How Princess Mackie Can Teach the Value of Community Outreach #MBAIMB24
(Left to right: author and real estate broker Twala Lockett-Jones, MBA 2024 Chairman Mark Jones)
NEW ORLEANS–Community outreach can expand access to financial literacy, MBA 2024 Chairman Mark Jones and author and real estate broker Twala Lockett-Jones agreed here at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Independent Mortgage Bankers conference.
“Twala Lockett-Jones wrote this great book called Princess Mackie Buys a House,” Jones said. “It tells the story of a young girl who has a dream to buy ‘a castle’ and it teaches financial literacy lessons about goal setting and saving. I was so excited when I read it, we decided to purchase over 4000 books to give them to fourth grade students throughout the Detroit Public School system.”
Lockett-Jones said her book was inspired by a conversation she had with her brother-in-law. “We would have a lot of conversations about poverty and a poverty mindset,” she said. “One day I asked him what can you do to change a poverty mindset? And he said it has to be through education; that’s the only way to do it.”
On one occasion, Lockett-Jones was showing homes to a young woman. “She was in her early 30s with three children,” Lockett-Jones said. “We looked at one home and she realized that this is the one–this is after looking at probably a dozen other homes and losing out. She looked at me and she literally started crying. She said, ‘I want this home. And by purchasing this home, I’m breaking generational curses in my family.’ She told me ‘nobody in her family has ever owned a home; I’ll be the first.’ It was just so powerful. To me that statement meant this isn’t about just her and her children. This is about her children’s children and their children and everybody they come into contact with. Now that they know that they can be homeowners, they’re going to share that story with everybody around them.”
Jones noted one of MBA’s goals is to get this message out across the nation, and to help its members use the book as part of their the strategy. Click here for more information about that initiative.
“Switching gears a little bit, you and I have discussed the impact this book has had not just on the children, but on their parents and other adults in their life, which is fascinating to me,” Jones noted. “Can you share a couple stories with us about the feedback you heard?”
“Absolutely,” Lockett-Jones replied. “More often than not, I have parents of high school seniors telling me they’re purchasing the book for their child who’s going off to college. I have parents of children who have either brought the book home from school, or some other way they got the book, or the parent bought the book for the child and the parent ends up reading the book and learning how to purchase a home just by reading the book. I was very intentional when writing the book of putting the steps to homeownership right inside the book. It’s outlined step by step, so any child can understand. And adults obviously can see that roadmap to homeownership. I also included a glossary in the back of the book, which parents find super helpful.”
After the interview, Lockett-Jones and Jones visited Homer Plessy Community School in New Orleans to introduce the elementary school students there to Princess Mackie.
