NASW Social Work Talks - EP 138 - Social Workers, Investment Funds & Evictions

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Joslyn Berndt founded the innovative CARES program in collaboration with the University of Texas Steve Hicks School of Social Work in 2017. In this new episode of Social Work Talks, we sit down with her to discuss the program, which houses social workers in an investment business and empowers them to foster productive and personalized landlord-resident communication, especially in times of crisis. 

This episode of Social Work Talks is brought to you by the University of Central Florida, built for those who don't wait for permission to change the world. From the National Association of Social Workers, this is Social Work Talks, and I'm your host, Elizabeth Lamott, and I am so excited to welcome Jocelyn Burnt to our conversation today. She is a financial wizard. She is the founder of Palladium Capital. She is a founding investor in the Amherst Group. She is the managing partner of JLB Holdings.

And I know, I know, I know this podcast is social work talks, not finance talks. And we don't usually have the chance to sit down with financial powerhouses like Jocelyn Berndt. However, she has been working closely with the University of Texas School of Social Work for years now, and she is a true visionary in public-private partnerships. She has started not one, but two social work initiatives within corporate settings, and her real estate fund has a full-on social work department. So she's going to tell us all about it.

Jocelyn, welcome to Social Work Talks. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Elizabeth. And what a nice introduction. I'm looking around like, who are you talking about? But it's you. Tell us a bit about your early career and how you got started in finance. Well, first of all, I want to thank you for having me because I love, you know, I was

so excited because I love social workers. They're some of my favorite people. And I've been on the board, like you said, for 15 years at the University of Texas School of Social Work. So I consider that to be extremely lucky and a privilege. And I'm kind of a social worker wannabe. So I've enjoyed tinkering with social science and trying to figure out, you know, how to solve problems or fill gaps.

And this exposure to the social work school helped me do that in a business setting. So my background was a little bit unconventional to most finance people. I started in Houston at a place called Criterion Investments. I didn't really have the background to work there. However, I played national. I was a nationally ranked tennis player and the owner loved tennis. So he interviewed me. I spent my formative years in the part of Houston called the Second Ward.

And then I went to school in a place called Pasadena. And the Second Ward was like the immigrant neighborhood. And Pasadena is where they make 85% of the world's petrochemicals. Houston is a very industrial town. And what a lot of people don't know about Houston is that it was the industrial capital in the early 20th century. So we have a ship channel. We had railroads.

We make 85% of the world's petrochemicals. So with all of that became generational wealth. So Criterion was one of the first to mutual funds, if not the first. And then we had huge families that we managed family offices for before we knew that that was actually a term. Like real pioneer in the family office. Yes, Houston had so much wealth and they're in wonderful families. So due to all this industrial capacity that we have here, I mean, it's still the global

capital of the world in terms of energy and petrochemicals. So those families then donated also. So we have like great sports teams. We have performing arts, visual arts. We pretty much have it all. And it's a huge city with a great vibe. But I was very lucky to have a start here. So New York would sort of structure deals and then come to Houston a lot of times to get them funded. So I'm 22 when I start to work there. And I worked there until John Hancock purchased the firm. So I had no idea the exposure we were doing. We called it private investment and we call that private equity now. We were the kind of the old family doctor. We took care of the 90 percent of the financial needs. If they needed to go public, they wanted to do an offering. We

would introduce them to people in New York or a dad offering. We managed the portfolio construction, the risk, all the strategic ins and outs of a family office. So then what led you to connect with social workers and with our field? Actually, it was Hurricane Katrina. So I lived in Austin, in and out for 20 years, but Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. If you remember, it was a horrible scene. Who can forget? I mean, it was devastating. And it was sewer water. I mean, the neighborhoods were decimated. The people couldn't go home. They couldn't collect any of their, but they lost it all. So Texas, big hearted Texas opened its doors and we were shipping New Orleans. We were having them to come to Texas and sort of get their feet on the ground, perhaps start over. Our preacher at church that morning, everyone's shell-shocked at what they were witnessing

on the TV, what happened to be from New Orleans? And he gave a different lens to this. He said, look, some of these kids were never going to get out of these neighborhoods. Here's the silver line. They're going to have a new experience. And a bunch of them are coming to Texas, like, right now. So we decided to donate. I know my little daughter was a few months old.

