PROVIDENCE — Frank Shea, executive director of Olneyville Housing Corporation, was dismayed when many of the renters of his nonprofit corporation’s subsidized apartments turned to rent-to-own stores for furnishings.

Those stores charge above-market interest rates on products offered at marked-up prices, Shea said, and he figured that his tenants were making bad decisions that would cloud their families’ financial prospects.

So now Olneyville Housing is steering first-time homebuyers and renters to Cardi’s furniture stores, which Shea said has more generous credit terms than the rent-to-own stores.

That move is the kind of action that is being recommended by a Poverty, Work and Opportunity Task Force appointed by Mayor David N. Cicilline. The task force yesterday presented its report, “Pathways to Opportunity,” to the mayor at a public ceremony at Casey Family Services, a social-service agency with local headquarters in Washington Park.

Cicilline drew from social-service agencies, philanthropies, businesses and other places to assemble the 35-member task force.

The group presented an array of proposals to help low-income people get ahead in life, including reining in high-cost check-cashers and lenders, expanding adult education and preventing teenage pregnancies. For example, the task force said, poor people need better access to financial education to help them avoid predatory lenders and unnecessarily high-cost mortgages to make sound investment decisions and to plan for the future.

Given that nearly a quarter of city residents and nearly 36 percent of city children live in families with incomes below the poverty line, it is important to the future of Providence that poor people be helped to climb the economic ladder, Cicilline said at the ceremony.

One of the chapters of the task force report is “Reduce the High Cost of Being Poor,” and it covers the kinds of problems faced by Shea’s clients.

There are three rent-to-own stores on Olneyville Square — there are six in the city, according to the report — enticing people to buy furniture, appliances and electronics on expensive installment plans, and “they are just sucking money out of neighborhoods” such as Olneyville and Valley, Shea declared.

“The number of times we saw the rent-a-center truck come was just heartbreaking,” he said. Low-income people all too often see their purchases repossessed because of a temporary financial setback, he said, and they wind up empty-handed.

Olneyville Housing solicited Cardi’s for help and set up a model apartment with Cardi’s furnishings to show renters and homebuyers what was available. Because Olneyville Housing gives low-income renters and homebuyers financial education, the tenants become positioned to qualify for mortgages and other kinds of credit.

Given their respective levels of creditworthiness, “people will get the credit they deserve” through the same offers Cardi’s has for everyone, Shea said.

“We think this program just gets them what they earned,” he added.

The task force recommends, among other proposals:

•That financial institutions be encouraged to cater to low-income customers with more-affordable banking services, such as checking and saving accounts and wire transfers of money to the customers’ home countries.

•That state government, either directly or by empowering municipalities, limit the interest and fees that can be charged for financial services and regulate other terms, and use licensing to restrict the number of “payday lenders” and check-cashing businesses.

•That city government enact a living-wage ordinance, which would require the city to increase the compensation of its own low-wage employees and to mandate that certain businesses and nonprofit organizations with municipal contracts or that benefit from municipal subsidies also boost the compensation of their low-wage employees.

•That city government better coordinate with the Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to expand adult education. Task force member Johan E. Uvin, director of the office of adult education for the state department, said there are 1,014 people enrolled in adult education in Providence, 1,500 waiting and tens of thousands who need it.

The state and the city, Uvin said after the presentation, want to improve the performance of adult-education providers and avoid duplication of effort, and they intend to lobby the business sector to contribute money to adult education.

•That city government and its partners find and implement a better way to prevent teen pregnancies, such as the Plain Talk program created by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and to support teens who are parents. The recommendation arises from the belief that when teens have children, it interferes with the teens’ education and employment

Cicilline said he will review the recommendations and that he is already acting on some of them, but he stopped short of committing to all of them.

For instance, in his first mayoral election campaign he opposed a living-wage ordinance, and he balked when the outgoing City Council last year tried to give it fast-track approval. It did not pass.

The mayor said, among other initiatives, that he soon will announce an apprenticeship plan for the city’s massive school construction project; that the city has invested $35,000 in Stepping Up, a program to develop the work force for health-care employment; and that he will name a team to analyze and make recommendations for improvement to the city’s First Source program.

The controversial First Source ordinance — some City Council members and activists complained that the mayor had to be goaded and ultimately ordered by a court to put it into action — requires employers who benefit from certain city subsidies and tax breaks or hold a city-financed construction contract to give hiring preference to job-seeking local residents on a list maintained by the city.

gsmith@projo.com