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City restores MOU with United Way to resume financial‑empowerment counseling
Summary
City staff told the council the Cities for Financial Empowerment program will resume under a new MOU with United Way after counselors became United Way employees; a $50,000 grant and marketing budget will support outreach and LanguageLine will provide translation services.
Syracuse City staff told councilors the city is reinstating a memorandum of understanding for the Cities for Financial Empowerment (CFE) program now that counselors who deliver the service are United Way employees.
A city staff member said the MOU is necessary so the city can access CFE’s database and training. “Rafiki Fuldgens is our FEC program manager on the city side, and he will pull some together some information that he'll share with all of you,” the staff member said, noting the city will provide usage and demographic data to councilors upon request.
Councilors pressed for details about outreach and language access. Staff said marketing funds are included both in United Way’s budget and in a separate $50,000 grant awarded to the program, and that United Way uses LanguageLine and has multilingual staff to serve non‑English speakers.
Staff also told the council the MOU language follows the CFE draft used previously and has been reviewed by the city’s law office; there will be no retroactive payments related to the contract transition. The staff presentation framed the change as an operational housekeeping step to preserve service continuity while granting the city access to training and the CFE database.
Next steps: Rafiki Fuldgens will compile historic service counts and demographic information from CFE’s database and provide that data to council members; councilors also asked staff to notify the community once services are fully onboarded under United Way.
