DEBRIEF
Facilitator: Wisdom Sprint
Date: Friday, Nov 21, 2025
Session time: 12:15 PM – 5:15 PM
Attendees: 12 people (WS + 11 participants)

executive summary
There is strong alignment around community upliftment. Financial literacy is desired as a longer-term, upstream intervention, but the organization currently mostly meets clients at moments of acute need. That creates an operational and strategic tension: the needs of people in crisis are different from clients who can engage with long-term education. Resource constraints—cash and volunteers—mean OMF must choose clarity and focus to scale impact while protecting its community values.
#Voting
Ambitions and funding priorities
headline
Future-casting exercise
journey map
  • 6 + Check + 6
Participants and stated ambitions
  • Attendance: 11 participants + facilitator. Participants included board members, volunteers and long-time community contributors (many with lived experience of the neighborhoods OMF serves). Several participants emphasized prior local volunteering or professional backgrounds in finance, HR, community services, and small-business/startup experience. (Names not quoted in transcript; participants are listed in your distribution list.)
  • Core personal/organizational ambitions surfaced:
  • Community empowerment and upliftment (most prominent): build stronger neighborhood ties; “neighbors helping neighbors.”
  • Financial literacy and life skills education: want to teach budgeting, basic money management, forward-looking finance.
  • Eviction prevention and crisis response: prioritizing support for people who are behind on rent or facing imminent eviction.
  • Sustainability of OMF: concerns about limited cash, human resources, and operational scalability.
  • Standardization vs. personalized support: maintain human-centered flexibility; consider efficiencies and repeatability for scale.
  • Stewardship and reciprocity: exploring pay-it-forward/donation ideas from past borrowers to support sustainability.
What we did and key outputs
  • Exercise 1 — Hashtags & Dot Voting (priorities / what to fund)
  • Participants wrote 1–3 hashtags capturing what they hoped OMF should prioritize.
  • Dot voting highlighted the two strongest themes: community upliftment and financial literacy.
  • Practical tension surfaced: evictions and crisis-response needs also showed up strongly, creating a conflict between proactive education and reactive crisis support.
  • Exercise 2 — Headline exercise (2–2.5 years out)
  • Participants wrote imagined front-page headlines that described a successful future for OMF.
  • Common themes in headlines: OMF prevents evictions at scale; OMF’s model is replicable and attracts significant grants; OMF is recognized for community-centered, high-impact outcomes.
  • These future visions reinforced an aspiration to combine measurable outcomes with community-led values.
  • Exercise 3 — Journey mapping (customer-focused “birth → check → after”)
  • Teams mapped the client journey before and after receiving a check (OMF loan support).
  • Outputs emphasized multiple stages: life circumstances leading to need, application and screening, disbursement mechanics (direct payments to landlord/creditor), post-check outcomes (repayment, referrals, additional supports).
  • Key operational insight: OMF currently interacts with clients at the crisis point (around the check); engaging earlier would require different resources, outreach, and product design.
Major discussion themes and points of debate
  • Community upliftment vs. crisis response
  • Collective recognition that both matter, but they represent different client segments and require different product designs and resources.
  • Representative framing from the session: “We have community upliftment and financial literacy — these are the two most prominent themes. Eviction was also raised, so we need to clarify whether we’re preventing or responding to evictions.”
  • Preventive financial literacy vs. reactive crisis support
  • Discussion concluded financial education is more effective before crisis; people in crisis have limited bandwidth for long-term learning.
  • Representative point: “Financial literacy is proactive, not reactive…people are more open to it when they’re not in a crisis.”
  • Capacity and operational limits matter
  • Multiple participants highlighted OMF’s limited cash and human resources (volunteer-driven), and the necessity of operational guardrails (e.g., caps on outstanding loans or standard loan sizes) to scale responsibly.
  • Facilitator framed this in product/operational terms: decide whether to serve clients at point of crisis or earlier in the journey — it’s difficult to do both well without more resources.
  • Standardization vs. customized lending
  • Tension between maintaining flexibility/humanity vs. standardizing products to improve repeatability and appeal to funders.
  • Several argued that standard products (e.g., fixed loan size, simple terms) enable scale; others worried standardization risks displacing the organization’s community-focused spirit.
  • Repayment incentives and sustainability
  • Debate on whether to charge interest or fees vs. alternative “carrot” incentives.
  • A prominent idea surfaced and gained support: a post-repayment donation appeal or “pay-it-forward” option (optional, dignity-preserving) for those who can contribute after successful loan completion. The facilitator modeled this idea with simple math: a modest voluntary contribution after repayment could substantially boost funds and demonstrate community reinvestment to larger funders.
