We started out 25 years ago in 1996, three people and one shared PC in one small office with a goal to help Canadians struggling with their debt. Now we have over 100 staff including over 40 licensed Credit Counsellors and a dedicated team of 12 Financial Educators and have offices in 17 cities. Since we started out we have had over 900,000 people come to us for help, educated over 110,000 Canadians and helped our clients repay over $1/2 Billion of debt! We don’t loan money, we focus on free individual credit counselling, budgeting assistance, financial literacy education and low cost debt management programs.
Everyone who doesn’t need us. In a perfect world, no one would need our services. In reality, however, many of us will run into financial difficulty for one reason or another, at one time or another. We help our clients plot a course to correct those financial challenges and to improve their financial future. We are in the business of helping others understand our financial system and how to tap into it without running into any potential pitfalls. We try to help those who are having problems manage their debts. We are a non-profit and ideally we would love it if things got to the point where we weren’t needed anymore, where nobody was living with financial concerns.
Our business is twofold in its focus; we help the individual with 1:1 credit counselling and we work with organizations and employers to provide financial literacy education. Both the counselling side and the education side faced the same COVID challenge. We couldn’t meet with people directly any more. Fortunately we were able to adapt with technology and web meetings and things worked themselves out nicely.