In 1992, the city of Los Angeles was on fire. John Hope Bryant looked at the wreckage and asked a question most people weren’t asking: not “how do we rebuild the buildings,” but “how do we rebuild the relationship between these communities and the economy that locked them out in the first place.”
That question became Operation HOPE. Thirty-four years later, it’s the largest financial literacy nonprofit in the country: more than 4 million people served, over $4 billion directed into communities that never had access to that kind of capital before. Bryant calls it the move from civil rights to silver rights. I call it investment. You don’t fix exclusion by hoping it goes away. You back the people already building what replaces it.
That’s why LIFT ALL exists. Our third pillar isn’t about teaching people to budget. It’s about economic sovereignty: the systems, literacy, and ownership that turn access into generational wealth. Financial architecture, not financial advice.
On June 2, Operation HOPE named Nicole and me HOPE Goodwill Ambassadors, alongside Roger Goodell, Killer Mike, Charlamagne tha God, and Morris Chestnut. We didn’t ask for a ceremonial title. We asked to be useful. Over the next year, that means showing up for HOPE’s national campaigns, its Financial Literacy Month work, and the HOPE Global Forums, and it means using whatever reach we have to point people toward a model that already works.
Operation HOPE runs on something called HOPE Inside: coaches, embedded directly in the communities they serve, sitting down with people and rebuilding their credit, their savings, their whole relationship with money, for free. That’s not a pilot program. That’s the model, running in cities across the country, for over three decades.
We don’t partner with organizations we think need saving. We partner with organizations already doing the work, at scale, with results. Operation HOPE has been doing this since before most of us were paying attention. Our job now is simple: give this partnership a home, put our name behind it, and make sure more people know this door exists.
Financial exclusion was engineered. So is the way out of it, by people like Operation HOPE. That’s the work we back.
Follow LIFT ALL → kodjoefoundation.org/lift-all
