The vision of Hand-Up Financial Group was the culmination of a lifetime of experiences, which were heavily influenced by the following: 1) three decades of personal and career experiences within the higher education systems in America; 2) exposure to international microfinance through my work with HOPE International; 3) a series of family and global financial crises; and 4) my own personal faith journey that was jumpstarted by the NY Times all-time best-selling non-fiction book The Purpose Driven Life.

The Back-Story

I grew up like many Americans in an average, suburban, middle class family.  I attended public school for K-12, played sports through the rec center and went to church on Sunday’s.  In high school, I was very focused on my academic studies, graduated first in my class with an unweighted 4.0 GPA, captained the varsity tennis team and founded the only high-school chapter of the American Red Cross in the state of Virginia at the time.  So, when it came time to think about college, I assumed all options would be on the table.  Unfortunately, my father experienced a major career disruption halfway through my high school years that sent our family to the brink of bankruptcy.  When it came time for me to apply to colleges, my parents were not in a position to help financially.  The idea of paying for the full cost of college on my own, with no savings, was a beyond daunting concept.  Therefore, my once robust list of college options contracted almost overnight, with only the public university systems being within my financial reach, but even that was going to be a stretch.  Thankfully, Virginia is home to two of the top six public universities in America and I was still able to apply to and be accepted to one of the top schools from my original list.

Getting accepted into William and Mary (W&M) was not the end of this season of trials, but the beginning of four more years of financial trials.  Despite getting over a dozen scholarships and being deemed a high need student by the university’s financial aid department, which afforded me Federal and State of Virginia needs-based grants, there was still a shortfall between the cost of attendance and what I could afford to pay.  The ability to find a way to cover these last dollars necessary for me to attend the school and program of my choice almost became a barrier to me going to college (today this “last dollar” funding is defined as GAP Funding, which is what Hand-Up was founded to address).  At the time W&M provided no needs-based student aid and my parents credit situation made them ineligible for Federal Parent PLUS loans, so my only options were to work while in school and take on student loans myself, both of which I did. At the time, and even more so now, I did not see the cost of my education as an expense, but an investment in my future.  However, in order to realize that investment, I needed access to timely and appropriately priced financing that would allow me to pay the cost over time, as I continued to benefit from the return on this investment for years to come.  Without access to borrowing capacity when I needed it most, I would have missed the many career opportunities and experiences that led to Hand-Up, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Intersection of Faith, Financing and Funding for the Most Needy

In 2002, I got married, joined Saddleback Church, re-found my faith, read The Purpose Drive Life (before it was even published and went on to sell over 50 million copies), and began working in the entry level post-secondary sector of higher education, where some of America’s most disadvantaged students sought a better life. It was there that I saw firsthand the disparities in both access and funding for many underserved student groups and how much those disparities had grown in just a single decade since I was applying for college. In order to combat these disparities, I sought to build partnerships that could help students by connecting investors and schools (like ours that cared about extending their reach) together to bring new and creative financial solutions to an educational landscape that has seen only one material increase to the federal aid programs, since I was in high school.

In 2008-2010 there were two additional events that shaped the Hand-Up journey.  The first was the 2008 financial market meltdown, which led to the Great Recession and eventually, the 2010 nationalization of U.S. federal student lending into a single-payer, government-controlled system. The second was my 2009 introduction to micro-finance through HOPE International (HOPE).

As a career finance professional who was Treasurer of a major education company, I have always been keen on access to capital as a key component to companies or individuals finding a path forward.  Additionally, the general concept of a “hand-up” vs. a “hand-out” has always been a big driver for me in my investing and giving. In 2010 when the earthquakes hit Haiti, my daughters became very focused on how they could help the many struggling families they saw on TV.  That week we began supporting HOPE.  In 2011, I was able to go on a HOPE trip to the Dominican Republic to see HOPE in action.  On that trip I realized the parallels between the work HOPE was doing to lift up the underserved and marginalized people internationally and the work I was doing domestically to support very similar needs in the U.S.  Whether it was Detroit, Chicago, Santa Domingo, DR or Kigali, Rwanda, when you look at those hardest hit by material poverty, the non-material aspect of poverty are strikingly similar (such as a sense of isolation or a lack of purpose and worth), as are the needs for transformational capital.

After that trip I set myself on a journey studying the works of Peter Greer, Brian Fikkert, Robert Lupton, Muhammad Yunus and others trying to learn all I could about helping without hurting. This research highlighted that even in the best-of-times the global financial systems left many people behind.  Sadly, in the worst-of-times, the impacts on underserved people groups become exponentially more challenging, as was evidenced in recent years by the Great Recession, the extensive regulatory actions focus on altering higher education and financial services sectors from 2007-2016 and the 2020 global Coronavirus Pandemic.

The Birth of Hand-Up

The time period from 2010-2016 saw major transitions in the U.S. higher education landscape.  The financial crisis, regulatory changes and political ideologies collectively combined from 2008 to 2010 to eliminate funding from over 1,500 financial institutions that previously supported the funding of higher education.  Additionally, during this same time period and the years that followed, nearly 1,300 proprietary institutions (over 80% of what once existed and 20% of all colleges in America) closed their doors. This constriction of both educational supply to markets that formerly served underrepresented students and the elimination of private educational financing solutions for more than 95% of students, combined to leave millions of American students without the options necessary to obtain a higher education.

The collective events described above made me realize that a new form of education financing was massively needed beyond the historical government and Wall Street models that had failed to effectively serve so many.  This new model would seek to serve the most underserved and underfunded communities within higher education, such as independent adults, minority students, first-generation students, families with lower socioeconomic means, and students attending faith-based institutions.  Additionally, this new model would also have to meet the needs of both schools and a diverse population of donors and social-impact minded investors (that have a passion for increasing access to education and allowing people to lift themselves out of their circumstances through a combination of hard work and self-discipline).  Lastly, the entity would need to be a social business that operated on the premise that all value derived by the enterprise would be returned to the communities and organizations it serves.

As I merged my own personal experiences and passions in the following areas: 1) working with HOPE International; 2) helping people find their purpose in life; and 3) two-decades spent building lending solutions that provided people a “hand-up” versus the “hand-out” philosophy, the culmination was Hand-Up Financial Group — a unique non-profit education financing platform that provides education financing solutions to students and educational institutions—via its mission-focused donors and investors to meet diverse needs and achieve common goals.

Don King