Arlo Washington is the barber — and banker — of Little Rock
Arlo Washington is the barber — and banker — of Little Rock
For “Econ Extra Credit” this month, “Marketplace Morning Report” is watching the Oscar-nominated documentary shorts. We’ll pull themes and lessons from a handful of the films up for the Academy Award (and we’ll see which one walks away victorious this coming weekend). But to kick things off, we took a closer look at “The Barber of Little Rock,” directed by John Hoffman and Christine Turner.
The film follows Arlo Washington on his quest to fight economic inequality in Arkansas in multiple ways. Washington is co-founder of a barber school that’s gotten more than 1,500 people licensed since 2008. He’s also the founder of a nonprofit loan fund, People Trust, for those in Little Rock who face structural barriers to accessing traditional forms of financing.
Washington spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio, and the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: Let’s start with one of your ventures, Washington Barber College. Give me a sense of the real mission there. It’s not just to teach people how to cut hair.
Arlo Washington: Absolutely, absolutely. It’s 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.
Brancaccio: And if the goal is conveying skills for cutting hair, your other work seems a leap — community-based lending. But if the goal is just what you say — giving people a skill that they can build on, which by implication, I think, is promoting social justice and helping a community achieve financial security — then your dual projects really do overlap, don’t they?
Washington: It all integrates. If you can have a trade and a skill that’s essential and needed, and you also have access to an opportunity, then you’re able to create a sustainable, profitable and scalable business for yourself as an entrepreneur.
Brancaccio: People Trust, it’s called, is what’s designated a community development financial institution. CDFI is the term of art. Tell me more about what a CDFI is compared to, I don’t know, one of the big brand banks.
Washington: Well a CDFI is a specialized organization that was put in place for low- and moderate-income communities to access the financial system.
Brancaccio: There are many moments in this, not very long film — it’ about a half an hour — where you really sit forward, that the film really draws you in. And one moment is this, when a person is discussing some of the obstacles that Black Americans can face when seeking a loan:
Clip from the “The Barber of Little Rock”: I was at a traditional bank for nine years. Sadly, banking while Black is a real thing. They don’t necessarily train you to know that. But once you get in there, and you actually see that the person coming in — if they’re white, they’re going to offer them credit cards, they’re gonna offer them loans, financing, you know, all of those. But you come in, you’re Black, there are no services offered.
Brancaccio: Now Mr. Washington you didn’t need your customers to explain this to you. This is something that you experienced the hard way, I’m assuming.
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.
Brancaccio: So People Trust has a problem to solve. How do you solve it? I mean, it’s not like I’m going to trust anyone and everyone who walks in your door. You must have a more layered and more sophisticated decision tree about whom you lend to and whom you don’t.
Washington: Absolutely. We look at the ability to repay. And we give everybody an “A” until they give themselves an “F.” And what I mean by that is, we take a holistic approach to community development finance.
For example, there’s a young man that came into our office, and he was unbanked. He was 25 years old. And I had to talk to him and let him know that being unbanked is — it costs you more to be unbanked than it does to be banked. Being homeless with your money doesn’t allow — you know, you can’t see your transactions. You can’t track your spending and create budgets. But I asked him before that why he felt the way he did, and he just said that he had lost trust in the traditional banks. And so after that conversation, he ended up opening the checking account and saying, “You know what? I’m going to give you another chance.” So now, we have a responsibility to build on that relationship and establish trust.
Brancaccio: So, when people walk in and you give everyone an “A” until they give themselves a lower grade, that means you lend some to people who come in and see how it goes.
Washington: Well, absolutely. We have a small-dollar loan program. That product was designed for community members that may be “credit-invisibles” or lack access to credit or have a very low, poor credit score, it gives them the opportunity to be able to regain their economic mobility, reestablish their credit scores and also have another chance.
Brancaccio: Now the new customer who just walked in the day before we’re talking here indicated he had lost trust in more traditional banking. What do you think that is from your experience? Is that a person who had a bank account at one point and got dinged by so many charges he ended up owing the bank or something?
Washington: Exactly. That’s exactly what happened. And so he didn’t understand the fees and didn’t understand that he had to keep a certain amount in his account. And, he felt like he was losing money. And so I believe that just taking that extra step and creating a welcoming atmosphere, and that understanding the cultural difference in banking, that goes a long way.
Brancaccio: How many other banks are in your neighborhood there?
Washington: There are about 30,000 community members there, and there are no other banks within a 10-mile radius. Yeah, it’s economically segregated. And you have just concentrated poverty. Actually since we’ve been there — we’ve been there a little bit over three years — and we have now another institution that has moved into the community, Southern Bancorp. So I believe that with a collective effort and a holistic approach, we could we could change that community.
Brancaccio: In the film, you project youthful vigor and seem to have many decades of this work ahead of you. But do you worry these projects depend so much on your own personal energy? I mean, there’ll be people listening who might want to replicate this model, your model, in other areas, but you don’t seem easily duplicated, Arlo.
Washington: It’s not really hard work because there are a lot of abandoned bank buildings in communities that just need CDFIs in them and get the credit moving. Start making small loans and get the credit moving. So when we think about scalability, I mean, it’s not a really hard task. It’s just about having boots on the ground and having people in place that are social bankers.
So when I think about that, I’ve been thinking about some ideas about how we can expand it to other markets and be able to offer our products and services and our help and community development to communities that lack access to capital and access to credit.
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