RSVP: feerickcenter@law.fordham.edu or 212-636-7715 (space limited; please RSVP and register early).

Workshop Goal:
• Providing direct service providers – for example, financial self-sufficiency specialists, lawyers, paralegals, social workers, and other case handler— with the skills and knowledge to assist domestic violence survivors improve their understanding and management of their financial affairs
• Help direct service providers to empower domestic violence survivors to take control of their financial futures

Topics covered:
• Goal setting
• Spending plans
• Credit cards
• Credit reporting
• Debt
• Scams / identity theft

Co-Sponsoring Organizations:
• Fordham Law School’s Feerick Center for Social Justice – The Center mission is to help address poverty through innovative problem-solving techniques. The Center engages in fact finding, policy research, legal analysis, convening, and consensus building and works with law students, alumni, and volunteers.
• The Coalition for Debtor Education -- The Coalition is a not-for-profit organization whose continuing mission is to assist over-indebted individuals in understanding and improving their ability to manage their financial affairs. The Coalition brings together multiple constituencies interested in consumers’ financial competence, consumer finance, predatory lending and the bankruptcy system.

Continental Breakfast provided; break for lunch on own.

Meet our Speakers:
Carol O’Rourke, Program Director of the Coalition for Debtor Education, joined after a long career in marketing at Smith Barney. While working on Wall St., Ms O’Rourke served on the Economic Education Committee and as chair for the Investors’ Education Committee at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, taught a series of beginning investor classes at The New School, and has written financial information columns and volunteered at the Coalition as an instructor.

She holds an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business and will soon complete her course of studies to become a Certified Financial Planner.

Erik Shumar, Public Interest Fellow at the Coalition, is a second-year Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University who brings to the Coalition a wealth of experience from his years of employment in investment and securities firms as well as from his background in psychology. He has taught for the Coalition for nearly a year in addition to his experience teaching as a professor of financial management and quantitative analysis at Columbia Univiersity.

Mr. Shumar is a graduate of Bucknell University and also holds Masters’ degrees from Columbia University in Public Administration and Social Work.