#TrustPlusatWork: Children’s Aid

Robyn Dietz, head of talent management and human resources at Children’s Aid discusses investing in employees’ financial and mental health during the pandemic.

What is Children’s Aid?

Children’s Aid is a large nonprofit that serves New York City’s most under-resourced neighborhoods. We’ve been around for a long time, working with our children, youth and families.

We’re a multi-service organization, and we’re very unique in that way. We provide services from cradle to college and career. We have children in early childhood programs. We have school aged children. We work with young adults, really through college and beyond. We also work with youth in foster care and offer many child welfare services. We have young adult programs for children that are aging out of some of their services to help get them on their feet and really thrive in our communities.

We provide health services in schools, and right now we’re in the middle of our summer camps. We will be providing after-school programming in the fall.

How does TrustPlus fit in?

This year more than ever we realized that there was so much uncertainty throughout the pandemic, and we wanted to be able to offer our employees really immediate help with counseling, coaching, or advice for those who are struggling and those who just really want to know more about personal finance. We had an early conversation with TrustPlus and it really felt like a great fit for our organization.

We have about 1100 full-time employees. And we have in the summer months, like now, probably another 1100 part-time employees, because we have after school programs, and we have summer camps. We work with the summer youth employment programs, and we really wanted to make sure that these services were available to all of our employees, including those that work during the summer.

I think it’s a really good fit for our community-based organization. We want to give our employees the tools that they need right now for immediate help, but also tools that they can have for the future to set themselves up for their own personal needs and for their families.

Why invest in your employees with TrustPlus?

Anything immediate that we could do to provide support to our employees during the pandemic felt like a big plus to us. We want our employees to be as stress free as possible. I know it’s sort of an oxymoron to say during the pandemic, but anything that we can do to help alleviate a stressor in their lives was what we were aiming for.

We want as many employees as possible to avail themselves of this service. Every success can help somebody get out of debt or coach them on managing debt, strengthening credit, and building savings for themselves or for their families, for future college schooling, whatever they need. I think every one of those successes, all of those stories, are what really makes this partnership great.