Ex-Broker Gives Church Blue-Chip Help for the Needy

The merging of spiritual teachings with financial expertise may seem an unlikely combination to some. But it was the perfect fit for Peggy Graham-Hill, a former stockbroker who never forgot the lessons she learned as a girl in a small Alabama church.

An independent financial consultant, Graham-Hill, 38, devotes much of her time to serving as special projects director for the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. She directs more than a dozen of the social programs and educational efforts that have made the activist church renowned throughout Los Angeles.

“Without Peggy Graham-Hill we’d be at (a) deficit in housing . . . and a dozen special projects which we have assigned to her hands,” said the Rev. Cecil (Chip) Murray, pastor of First AME’s 7,500-member congregation. “She is the mainspring.”

With a full-time staff of three, Graham-Hill has sought and received millions of dollars for First AME’s programs, enabling the church to build facilities that house the poor, the elderly and the physically disabled.

She set up all six of First AME’s nonprofit corporations, through which many of the church’s programs are administered. She has done everything from teaching AIDS prevention to putting together a project in October in which 8,000 condom kits were distributed by four local churches during Sunday services.

Graham-Hill even monitors the type of food fed to the homeless. No fried chicken or french fries, she warns church volunteers, because grease is hard on a stomach that rarely gets a healthy meal. And put a little milk in the mashed potatoes, she says, to make the food go down a little easier.

Her duties are not only administrative. Graham-Hill is a teacher, adviser and hand-holder to many who need assistance in the local black community.

She recalled some of the requests she has gotten from homeless women for whom the church has provided shelter. “ ‘Would you do me a favor?’ ” Graham-Hill said she has been asked. “ ‘Call my mother and tell her I’m alive. I haven’t spoken to her in eight years.’ ”

“So I call mommy and say ‘I know your daughter. She’s alive and well.’ If I was the mother, that would scare me to death,” said Graham-Hill, who has a 5-year-old son. “But that’s all I can do.”

Graham-Hill’s job is a far cry from her former occupation as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. But she said that her new profession is, in a sense, a homecoming.

“I knew I was coming back to the community,” she said, speaking from her office in an elegant home near the church. “I could feel it.”

Graham-Hill laid the groundwork for her current position during the 10 years she worked for Merrill Lynch. While she worked in downtown Los Angeles as a stockbroker, Graham-Hill taught money management on a radio talk show, held investment classes in private homes and organized local investment clubs. Eventually, she began to handle investments for First AME church.

Unhappy with her work environment at Merrill Lynch, she left in 1984, a fact she mentioned to Murray.

“He said, ‘OK, you’re not working. I got something for you,’ ” she recalled with a smile. And Graham-Hill, who spent her childhood Sundays singing in a Baptist choir, began working for the church.

A friendly woman with a warm manner, Graham-Hill said her criteria for success are now different than when she was providing investment advice to wealthy clients.

In the brokerage business, she said, luck meant finding an investor with a million dollars to spend. In her current job, luck often means finding shelter for a family with no place else to go.

But that’s what she says makes the work so fulfilling. “I don’t know anything else I’d want to do,” she said. “It’s a different high than being a stockbroker. Here . . . It’s bodies you’re dealing with, people.”

Her first order of business at First AME was overseeing a $4-million housing development for the physically disabled, and since then, she hasn’t stopped.

First AME is renovating, building and developing more than 130 units of housing as well as a $15-million commercial building on Western Avenue that will include doctor’s offices, senior citizen housing and a bookstore.

“I have to find $2 million in a month and a half,” Graham-Hill said, shaking her head over pending projects. “I’ll find it. I always do.”

Graham-Hill can often be found giving financial advice to people trying to open businesses or on the verge of losing the roofs over their heads.

“It was incredible the number of people last year and this year who lost their homes,” she said. “They come to us in foreclosure, (when) they’ve got three days to get $10,000.”

Though the church cannot lend money to individuals, Graham-Hill said, “I offer alternatives” ranging from getting other people to invest with the person to sometimes lending money from her own pocket.

And she also offers another valuable service to First AME and other local churches--the ability to write funding proposals that meet standards set by institutions offering loans and grants. She said it is a skill often lacking at the grass-roots level, where organizers have good intentions but often lack the expertise and financing to turn their visions into reality.

“In our community very few know how to write the proposals,” Graham-Hill said. “The key is to try it, even if you don’t get it right. . . . (Government agencies) either get sick of listening to you or at some point in time they have to acknowledge you.”

“The city can always throw . . . in your face that you can’t write proposals,” said Graham-Hill. But “they can’t say that to me.”

Graham-Hill realizes she could get paid much more as a stockbroker, and admits that she sometimes gets tired juggling her various roles. But the weariness, she said, “only lasts a little while.”

And, whether the economy is healthy or hurting, there is always more to do.

“There can be a recession or not,” Graham-Hill said. “People still come in here hungry. People still need help with their businesses. The economy (only) affects things in the sense that it makes more people come, but it doesn’t affect my job.”