My son was about two. So I had loads of baby stuff. And we loaded the car, and we dropped it off. And then we went to a place called Project Help, and that changed everything. So Project Help is a homeless school liaison office associated with the Austin Independent School District. I'm sure you're familiar with homeless school liaisons, but I had never heard of one in my life.

So I walk in, and these ladies are preparing to receive these children and put them in school. So we said, how can we help? and one thing led to the next and she said look we're getting a hundred we don't know 100 200 kids and you have to have a backpack to go to school and they don't have any clothes and it was labor day weekend so we said well we have a company and we'll help and let's see what we can do so we called up people that were in town and we've made backpacks and we made little duffel bags that we made bureaus kind of because we knew they were going to be living in shelters and we

put clothes for the kids. And so we could get the kids in school as fast as possible and at least mitigate some of the disruption in their lives. So in that moment, you turned to your company and said, we need to do this. And you became the liaison between the social worker and the company. Right. But I also, nothing happens in a vacuum. I had tremendous support by the partners at our company executive management was all on board and facilitated this so that was the great thing we turned our conference room into a backpack station center and every day we would go we dropped off our 200 backpacks whatever it was and then kathy riquejo who was the head liaison incredible woman and she said oh great uh we're getting 200 more and this went on for six days just kept going so

by the end of the week or Saturday, we got about a thousand kids into school. And what was the impact on you of this experience, both personally and professionally? It was transformative for me, actually, from two perspectives. One, I was living in Austin, Texas with two children, and I had no idea how many homeless kids there were per night. she told me there's somewhere between seven and nine thousand homeless kids so that was hard to hear and then secondly what I sort of ran this mayhem for the six days and I was it was a lot I mean we had to pack the backpack specifically for grades so I was grabbing bible study groups anybody I could find in the building come help us and tragedy does bring out the best in humanity

I mean, I love that aspect of it. I mean, everybody was on board to help these kids. But inside the company, you had people that work in the mailroom or the lunch ladies were rubbing shoulders with the million-dollar bond traders. And that energy, I just loved it. It was a great energy, and it was a unity, and we were all together solving this problem for a greater good. and the bonds that we formed lasted for a long time.

It was a different way to interact in the company. You know, on Wall Street, we go to dinners, we go to happy hours. Now we pack hygiene kits sometimes. Right, but this is more real and it's more meaningful. And so then what? Well, it was interesting the first decade. So we decided that we would do this,

Like these seven or eight thousand kids bothered all of us. Like, well, we can't unhear that, as I like to say. So what are we going to do? So I developed a close relationship with Kathy and she over the next decade taught me a lot about the needs and the gaps that needed filling and just started innovating. We're kind of known for that anyway in finance. And so I sort of just put that lens onto the social work and tried to help her out where we could. And then that became a formal organization housed in the Amherst group eventually.

Is that correct? Yes. So it was interesting, the first decade. So Capacity Kids is over 20 years old. The first decade, I received a little resistance, not from executive management at all. I had their buy-in and support. But some of the partners were like, oh, don't you give money at church? What are we doing here?

And it was interesting, the first decade. I didn't listen. We just kept doing it. And then the second decade, it's phenomenal, the transformation in the next generation. A lot of people, I'm told, would join our firm for our outreach programs. Of Cap City Kids. We knew about Cap City Kids, started by you, and it was part of why they would choose working at the Amherst Group over somewhere else.

Isn't that something? It's something how it changed. And so we decided to, it wasn't in the company originally. First, we did backpacks and we just grew. We would learn about a need and sort of develop a program. And I tried to do things that other people didn't do.

