying them all the time.
So let's talk about what I do
for each organization. My professional
practicum experience is a little
different from other people's.
Typically, you're assigned to work
at one nonprofit
organization throughout the United
States. I was assigned to work at two. Now
the reason why this is, is because first,
both these organizations are in the same
office in Washington, D.C.
They are both located on the famous K
Street-- it's on 17th and K Northwest. K
Street is typically known for having a
lot of nonprofit organizations as well
as the lawyers and lobbyists. There are a
lot of lobbying organizations inside of
my office, inside of the building and
it's a really interesting area to see, to
work in. So CBA and CFSI--
they're both
nonprofits that work in the financial
services industry. CBA mostly works on
helping nonprofit institutions located
throughout the United States who are involved in
lending. They help them report credit
data and access credit data from the
credit bureaus-- those would be Equifax,
TransUnion, and Experian. The
reasons why they do that is because,
let's say you go out and get a loan
from a nonprofit institution
like a CDFI, and you do a great job. You
repay that loan, you pay all the interest
on time, everything goes great.
But then when you check your credit
score in the same year, your credit
score actually goes down and you're like,
wait, I did everything right. Well it's because probably
that CDFI wasn't reporting that
information to the credit bureaus. So
what we do at CBA is we help those CDFIs
and nonprofit lending institutions. We
help them report that credit data to the
big three credit bureaus. So that's kind
of the general overview, and we also help
financial coaches in those nonprofit
institutions-- we help them access credit
reports. We also do a lot of trainings,
consulting, things of that nature,
and we're also expanding our
capabilities in other places as well. What I do specific at
CBA is a lot of
data projects and a lot of client
outreach, and just general, day-
to-day, you know, "Can you fetch me a list
of all of our members who do this kind
of thing?" And, "Can you send them a
communication that
emphasizes this portion so they can sign
up for this service?" Things of that nature.
So for my other organization I work for,
Center for Financial Services Innovation
(CFSI)-- well first, let's go over what they
do. CFSI is a bigger
nonprofit institution than CBA.  CFSI
is an interesting combination of
think-tank project management, for
example, any of the big kind of players
in the financial services industry
including for-profits, nonprofits,
government institutions, we all work with
them to kind of get them around the same table to answer some of the financial
services' most pressing questions. Some of the things that I've worked on
is I've worked with a couple of big-- I
can't say their names because privacy, but a
couple of big organizations and one of
the big products we do for them is we
help people understand the financial
plight of being a low to moderate-income
person who uses alternative financial
services. We take
bankers, we take government people, we
take people who typically make
over, minimum, like $60,000 a year, and we
put them in situations where they're
forced to participate in financial
services like check cashing, finding how
much they can sell off a ring at a
pawn shop, things like that. Things that
people who are in tough financial
situations would have to do to just
make it by, and so we kind of help these
people who make these products and who
have influence in these products, but never
actually experienced them themselves--
we give them that experience so that
they can empathize and better
understands the consumers behind who are
using those products. I've worked on a
couple of those, I helped to run one of
those experiences where they go out in
the field and actually consume those
products, and they come back and they
have a huge change of heart. It's quite
emotional to see how these people
respond. So I ran one of those in
Washington, D.C. and one in New York
City.
Both were fantastic experiences. A
couple of the other projects I've worked
on-- I've worked on a communications plan,
or at least the research behind a
communications plan for the Earned
Income Tax Credit refund delay that's
gonna be coming up this coming year in
January 2017, so it kind of helped our
clients understand how to reach
out and communicate this tax refund
delay. And currently I'm working on a
project about secured
credit cards to help the credit
card companies and interested parties
understand the room for them and 
hopefully spark some innovation in these
products. So yeah, I know it's a lot of
information; basically I work for two
organizations. They are both in the financial services industry.
They're both in Washington, D.C., and that in
itself-- just being in Washington D.C.,-- is
one of the greatest perks of my
 professional practicum.
It's been just a big
change of social sphere and just
everything, you know-- tall buildings, the city lifestyle. But
that's not to say that all professional
practicums are like mine. For
location, we have people located all over:
we have some people in Montana,
people in Chicago, one
person's in California right now, so
we're located all across
the United States. And so I want to
emphasize in my experience here in
Washington, D.C., working for these two
financial services nonprofits, is a
completely unique experience and it's
kind of similar to Peace Corps-- every country around
for Peace Corps service is gonna be
completely different, but there's always
gonna be those common threads that go
through the experiences.
Our Stevenson Center cohort
that is currently doing the professional
practicum, we talk about how things are
the same, how things are different and
there's generally some common
threads between all of our organizations.
So yeah, I'm excited-- I've just
completed my fifth month here in my
professional practicum here in D.C. and
I'm currently writing my thesis which
will need to be done sometime next year.
I can't guarantee what time, but it's
gonna be-- if not to choose a better word--
"great." (I have to get all the emotion out of
the election). So the steps
for me now is I still have about six to
five months left on my
professional practicum, and
currently just finishing up on my thesis
and then I will graduate sometime in the
summer of 2017 with my Master's of
Science in Political Science,
Applied Community Development. So I hope
that you've gotten to understand
a little bit more about me, where I come
from,
why I joined, what I'm doing here as a Stevenson Center Fellow, the products I'm
working on in my professional
practicum, and the general
timeline for what a Stevenson Center
Peace Corps Fellow goes through. If
you have any questions, I will be happy
to answer them, and if
you're a prospective student or
just generally interested in the
Stevenson Center, the Stevenson Center
staff are just fantastic and will 
work tirelessly to serve you and
figure out whatever you need to figure
 out. I'm so grateful to them for
being an awesome staff. So thank you for
listening,
hopefully I haven't bored you, and have a
great day. Thank you so much listening! Bye.
