A former Dallas mayor spoke with The Dallas Express about her mission to help a formerly homeless man get his savings back after $9,500 was transferred out of his account with the financial services company Chime.
Laura Miller served as mayor from 2002 to 2007 before launching The Ladder Project in 2018. The organization asserts on its website that “the highest level of the ladder of charity is to provide an individual with the means to support himself, to become self-sufficient, so that never again will he or she need to rely on the generosity of others to maintain his independence.”
Miller told The Dallas Express she founded The Ladder Project because “there are as many [homeless] people in Dallas now as there was when I was mayor of Dallas.”
The idea behind the organization is to “take one person out of the shelter in Dallas and create a new life for them, get them a job, get them an apartment, furnish the apartment, [and] clear their debts or whatever is needed to set them on a new path,” Miller said. The Ladder Project operates out of Miller’s synagogue, Congregation Shearith Israel.
Stanford Dixson was one of the individuals who went from living on the streets to being a productive citizen with some help from The Ladder Project.
“Stanford is one of our most successful clients,” Miller told The Dallas Express. “He was living at the Austin Street Shelter [while] working at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas.”
Miller said the hospital CEO called her, informed her that a “star employee” was living in a shelter, and asked her to help him find stable housing.
“We got him out of the shelter,” Miller said. “I picked him up and moved him to his new apartment. My whole team completely furnished the apartment … paid the renters insurance, got the electricity hooked up, and set him off on a path.”
“He’s had a wonderful year,” she continued. “He’s saved his money, and he’s worked overtime.”
Miller said Dixson planned to use his savings to visit family in New York and purchase a new pair of dentures.
However, his plans got put on hold after $9,500 was allegedly stolen from Dixson via his Chime account, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
“He was on a path for doing all that, and then got hit and hit and hit by someone named Jeffery Campbell,” she told The Dallas Express.
Chime is a financial services app that provides banking tools but is technically not a bank. The alleged thief reportedly removed funds in a series of three transfers under the account name “Jeffery C.”
After each transaction, Dixson filed complaints with Chime and changed his password. When the thefts kept occurring, he called Miller for help. She took him to an actual bank and helped transfer his money to a savings account.
Miller has worked to help Dixson retrieve his lost savings but said Chime has been difficult to work with.
“The main reason why no one in America should use Chime … is that there is no way to get help,” she told The Dallas Express. “There are no physical locations for the institution. There is [only] one phone number. They have no corporate office phone number — no way to reach anybody except through a 1-800 number that’s answered in the Philippines with people who answer the phone who don’t really know what’s going on.”
Miller said she sent “very long emails and spent hours on the phone” with Chime employees and would simply receive “form letters saying we’ve reviewed your case and we deny it.”
She told The Dallas Express she plans to file a lawsuit against Chime in a local justice of the peace court “to get somebody to pay attention.”
For its part, Chime defended its handling of the case in a statement sent to The Dallas Express by a company spokesperson.
“We take these matters seriously and the trust of our members is fundamental to our business and Chime’s number one priority,” the statement read. “To ensure the safety of our members and our platform, we employ rigorous fraud detection protocols.”
“Our team, which is made up of representatives who are specialized in handling these matters, responded to this member’s disputes in a timely manner,” the company claimed. “We performed a thorough investigation and found no evidence of error or fraud.”
More details about Dixson’s ordeal can be found here.
The City of Dallas continues to wrestle with a serious crisis of homelessness and vagrancy, which roughly 75% of residents consider a “major” problem, according to a satisfaction survey conducted by the City government.
Dallas residents favor a homelessness response strategy similar to that of the San Antonio-based nonprofit Haven for Hope, as indicated by polling undertaken by The Dallas Express.
Haven for Hope partners with the City of San Antonio to offer a “one-stop shop” for supportive services and emergency housing on a single campus, keeping the problems that stem from homelessness and vagrancy and their solutions centralized in one location. The City of Dallas has not yet experimented with such a model.