I love when my programs get copied. Right, that's flattery. Yes, so we had a program get copied, but another organization took it over and perfect. you know that frees up resources for me to go develop another one you're saying cap city kids under other names has been replicated in other companies throughout the u.s i don't know about that so much but in austin so i had some tutors in homeless shelters that would come in they were teachers so it's kind of a win-win that teachers can moonlight and make some extra money and the

moms or the dads in the homeless shelter could have child care for their homework help for two hours every night. This was wildly successful, and we learned a lot from this program, too. The kids would improve in school, and they couldn't wait. If you were one of the teachers, like, Elizabeth, I made an A on my spelling test. It became interesting, and then they added soccer, and so I think it was the Junior League, but one of those groups said, can we just do this? And I said, sure. Right. So they took it over and we went on to develop other programs. So that was the first one. We did end up taking Cap City Nationwide once our company grew into the different offices. But at this point, I mean, it all runs via playbooks. I don't even really

administer much anymore. The offices do it. We have a social work intern and she facilitates the ordering and it all just rolls. And so then how and at what point did you connect with the University of Texas School of Social Work? That was one of our programs. To get ideas, we hosted a dinner. You know, social workers don't have a lot of dinners. We have hosted a roundtable dinner downtown, invited all the homeless school liaisons in Central Texas, and we said, tell us your needs. So each one there, again, this is my social work flag. They're so articulate. I mean, social workers really know how to, the education is unbelievable. I think everybody could benefit from it personally, but they're, they told us about the needs in central Texas

and a former superintendent joined the meeting. She was leaving town, but she explained to me that at the University of Texas, that they had 20, the students in the graduate level would have to complete two years of field service, which would be 20 hours a week. And she said in the schools, they didn't have any social workers, particularly in the marginalized schools where they were really needed. The counselors were overwhelmed. So she said, look, why don't you pay one master level social worker, and she or he can supervise as their field service component, eight to 10 interns. And you can put those interns in these marginalized schools and help the children, help the

teachers, help counselors. And then came the fun part. The fun part of? Of the execution. And what do you say was the biggest hurdle there? Well, Kathy, the homeless school liaison, set me up with the Dean of Field Services at the University of Texas. So that was my first intro, Tanya Voss.

I always thank her for her trust. And then we had AISD. And Tanya said, look, I think this sounds like a phenomenal idea. I'm in charge to make sure that these social workers get an incredible education. I will do it. I love the idea. But you have to have Kate Amerson. She's the only person I'm going to sign off on.

I'm like, great. So I phone up Kate Amerson, tell her whatever I can to get her to take the job, which she does. And she basically says, look, we'll pioneer this. I'll do it. And she was very sophisticated. So the program wound up, she did a great job getting national award. And I think Kate got social worker of the year in 2016 or 2017.

So it became wildly successful. we've trained about 150 social workers with 50,000 hours of direct counseling and about six or 6,800 to 7,500 children we were losing count a little bit and that doesn't count group therapies you know as well as I do like to take a traumatized child and put someone with them for nine months is huge you know you can really make a lot of progress so these social workers we have a dinner every year, and they tell us about their experience. And the stories are just so good. How many of those who do field placements in this realm, like roughly how many of them do you think stay in the school social work setting, at least initially? And what else do you hear about in

terms of their social work career paths? Well, we invite our alumni, Cap City Kids alumni that are around town to the dinner to celebrate the current cohorts. So I do know what a lot of them are doing, the range and the gamut. We send the list out, you know, to everyone and people will answer, hello, I'm in Ghana. I'm doing social work in Ghana, but Caroline Crawford worked at Women's Empowerment to help girls. And now she's a consultant to business, to companies, like an executive coach we have someone running the food bank we have social workers working in policy we have some that do private counseling hr all sorts of things this episode of social work talks is brought to you by the university of central florida built for those who don't

