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When Dan Tuft recalls his first meeting with Jeffrey Augustin, his eyes fill with tears.
“We had this immediate connection. We were just standing there in his shop in downtown Trenton talking about what it’s like to run a business and the challenges you face,” Tuft says.
Tuft knows the joys and the loneliness of small-business ownership, but not the extra hurdle faced by Augustin, who was formerly incarcerated. They met when Tuft’s congregation—the Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing in nearby Titusville, New Jersey—began supporting the Trenton Microloan Collaborative, which was started by Westminster Presbyterian and Princeton’s Nassau Presbyterian to assist formerly incarcerated people. Augustin was the first beneficiary of the program, before Washington Crossing got involved, and his story helped inspire the congregation’s participation.
Jeffrey Augustin in his New Jersey store. The small business received an investment from the Trenton Microloan Collaborative.
When organizers told Augustin he could get a $2,000 microloan, he said what he could really use was help with his accounting and taxes, so that’s what they arranged.
“It definitely lifted a whole lot of weight” off his shoulders, he says.
He laughs remembering how many people offered to help him, as the first recipient, but adds of the help, “It was God-sent for me.”
The assistance gave Augustin a firmer financial footing, which in turn made him eligible to apply for larger grants elsewhere. Though the microloan program typically offers $2,000 loans, organizers form a relationship with applicants and listen to them, as Augustin’s experience demonstrated. A business owner who had been established for two years, he knew best what his business needed, and the help he received set him up for success.
According to the NAACP, African Americans and Hispanics represent 56 percent of the nation’s incarcerated people, though they represent just 32 percent of the U.S. population. The microloan program helps form bonds of mutual respect between recipients and the community, and it has given the Washington Crossing congregation a chance to put its values into practice.
“We don’t believe we can actually be antiracist without being in relationship with communities of color,” says Rev. Kim Wildszewski, the congregation’s senior minister.
Jacque Howard, treasurer of the Trenton Microloan Collaborative, agrees.
“If we’re in relation, then people who do not look like each other, maybe don’t speak the same initial language, they can still come together because they know this person’s coming from a space of wanting to learn,” Howard says. “Washington Crossing, they’re coming to the table with true, genuine concern and also a willingness to listen and to be in relation.”
The congregants and the microloan board members and recipients don’t, by and large, look alike. But those differences are an asset, Howard says: “When you’re doing a potluck supper, if everybody brings a protein, that’s probably not going to work out. But if people bring different things, before we know it, we’ve had this amazing meal and more than likely someone’s experienced something that was a little bit different than what they’ve had before.”
Washington Crossing’s Faith Expression and Funding Team triggered a culture shift when they connected with the program, supporting it with a check and also shopping at recipients’ businesses, buying their products, and inviting them to their congregation.
Which is how Tuft found himself in Augustin’s Dealz Dealz Dealz store, and why Augustin and building contractor Pete Lewis—one of the recipients of a loan with funds provided by Washington Crossing—were at a July 2025 coffee hour.
To Wildszewski, the beauty of the congregation’s participation was in recognizing the value of the collaborative’s work and asking to join it—and from there, seeking relationship with microloan recipients. Tuft agrees. “I think it was just a wonderful example of when everyone involved is welcoming each other with open arms, you can create some pretty powerful stuff.”
Powerful enough to reduce a man to tears.