Celebrating Black History Month: From struggles to triumph: Celebrating Athalyah Yisrael’s journey to financial empowerment

Athalyah Yisrael is the second-to-last child of the two girls and two boys her parents have produced, and has successfully flipped the script and changed the course of her life from constant financial struggles to owning her well-established business, “Outliners Zone Empowerment.”
Yisrael’s journey from financial frustration to empowerment all started in 2015, when she was backed against the poignant wall of personal financial management challenges in her small business, Fun Park Rentals.

It is here where she provided excitement to children with the rental of bouncy castles and trampolines for children’s parties. Although it was bringing in a constant monthly income, her poor management of finances had resulted in stagnation of the business.
“By 2016, the ongoing cycle of living from paycheck to paycheck was very frustrating,” Yisrael has expressed.
Her husband Gabriel Yisrael attempted to assist her in improving her financial management by paying off her debt. This, however, proved futile, as the mismanagement of funds continued daily.
As soon as he would pay off her debt, she would shortly after be in more debt once again. At the end of 2016, her husband decided to stop paying off her debt and cautioned her to take control of her lavish spending.
According to Yisrael, “I did not know what I wanted to become, even after finishing school, but I was sent to live in London for a little while, and then I came back, started University, did my degree in Social Work, and I started working. I worked at Demerara Distillers Limited (DDL) for a few years, and it was there that I always had the desire to own my own business.”

This was the young woman’s financial turning point. She began seeking out courses to learn how to manage finances, how to keep it and multiply it for herself and generations to come. Based on her findings, she recognised that from her childhood to adulthood, none of her schooling had taught her about managing and keeping money, hence she was not financially educated.
She took the stems of her outlook and rooted them in the idea of “breaking free from financial illiteracy.” This was one chaotic realm she did not want to pass on to her children. Between 2016 and 2017, she created a money management system of splitting her fun rental income into five containers – Tithes, Invest, Save, Donate, and Spend.
In 2017, the birth of her Business Outliners Zone finally kicked off, as she experienced success in paying off her debt, confidently managing her income, and investing in assets. For the entire 2017, she began sharing the financial literacy and wealth creation educational principles that worked for her with companies, for their employees and friends for free.
The game changer came about when she began to charge $2000 from persons interested in transforming their finances. “What became evident was that those persons who paid the fee were more diligent in applying the principles to see the principles. Authenticating the quote “Those who pay pay attention”
Meanwhile, in late 2017, The African Cultural Development Association (ACDA) hosted a Ujamaa Challenge – helping youths launch a business idea. At the end of the challenge, she successfully emerged as the 2nd place winner with a prize money of $100,000.
In February 2018, her husband and she formally launched Outliers Zone – a training institute that would partner with companies to help their employee end the paycheck-to-paycheck living cycle.
The results continued to be transformational for companies and their employees. One client, Bianca Cummings, after completing the programme, was able to move from one source of income to three streams in less than three months.
In 2018 and 2019, more companies were requesting ending employee paycheck-to-paycheck solutions for their employees. The irony found itself constantly in different lives she helped, as Yisrael, who once was at a financially ached point in her life, began changing the lives of others, making them encounter financial freedom.
As she reflected on her most significant milestones, it is worth noting that in 2019, her business’s solution to ending ‘paycheck-to-paycheck’ living was selected as one of the 17 finalists of the Caribbean Innovation Competition (CIC), in the XIV Edition of the Talent and Innovation Competition of the Americas (TIC).
The company represented Guyana in Medellin, Colombia, where it was selected from 100,000 projects to represent the Caribbean & Guyana in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, back in November 2019.
As Mrs. Yisrael lends her perspective to her past trials, starting from the impoverished shards being sunk in her circumstances to now, she expressed, “We are immensely grateful for the business support organizations like the Small Business Bureau, the Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Georgetown Chambers of Commerce, and the 42 companies that booked our training programme over the years.”
To date, the company is proud to host “A Human Resource Manager’s Guide to Understanding Employee Financial Well-being”, which is set for February 26, 2024 in the conference room of the National Library. Admission to this event is $21,999, and interested persons can acquire more information about the event by contacting 617-0173.