  • Representative quote capturing the idea: “Ask borrowers, after they repay, whether they can donate a small amount to help the next family—pay it forward.”
Decisions to be made (strategic questions raised)
  • Target client segment: Do we primarily serve people in acute precarity (eviction/crisis) or engage earlier with prevention/financial education? (Or create distinct products for each segment?)
  • Product clarity: Do we formalize a standard loan product (size, terms) to enable scale and clearer messaging to clients and funders?
  • Repayment model: Do we keep strictly no-interest policies, add modest fees, or embed voluntary “pay-it-forward” mechanisms?
  • Operating limits: What explicit operational constraints (e.g., maximum outstanding loans, cash-on-hand thresholds) should be codified to guide monthly lending decisions?
  • Referral network and partnerships: How to formalize connections and handoffs to other community services so OMF can prioritize the right interventions (short-term AND upstream supports)?
Recommended next steps
Immediate (next 2–4 weeks)
  • Share this debrief with all participants and invite corrections or additions. (I’ve pulled the workshop transcript highlights; please ask participants to confirm names and any verbatim quotes you wish to include.)
  • Convene a small working group (3–5 people from today) to convert ideas into proposals: one to formalize a proposed standard loan product (example: single standard loan size with clear terms), another to draft an optional post-repayment “pay-it-forward” proposal, and a third to review messaging for client clarity.
  • Prepare and circulate a short client-facing “what OMF does” messaging draft (one-page) so that community demand-side understanding can be assessed — ask a small sample of local users if the message is clear.
Near term (1–3 months)
  • Pilot a standardized product: pick one simple, constrained product to pilot (example: $2,500 standard loan with an optional post-repayment donation ask). Define measures: approval rate, default rate, % who make voluntary donation, time to decision, staff hours per case.
  • Create an operational capacity model (dashboard): cash-on-hand, outstanding loan cap, expected monthly paybacks, and forecasted lending capacity; use this to define monthly lending thresholds (e.g., lend only until outstanding loans reach $X).
  • Formalize referral and partner map: list partner orgs for prevention (skills, employment), eviction legal aid, and wrap-around services for clients before and after the check.
Strategic (3–12 months)
  • Decide product segmentation strategy: if OMF wants to serve both crisis and prevention, formalize two distinct product lines and pathways (e.g., Emergency Loan product vs. Prevention/Financial Coaching product) and map resource needs for each.
  • Fundraising approach tied to product clarity: use pilot results (repayment + donation metrics) to build a compelling case for grants/impact funders; consider how a demonstrated community reinvestment (pay-it-forward) model attracts larger donors.
  • Evaluate whether modest revenue features (commitment fee, one-time first payment, or voluntary donation) should be adopted, and if so, how to keep them dignity-preserving and optional.
Metrics to capture in pilots
  • Approval rate; average time from application to check; default rate; repayment timeline; % of borrowers who make voluntary donation; volunteer hours per case; number of referrals to partner services.
omf - four key functional domains
  • Financial controller / Product owner
  • Community outreach / messaging (demand-side)
  • Fundraising / donation appeals (supply-side)
  • Loan maintenance / outreach
OMF Agenda
November 21, 2025
01
Icebreaker
Duration: 15 Minutes
Purpose: To quickly surface both personal motivation and collective priorities, setting a warm, reflective tone.
02
Headline
Duration: 15 Minutes
Purpose: To imagine an ideal future for OMF, confirming motivations and collective alignment.
03
Journey Mapping
Duration: 30 Minutes
Purpose: To spark creative thinking about OMF’s future by mapping the journey of a new or evolving customer.
04
Personal Growth - optional
Duration: 15 Minutes
Purpose: To surface and share the personal hopes, aspirations, and growth goals of each board member through their OMF involvement.
05
Reflection - over lunch
Duration: 15 Minutes
Purpose: To synthesize key takeaways and next steps.
icebreaker
What’s Your OMF Spark?
Two Questions (5 mins)
A) If you could fund anything through OMF, what would it be?
B) What do YOU want to gain from your OMF involvement?
Distill + Pass (8 mins)
Harvest (2 mins)
headline
OMF in the News – A Future We Created
Imagine it’s three years from now, and OMF has just been featured on the front page of a major local or national news outlet. The headline celebrates a major change or breakthrough that OMF has achieved.
Reflect + Write (5 mins)
Share + Dots (5 mins)
Discuss (5 mins)
journey map
who should omf serve?
Map a customer journey with your group (10 mins)
Present (15 mins)
Reflections (5 mins) … continued over lunch