About
Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners is a New York City-based nonprofit social enterprise creating financial security for low-wage workers. As trusted financial guides, Neighborhood Trust helps workers reduce and avoid predatory debt, build savings, and escape the cycle of living paycheck to paycheck. As social entrepreneurs, the organization uses its data and insights to push the financial services marketplace toward more equitable products, services, and benefits accountable to worker needs.
Mission
Neighborhood Trust describes itself as a national nonprofit financial services innovator built for workers: it partners, co-creates, and innovates to build financial products, services, and benefits for workers who have traditionally had to rely on debt to make ends meet, drawing on over 25 years of experience providing financial guidance.
What they do
- TrustPlus: the organization's worker financial health solution pairs workers with a trusted Financial Coach and the financial products, benefits, and strategies they need, resulting in reduced debt, improved credit, and less financial stress. It is offered to employers as an employee financial health benefit.
- Pathways to Financial Empowerment: launched in 2015 in partnership with the credit union network Inclusiv, Pathways trains credit union staff nationwide to deliver Neighborhood Trust's model of trusted, action-oriented financial coaching and to track results via its proprietary technology platform.
- Financial Empowerment Centers: Neighborhood Trust continues to be the lead vendor for New York City's Financial Empowerment Centers, the free financial coaching program launched by the Bloomberg administration in 2006.
- Worker Insights Initiative: introduced in 2021 to surface data on the financial lives of low-wage workers and drive product and policy innovation among employers, banks, FinTechs, and policymakers.
History
Mark Levine founded the organization in the mid-1990s as Credit Where Credit Is Due, a 501(c)(3) created to help secure a federal charter for a community development credit union in Washington Heights; Neighborhood Trust Federal Credit Union opened its doors in 1997. Justine Zinkin joined as CEO in 2002 and moved services out into community organizations. In 2012 Credit Where Credit Is Due became Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners, separated from the credit union, and launched TrustPlus; a digital coaching platform followed in 2017, enabling national reach. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the organization distributed $2 million in unconditional cash relief to more than 3,600 recipients, paired with financial coaching.
Financials
According to its Form 990 data on ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, for fiscal year 2025 Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners reported total revenue of $6,537,793, total expenses of $7,805,792, and net assets of $7,580,257. Contributions represented about 90 percent of revenue ($5.9 million). The organization has been tax-exempt since February 1996.
Governance
The organization is led by CEO Justine Zinkin. Its volunteer board of directors is chaired by Aliah Greene, with Franco M. Baseggio serving as vice chair, per its most recent Form 990. Headquarters are at 530 West 166th Street in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.