wait for permission to change the world the fully online master of social work at ucf is a powerful next step to advance your career and make a greater impact. Offering hands-on field experience and internship connections, the degree is accredited by the Council on Social Work Education and available as a three-year track for 16 months if you earned a BSW in the last six years. So join UCF in daring to invent what's next for your career, your field, and beyond. Visit ucf.edu forward slash online. Jocelyn, what's next? So you're overseeing all of this and it's growing and hundreds of emerging

social workers are doing their field placements through this program. And some people I think would stop there and focus on that. And that would be your social work endeavor. And that is, to my understanding, not what happened. So what happens next? Well, I was living in D.C. at the time. It was during the financial crisis of 2007, really, to about 12. So every summer I would go back to Texas and start another program with Kathy. I don't really manage, like I said, these programs. I just innovate them. I pioneer them. I get them running with results and then hand them over. And so that's I've started a few more programs. Tell us about CARES, because CARES is a really interesting one. That is an interesting one. I have some great hair over that one. Imagine putting social workers in a Wall Street investment bank, real estate investment bank.

Most people wouldn't imagine it, and you have. And our listeners and viewers have specifically asked us to learn more about outside-the-box social work careers. And so this just is fascinating to me. Well, we didn't call it public-private partnerships. I used to call it triangulation. You know, it was the social workers, the real estate investment bank, and the University of Texas. But it is a public-private partnership. So what happened is we, after the financial crisis, switched to be a single family residential platform.

And that's kind of a bad word in today's language. But really, the truth is there's 100 million Americans that can't get a mortgage. And we saw that being in D.C., that they were going to not be able to get a mortgage and they needed somewhere to live. So we started to buy houses and we renovate them and they're in good school districts, right? Maybe year two, most of the bad problems would sort of end up on my desk. I wouldn't say bad problems, but things that were out of the box. Well, this one was a bad problem. A woman in Florida had a not ideal personal circumstance and couldn't pay rent, but she was in nursing school and she was going to be able to pay rent three or four months. So that was sort of the catalyst. Of course, the answer was, yes, you can stay in the house. she was super articulate and she explained to me why she needed to stay in the house. And it just sort of gave me the idea that this was going to be a factor, right? Evictions. Another friend of mine mentioned it to me too, because I had such a close relationship with the

University of Texas. So I think this program could go in any financial firm or anyone collecting money. So basically, you understand social work, you hear about this problem, and if I'm following, you then start to house social workers in the firm to help somebody like this woman access appropriate resources to do everything possible to stay in her home and thrive. Well, so what of social workers the best at de-escalating situations, right? So I was really close to the dean, Dean Zias at this point, and as well as Dean Cole at the University of Texas. And so I went to them and they are entrepreneurial deans and they loved it. They said, this is pioneering. So they were on board. So that, and there was a lot of trust because of the Cap City was, and I was

already on the board. So we went to work and they gave us a very talented professor, Joan, and she took four interns and she just started developing best practices. It took two years to really get it off the ground and really understand how to, you know, on both ends, the business people don't understand what these social workers are doing. The social workers don't major in social work school to work at a Wall Street investment bank. They just don't, okay? You know that. But after one year in Joan's program, it was so wildly successful. We had 111 people up for eviction. Eviction, like the letter's going to go on the door. The family's got to move. It's a hard thing to understand, but you can't live in a house for free because there's property

taxes their school taxes it's the margins aren't as high as everyone thinks they are i mean by the time you paid the maintenance and right we wanted to have a a gentle way things happen in people's lives you know and so instead of putting a big note on the door and making it humiliating and then god only knows what can ensue in the family trauma for sure we wanted to give them a soft landing so 111 people were up for eviction about 35 percent within we saved half half didn't have to move where there had already been a decision that they simply could not stay in their home they were therefore able to do so because of social workers helping them access appropriate resources to stay right some if you had cancer we had a way to keep you in the house if you were a

