Our Conceptual Definitions

Financial trauma - a cycle of triggers and reactions that limits a person’s or a community’s ability to build wealth(McKenzie, 2020; McKenzie, et. al, 2021; McKenzie, 2022).
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Financial shame - the psychological effect of being told that you are to blame for the socioeconomic harm you experience (McKenzie, 2020).
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Financial abuse - an event, action, policy, or cultural message that inequitably reinforces the conditions that impair a person's wealth-building capability or material safety (McKenzie, 2020).
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Wealth justice - is a commitment to:
(1) actively undoing generations of violent, systemic financial trauma, financial abuse, and financial shame;
(2) acknowledging and understanding the unique and intractable struggles people have against wealth inequality from an intersectional lens; and
(3) healing by holding our social, political, economic, and cultural institutions accountable for perpetrating and transmitting financial trauma and abuse.  (McKenzie, et.al, 2021).

Rooting the crisis in facts

Our Key Research

We study the effects of financial trauma, shaming, and abuse on Black people, which has not been robustly examined.

Black women and the wealth gap

Key insight: Financial trauma has the largest influence on a person’s wealth-building capability. We cannot understand wealth inequality and how to close the racial and gender wealth gap without a thorough conceptualization of financial trauma and the people it harms the most: Black women.

Traumatic Fundraising: The Financial Traumatization of Underrepresented Nonprofit Leaders by Philanthropic Institutions

Key insight: According to a Bridgespan report, 51% of nonprofit leaders of color lack access to foundations. But for those who have access to these entities, the real trouble begins. Underrepresented founders have made it clear to us: interacting with philanthropic institutions is almost always (financially) traumatizing. Despite commitments to funding.

The relationship between maternal health outcomes and financial trauma

Key insight: Financial trauma negatively impacts maternal health outcomes, particularly those of Black women. Our work focuses on the implications of inadequate and inconsistent parenting resources, such as paid family leave, and rampant misinformation on new mothers in the postpartum period.

Evaluating compensation structures and basic needs security in college athletics

Key insight: Many Black college athletes experience basic needs insecurity today, and, in light of new NIL rules, are increasingly vulnerable to financial trauma. As we start to compensate college athletes, we should be creating an entirely new approach that centers wealth justice, closes gaps, and reduces harm–setting athletes up to build wealth for the long-term.