A Shared Reality: Partners on Access & Trust
On May 13th, 2026, we gathered for the second webinar in our three-part series on community conversations, and this one brought something different to the table. Instead of zooming out to look at data, we zoomed in on the people doing the work every single day.
Voices from the Field: Community Partners on Access, Barriers & Trust featured leaders from two of MAF’s nonprofit partners: Sandy Guzman, Senior Financial Empowerment Coach at the Resurrection Project in Chicago, and Carlos Vazquez and Marco Ortega, Director and Manager of Entrepreneurship at Lift LA in Los Angeles. Together, they painted a vivid, honest picture of what it actually looks like to show up for immigrant and low-income communities right now, and what trust truly requires.
Here’s what we took away.
Fear is not a background condition. It’s the starting point.
Before anything else can happen, before a coaching session, a loan application, or a workshop on building credit, organizations like TRP and Lift LA have to reckon with the emotional weight their clients are carrying when they walk through the door.
Carlos described the moment a client steps in:
“They feel like this is a safe space for them.”
Getting to that moment takes work. Carlos and Marco have made home visits to entrepreneurs who were too afraid to come to the office. Sandy described clients arriving with tears they hadn’t yet let fall, trauma visible in their eyes before a single word was exchanged.
Fear, uncertainty, and exhaustion aren’t incidental to the work. They are what the work starts with.
The digital divide is widening the gap
When it comes to accessing financial tools and services, our partners named the digital divide as one of the most persistent and underestimated barriers. Language barriers make platforms impossible to navigate. Distrust of apps and links runs high among people who’ve been targeted by scams. Elderly clients are especially vulnerable. And misinformation spreads rapidly through social media, sounding like financial guidance when it isn’t.
Sandy described clients who received text messages with links and genuinely didn’t know if they were being targeted by scammers.
Marco noted that people were downloading Bitcoin wallets and speculative financial apps based on recommendations from friends and social media, driven by a desperate search for stability in the absence of trusted information.
Carlos described a domino effect that starts with fear of going outside: no work, no income, no ability to pay rent, no buffer to even consider saving. For a person in that position, the conversation about building an emergency fund or opening a bank account is simply not where they are.
Resilience is present, and it deserves to be resourced
Despite everything, our partners kept returning to the same word: resilience.
Community members are adapting. Entrepreneurs who used to sell food on the street are pivoting to home catering under California’s new cottage food laws. Others are opening Amazon storefronts. Single mothers are living with extended family to stretch every dollar. Families are attending virtual financial workshops from the safety of their homes, bringing grandparents and children along for the session.
“Sometimes when we meet with them, you think they’re on their last month of rent, and they’re going to be homeless. And somehow, next month, they figure it out.” — Carlos Vazquez
That resilience is something to support. Our partners are working hard to connect people to food banks, CDFIs, legal aid, pitch competitions, and emergency funds. People don’t just need resilience in isolation; they need resilience backed by resources and relationships.
Trust is built in the long game
One of the most powerful moments of the conversation came near the end, when Efrain Segundo, MAF’s Director of Partnerships, put a direct question to the room: what does it actually take to build trust and sustain it over time?
The answers came from different places, but they pointed in the same direction. For Sandy, it comes down to consistent transparency, being honest, being reliable, showing up through the good and the hard alike. Not just in crisis moments, but in the ordinary ones too.
At Lift LA, Carlos said, everything gets filtered through three pillars: hope, money, and love. The way programs are designed, the way partnerships are built, even the way a conversation starts with a new client. Those three things aren’t a slogan. They’re a lens.
Marco brought it back to something even more foundational: time. Trust can’t be rushed, and it can’t be extracted. You can’t expect someone to open up if you haven’t put in the relationship first, and you can’t serve someone well if you’ve promised more than you can deliver. Non-transactional presence, he said, is what makes the difference.
What all three described, in their own words, is what this work actually looks like on the ground. An organization showing up at someone’s door because the person was too scared to come to them. A team member getting their notary license on their own time just to help clients draft letters in case the worst happens. A program moving online not because it’s more efficient, but because safety matters more than convenience. Trust isn’t a talking point. It’s a practice.
What the community conversations revealed
Both TRP and Lift LA co-hosted the community conversations that MAF facilitated in November of 2025, and the stories from those rooms didn’t leave the room when the conversations ended.
What Sandy kept coming back to was the number of people who had stopped using banks entirely. Not because they didn’t have savings, but because they no longer trusted where those savings would go. Social media had done its work: some community members were genuinely convinced that banks were on the verge of closing, that their money could be seized. Significant amounts of cash were being stored under mattresses and inside coffee cans. These weren’t people who didn’t understand the financial system. They were people who had looked at it and made a decision.
The story that stayed with Marco was that of a single mother working three or four jobs to pay back government benefits she had received years earlier. He didn’t frame it as a cautionary tale. “How did we allow this to happen?” he asked, and the question landed in the room with weight. It wasn’t rhetorical. It was a demand for something structural to change.
Carlos talked about an entrepreneur who had rebuilt her business from the ground up mid-hardship, found her way through Lift LA’s academy and a web of partner organizations, and kept going even as her husband’s health remained uncertain. There was something in the way he told it that made clear this wasn’t just one story. “People figure it out,” he said. “And in this case, they found a way.”
What comes next
This webinar was the second in our three-part series. Read more about setting the stage with trust by listening. Our third and final session will take place on June 4th, where we’ll share key takeaways from the community conversations and our full research report on how immigrant communities navigate digital financial services.
The thread running through all of it is the same: trust is the foundation. The organizations already embedded in the community, the ones who know their clients’ names, who will make a home visit, who will show up with a food basket or a notarized letter or just a listening ear, are the ones making that foundation possible.
We’re grateful to Sandy, Carlos, Marco, and the entire teams at the Resurrection Project and Lift LA for their partnership, their honesty, and their belief that better is possible.
Watch the full recording of Voices from the Field below:
