Volume 9 – Number 37 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019
BLACK HISTORY: 365 DAYS PER YEAR
MENTORING IMPACTS WHOLE COMMUNITIES
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MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE HER LEGACY STANDS THE TEST OF TIME
WORDS AT A TIME: HOW TO TALK ABOUT RACE
NEW YEAR. HAPPIER YOU.
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contents 7 New year, happier you 9 Black History Month: 365 days of the year 10 Roots: Bishop T.D. Jakes leads a traveling exhibit on slavery 12 Mentoring: Parramore Kidz Zone 14 Health and Wellness – Putting your strengths first 16 Mentoring: Youth mentored to put food back in the community 18 Workplace: Employees may be able to help you pay off student debt 20 A way to talk about race, 6 words at a time 24 5,000 Role Models of Excellence Project 27 Aging with optimism 28 Travel: What every frequent flyer should know 29 Sports: Recognizing a true Hall of Fame dad 30 Giving for good 32 How to rekindle the romance in your marriage 33 Good Read: Words of power 34 Undersung Heroes – African American Read-In 36 Real Estate: Investing in the Orlando market 38 Medically Speaking: Infertility – finding new paths 40 Education: Boost women’s confidence to fix STEM gender gap
44 COVER STORY
MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE HER LEGACY STANDS THE TEST OF TIME Statue of Mary McLeod Bethune on the campus of Bethune-Cookman University Photo and cover photo by John Reeves
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42 ONYX Profile: Derrick Blue 43 ONYX Profile: Lena Graham-Morris 44 Cover Story: Mary McLeod Bethune’s Legacy Stands the Test of Time 46 Florida Scope 48 Money Matters: The co-op that’s keeping community money out of big banks 51 Credit card fraud is down due to chip technology 53 Taxpayers beware 54 Food and Wine: Three red wine drinks for Valentine’s Day
JOI N US FOR WOM E N ON T H E MOV E
FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2019 11:30 A.M. ALFOND INN, WINTER PARK, FL Women on the Move celebrates trailblazers who make positive impacts in their communities and their chosen professions. This event has become a highly-anticipated event to acknowledge these accomplishments.
For more information, visit www.onyxwotm.com
REAL ESTATE
Investing In The Orlando Housing Market In 2019
By Dee Parker
Compared to other cities with competitive real estate markets, investing in Orlando housing market makes more sense since it has experienced a 6% increase in property prices in a year. In the first half of 2018, house flippers still made an average gross return of 44.3%, or $65,250 per deal. And, according to Zillow, the first-time home buyers in the U.S. looking for an affordable home without much competition may have the best luck in the State of Florida. Top 3 Reasons to Invest in Orlando in 2019: Job Growth: Orlando is the new hub for many young professionals especially those with various types of technological expertise, including engineers and IT professionals. This city has experienced an annual job growth of around 4.4% and is also one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country. The city is also set to experience its highest job growth rate in the 10 years to come. A market with high job growth is a great market for real estate investment as well.
Information compiled by Dee Parker, Parker Realty
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Population Growth: During the last 3 years, the population in Orlando has been growing at the rate of 7.2% which has never been experienced by this city before. And, with all the new jobs coming to the area, it’s very likely this trend will continue in 2019. (This means the demand for housing is likely to increase.) Affordability: In Orlando it is still possible to purchase fully renovated 3-bedroom properties in good neighborhoods for as little as $150,000. Ten Florida markets have fully rebounded from the disruption caused by the global financial crisis. Most impressively, the Orlando housing market made it in the top 5 best places to invest in real estate for the third year in a row, and Orlando is ranked high in the Top 10 best cities for first-time home buyers in 2018!
Adobe Stock
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rlando is one of the best places to buy rental property in the state of Florida in 2019. Located in Florida’s “sun belt” region, the area is known for its warm climate, beautiful beaches, world famous amusement parks, and entertainment and the market is fueled by job seekers, baby boomer retirees, and students who want to live in an area that offers a high quality of living at a reasonable cost. With an average rental of $1,599, the Orlando real estate market is expanding at a great pace and people from all over the country are either choosing to move permanently or invest here. The demand for single family homes has been on the rise in the Sunshine State for quite some time. Still, it’s possible to acquire fully renovated properties in good Florida neighborhoods for under $175,000. What’s even more interesting is that, despite these incredibly low housing prices statewide, many home seekers are choosing to rent instead of buy. As you can imagine, this is causing rental rates to skyrocket.
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TECHNOLOGY
THE STATS ARE IN:
Credit card fraud is down 75 percent because of chip technology
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he whole idea behind integrating EMV® chips into credit and debit cards was to make transactions safer and more secure for consumers and merchants. A recent report by Visa shows that it has hit the mark. Visa took a look at the numbers, comparing chip card use by consumers and adoption by merchants from the initial rollout of chip cards in 2015 to now. What they found is pretty staggering. Counterfeit fraud, where a criminal steals your payment card number and imprints it onto another card to use in-person at their favorite store, is down 75 percent from September 2015 to March 2018 at U.S. merchants that are chip-enabled. The sharp drop illustrates that the chip technology is doing its job as intended. That’s important, because criminals are always on the prowl searching for an easy way to get money. Data that travels through a payment network when you insert your chip card is different than the data that is sent when you swipe your payment card using its magnetic stripe. The chip generates a onetime code that can only be used for one transaction. If cybercriminals steal your card number from the merchant’s system or from a data breach, it is essentially impossible to commit counterfeit payment
card fraud because the one-time code cannot be re-used and the card number alone is not enough to complete a transaction at a point-of-sale (POS) machine. So chip cards and terminals protect the customer from his or her stolen payment card number being counterfeited and protect the merchant from having to refund the money while losing their merchandise. In the end, everyone wins except for the fraudster. Some other findings from the Visa study include: More than 3.1 million U.S. merchant locations or 67 percent of U.S. storefronts are now fully chip-enabled and accepting chip cards. As recently as September 2015, only 392,000 merchants were accepting chip transactions. That’s a 680 percent increase since chip technology debuted in the U.S.[ii]97 percent of overall U.S. payment volume in June 2018 was on chip-enabled cards.[iii]In September 2015, $4.8 billion was spent on chip transactions. In June 2018, that figure had jumped to $76.7 billion.[iv]Reasons for merchants to switch to the chip More and more merchants are accepting chip card transactions, but some, especially smaller merchants, have been slow to adopt
the technology. But there are good reasons for updating to accept chip card payments, not the least of which is customer expectation. People who have chip cards expect the payment security they provide, and not accepting chip payments might be seen as a negative with consumers. Other reasons for adopting chip technology include: Implementing chip-based POS terminals is easier than ever before. It has become standard technology among many merchants and their technology suppliers. Transactions involving chip-based payment cards at many merchants are faster than when EMV chip cards first became available thanks to Visa Quick Chip technology.Implementing and investing in chip-based POS systems in many cases can also support new payment technologies like contactless payments.For more information about the study, or to read the findings, visit Visa, Inc. at https://usa.visa. com/visa-everywhere/security/visa-chipcard-stats.html. EMV® is a registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries and an unregistered trademark elsewhere. The EMV trademark is owned by EMVCo, LLC. Content provided by Brandpoint ONYX MAGAZINE 51