Today we’d like to introduce you to Natalia Abrams and Cody Hounanian.
Natalia and Cody, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Natalia: I grew up in Burbank, California and have been a lifelong resident of Los Angeles. My husband of over 16 years and I live in Sherman Oaks with our two dogs, Bowie (a pit/lab mix) and Maddie (a purebred lab). I am a nonprofit founder and director.
I started by working odd jobs – retail, a nanny, an event planner, an actress until I got serious with my life. In 2005, we traveled to Mississippi to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least, and it redirected my life goals – I wanted to help people and contribute to society. I just didn’t know exactly how to make this goal into a career.
First – I went back to school attending LA Valley College and then UCLA. I graduated UCLA in 2009, amidst the US financial crisis. As a non-traditional student (over 25 years old) I had noticed that tuition was double from what it would have been if I attended college in 1998. However, like many new graduates, I was unaware of just how bad the student debt crisis had become.
In fall of 2010, the University of California system announced that they were raising tuition more than 32% across the board (all UC schools) which caused understandable outrage from students. I attended my first “tuition hike” protest which led to my personal research on student debt issues and higher education policy. It was during my in-depth researching that the occupy movement sprung up. The timing was perfect!
I am grateful that while I figured out the next steps in my personal career that I was able to help and learn from my husband Steven while he built his wallpaper business in Sherman Oaks. To this day, we share office space. In October of 2011, I started Occupy Colleges by launching Twitter and Facebook pages from my bedroom, within a week I had over 1000 followers, and CNN was calling.
We focused on the economic injustices students face – tuition/tuition hikes and overwhelming student loan debt. Within a month, multiple campuses organized mass protests and walkouts which continued with great frequency until March of 2012. The Occupy movement may have been over, but my desire and passion to help students were cemented.
Now more than ever, I was clear on what I wanted to do and how to do it. My and Student Debt Crisis’ overall goal of ending student loan debt, returning to a free college system and most importantly – representing the 45 million student loan borrowers that often feel voiceless and trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare.
Cody: My story begins in Santa Clarita, California where I grew up and continue to live today. The suburbs are an interesting place for the grandchild of refugee immigrants, a progressive young person with a racially diverse family on top of that. Yet, the opportunities provided to me here helped develop my fundamental principles.
My parents worked the same job for decades. My father was a custodian, my mother a secretary. We were solidly middle-class, but we had the ‘American Dream’ – a home, a car, education, and healthcare.
In 2012, while studying at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I took up my first effort in political organizing when I worked to successfully re-elect local Congresswoman Lois Capps. During that campaign, we mobilized student voters in record numbers, and we were victorious, if only by a slim margin.
This was my first go in advocacy work, it was a major win for my community, and it was the beginning of my work fighting to defend progressive values. I finished my time in school with a degree and a dream, but no job in my field. Even worse, jobs were scarce having graduated just after the recession. Of course, some of the most important life moments are the unexpected ones. A family friend casually connected Natalia and I.
That moment sprouted the most important mentorship, friendship, and partnership that I’ve had in my life. All of it centered around the passion and energy we put into our work at Student Debt Crisis.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Being a small organization comes with unique challenges. How do we maximize our large following? How do we employ cutting-edge tools and actions? How do we ensure that student loan borrowers have a seat at the table? It requires creative solutions and a willingness to partner with others.
Our small team is able to lead the movement to end student debt by partnering with large, credible organizations that amplify our work and reaffirm our role in the progressive community. Whether it is hosting a hotline with the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor union organization, or delivering a petition to Congress with partners from Higher Ed, Not Debt, one of our strengths is our ability to work well with others to make sure our impact is as large as possible.
Being a small organization also means that our fundraising is often tight. We have to commit as much of our income as possible directly to programming – that guarantees that each individual small donation can be used to educate borrowers about their options or shape public policy to improve our broken system. Advocates have to be willing to work towards change without much financial return.
However, creating change is thoroughly rewarding in its own right. Thankfully, we have been privileged with the means to pursue a labor of love purely for the sake of improving our world. A major change in leadership can send shockwaves through any organization, particularly a grassroots organization that was founded by real, everyday Americans.
In 2014, the creator of the Student Debt Crisis’ founding petition stepped down. Natalia became executive director shortly thereafter and had to re-envision the future of the organization. Then, Cody joined, and the organization’s entire structure had to be created. We moved the home base for Student Debt Crisis from NY to CA, which proved to be a wise move considering all of the positive movement within the issue of higher education in California politics.
We’d love to hear more about your organization.
Student Debt Crisis (SDC) is a non-profit (501c4) organization dedicated to fundamentally reforming student debt and higher education loan policies. We take a personal approach to member needs—working directly with borrowers to understand their challenges and fears, repayment obstacles and frustrations.
We tackle the challenges of loan refinancing and consumer protection policies with media and legislators, as well as educating borrowers and higher education experts with lectures, webinars, and special events. At the time we launched the Student Debt Crisis, hardly anyone was talking about student loan debt or understood what borrowers were facing.
We named our organization with the purpose to bring attention to what we saw (and was later confirmed by recent research) as a true crisis! Americans are forced to redefine their aspirations because skyrocketing student debt continues to prevent young people from starting families and purchasing homes, it prevents entrepreneurs from investing in themselves or their small businesses, and it means that mom and dad can’t save for retirement.
All in all, there are 45 million of us with student loan debt. Together, we owe over 1.5 trillion dollars. The economy as a whole is hurt by the student debt crisis, and we are all paying the price. This is where things accelerated. By the summer of 2012, our team was invited to join with scores of top higher education organizations to build a national campaign.
Finally, the issue of student debt was getting some of the attention it deserved. However, we remained dedicated to ensuring that the student debt crisis was addressed as a serious problem. In addition, Natalia was offered her first consulting job with the Center for American Progress to help officially launch the campaign.
In March of 2013, she had the great honor of being a part of the launch of Higher Ed, Not Debt. A former event-planner, she helped arrange for Senator Elizabeth Warren to be our guest speaker. SDC has grown into national prominence for our efforts to intercede on behalf of borrowers for debt resolution solutions through petitions, awareness-building campaigns, outreach, social media and meetings with lawmakers.
Boasting a large and engaged membership network, our organization is an ally member of the ‘Higher Ed Not Debt’ campaign and has worked in cooperation with “HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher,” Michael Moore, and the AFL-CIO to draw attention to the needs of borrowers. It is our core belief that our nation’s success is dependent upon an educated workforce capable of critical thinking, innovation, and entrepreneurship necessary for prosperity.
At the heart of our belief is the conviction that we can no longer burden students with the ever-increasing costs of higher education. Affordable and accessible education—including the equitable repayment of debt incurred—is crucial for the U.S. to maintain its position as a 21st-century global leader.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Success to us means having constant growth and movement towards the progress we hope to achieve. There is always an ebb and flow to any business or nonprofit; however, success to us means continuing to push our organization, and ourselves personally.
As long as there are improvements year over year, we see ourselves as succeeding. It also means that success is an ever-changing benchmark.
Contact Info:
- Address: 15442 Ventura Blvd. #201 Sherman Oaks, CA 91403
- Website: www.StudentDebtCrisis.org
- Phone: 6618771813
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/debtcrisisorg
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/debtcrisisorg
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/debtcrisisorg
- Other: http://twitter.com/nataliaabrams , http://twitter.com/chounanian
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