former veteran, you know, social workers, they figured out different channels and we helped. And by the end of this year, half were able to stay in the house. Within 30 days, 30%, I believe, by 90 days were completely paid up. It was phenomenal results. And the next year was better and better. And so fast forward to COVID, we have all this sort of set up. And of course, people had a hard time, you know, couldn't pay their rent. And the rent rebatements from the government were announced. And so our social workers were able to go access $56 million of rent rebatement for our residents during COVID. And it's like, it's completely, that's just great for everybody. Do you think that those social workers housed in a corporate setting were even

more poised to be able to understand how to access the appropriate resources because they were already there? Is that possible? Just already being in a corporate setting and understanding the social work principles and the resources. It wasn't just like all of a sudden you showed up and you couldn't pay your rent. We were organized so that we could go right to a resident who had a problem, say, what's the matter? And we might be able to work something out. I mean, things happen. And COVID was a special situation. But in the normal world, things happen. People lose their jobs. Things happen. And it's obviously, I mean, part of what really struck me learning about the CARES program is it benefits everyone. I mean, most importantly, it benefits the family

to stay in the home, but it benefits the property owners and managers as well, of course. And social workers became the linchpin for that. I mean, as you describe in part of the literature of the program, it's integrating social work principles into property management. That's just extraordinary. And I agree with you. I think there's versions of this that could be replicated in so many corporate settings. How do we do that? I was lucky, again, the executive management at Amherst never tells me no. They let me tinker with these social sciences, and it's expensive, too, to bring this on and incubate it. It might not work. We had to have a few sit-downs with people that didn't understand, you know, I mean, nobody wants that. So find management that is interested

and, you know, it's a win-win helping whatever it is, say it's a car company. I mean, they don't want to repossess a car. I'm just making this up. I don't know anything about car companies, but I know that we want people to see it costs money to have to evict people. We don't want to, A, we don't want to do it and B, it's expensive. And so I think this benefits everybody, maybe credit card companies too? I don't know. Anybody who has a collection department. So Jocelyn, it's incredible that you started this CARES program. What is the status today? Well, I incubated the program and our government liaison, a very talented woman called Ginger Charles, really took it by the horns and expanded it and grew it. And now we have

hired actually some of our interns and we have full-time social workers that work in the firm who help with not only the evictions, but sometimes we have natural disasters too, like hurricanes and tornadoes and things like that. So I incubated it and Ginger gave it life. Incredible. Well, thank you. Thank you. As we're talking about this, one thing I'm thinking, like with these interviews for social work talks, I often send them along to people I think will be interested. And I am going to do my very best to get this conversation heard by as many schools of social work as possible,

including board members, because more and more, the social work programs, it's my understanding, at universities tend to have boards that have more of a corporate structure, you know, people in business who care about social work and social services, and yet they may not have thought of this kind of innovative solution. And I want board members at social work schools to hear about your work. That just popped into my head. So what do you think? I think that's a great idea, but that's another thing that happened. Dean Zayas started, I moved back to Austin from D.C. My daughter was in first grade and Dean Zayas started at that time. And Tonya Voss introduced me to him. That was a pivotal point, too. He I was the first person

he appointed to his board. And I said, look, he wanted to be the scholarship dean because the University of Texas had incredible research, incredible research like like the University of Texas has perhaps the highest research funding of any I mean it's I don't have it right here but but super high super high research dollars I do have it right here it is um 37.5 million research dollars I mean that's incredible it's incredible and the professors and the people doing the research was incredible. So I learned all of this and how amazing the research was. Dean White was there before Dean Zias, and I knew her too, and she had to approve all of my Cap City kids. So Dean White set the school up beautifully for this research. Well,

but what we didn't have was an endowment. So the endowment was $3 million or something, in social workers, as you know, have the same debt as everybody else, and they don't get paid what they should. This is why the boards at some of the schools have really diversified. I think it used to be that the boards of the schools were all social workers, and because of the endowment, that has changed, and that could be part of how we funnel this idea out there. Well, that's kind of where I was going. I mean, he brought me to the meeting, and I don't want this to sound disrespectful, but he wanted to be the scholarship dean. He said, look, we're losing students to Berkeley, Michigan, because we don't have any endowment. And I want to be the number one. I

loved him. I love him still. I want to be the number one dean. I said, all right, I'm with you. And he took me, and they were reading poetry in the advisory meeting. And as much as that's great, I said, Dean, that is not going to get us scholarships. And so we then started recruiting business people. And then the business people would go out. I would say like, OK, it's great to be in the business school advisory board, but, you know, come to our meetings, too. And over time, we were out shaking our can.

I mean, everywhere we could. And the endowment grew 600 percent in those six years that I was the chairperson. Amazing. We had the great responses, too, from the president of the school, President Powers and President Fendes. Both were supportive. So you just sort of start at the top and say, look, this is what we want to do. And they couldn't have been more supportive. I mean, in that lane, but sort of in the reverse direction, what advice do you have for social workers who are looking to be in a more corporate setting or entrepreneurial setting? It depends on what someone wants to do. I mean, a lot of times social workers don't go to the social work school to be in a corporate setting. I mean, but the ones that do are incredibly valuable, in my opinion.

I mean, there's a lot of things that they could do. Think of a gap and fill it. I love this idea of having a heartbeat department in the company. So that's where you celebrate employee anniversaries and you have team building events. And if somebody is putting fish in the microwave every day and smelling up the office for the afternoon, the social worker can kind of mediate the situation and they can even work in HR. It's unlimited. I agree with you. I mean, I think it is such a valuable education and social workers are undervalued often in the marketplace. You called yourself a wannabe social worker. I would

say it's more like my mom is also a social worker and she would say you are an honorary social worker. You're not a wannabe social worker, you're an honorary social worker. And I'm curious, how would you say starting these social work-led organizations has changed, if at all, you and your approach to finance? Well, I think that my approach to finance was a little bit different anyway, coming sort of from the blue collar background. What social work really did for me was it confirmed what I always knew that it's not just about the numbers. It, you know, finance is about the numbers, who does the deal, who makes the money. But it's, I always felt that the human element was also very important. I think one of the famous investors, Peter Drucker,

says like culture eats strategy for breakfast. And, and it does. And what a social worker can do is bring in the human component and it made me see risk differently. I mean, I see risk differently than my peers. Yeah. Tell us about that. Well, social work gave me language for what I always felt. If you don't have a good culture, it's going to show up on your balance sheet eventually. You know, if you don't take care of people, you're not going to have a business. I mean, growing up in Pasadena, I watched it being, we didn't call it macroeconomics, but I watched volatility before I knew what the word volatility was, because Houston used to live and die based on the price of oil. And what a lot of people don't know is that a high price of oil

is a global tax, because petrochemicals make everything, are involved in anything. So whenever you have a, the price of oil go up, rise, everything goes up. So interest rates, all of those things that were happening on the ground level in the blue collar neighborhood, I wasn't calling it macro, global macroeconomics, but you know, it was. So understanding like it goes to the dinner table. I mean, global macroeconomics was Tuesday in Houston, Texas in the blue collar neighborhood. Right. Well, Houston, Texas, I believe is the most integrated city in the U.S. 142 nationalities, I think, living in harmony. Houston is amazing. Jocelyn Byrne, you are amazing. Thank you so much for joining Social Work Talks. We really appreciate it. And I hope

that we can continue this conversation over time. And I hope to see more from you in the social work sphere. Well, I wrote a lot of these programs up and I'm posting them to give them out for free. I think that's kind of the best way to grow the programs. So they're on my LinkedIn. Okay, great. Well, we will put that in the show notes portion for our listeners and our viewers. And thank you so much. Oh, thanks for having me, Elizabeth. I love social workers. Thanks for everything that you all do. I see you. Take care. Thank you.