Girls With Impact TEENS TAUGHT ABOUT FINANCIAL LITERACY
Program teaches youths finances, business skills
As the school year ended and summer began, Page Curtin, a mother of three, was looking at a summer of canceled plans for her children. Her daughter M. G., 12, would not be going to sleep- away camp as planned.
Then she heard through her husband’s employer about a program that aimed to teach girls financial, entrepreneurial and business skills in a five- week virtual program. M. G. jumped at the opportunity, and during the program she joined other girls to create a mask awareness campaign that would be driven by tweens.
The program, Girls With Impact, “became a great Plan B,” Curtin said. “It provided a little bit of structure to the week. She had homework, and she was accountable for each session.”
It also helped her daughter begin to understand things many parents fret about for their children: knowledge of personal finances, business skills and the ability to collaborate.
Financial literacy programs are intended to give children an understanding of business skills at an early age. The practical guidelines they learn will help them later when they need to make decisions about cars, college and debt, and the lessons will stick with them as they begin to manage their own finances in their 20s.
Private banks and wealth managers have for years designed programs to help the children of their wealthiest clients with these skills. But Girls With Impact is a nonprofit organization created by a group of successful businesswomen.
A majority of parents surveyed this year ranked financial literacy at the top of their list of non- core courses they wanted taught in school, according to a report to be released next week by the Charles Schwab Foundation. The report surveyed 5,000 people in February before the pandemic took hold and 2,000 more in June.
Second was health and wellness, at around 40%; college placement finished third. When parents were asked about the importance of various life skills to their children, learning money management tied with the dangers of drugs and alcohol.
“This pandemic has exposed so many Americans’ financial vulnerabilities,” said Carrie Schwab- Pomerantz, chair and president of the Charles Schwab Foundation. “People are putting a high priority on educating this next generation, so they don’t experience what they’re experiencing today.”
The aim of Girls With Impact is to push the students to grow comfortable discussing money and ideas with new people their own age and learn skills that may spur them to go into business themselves.
“You can go online and learn pieces of this, but the beauty of this program is in the structure, the experience of being in a setting with peers” who might question your ideas, said Jennifer Openshaw, the chief executive of Girls With Impact and a former Wall Street executive. “It can be scary.”
When the organization surveyed graduates of the program, it found that 81% viewed themselves as leaders after the course, versus 47% before, and 91% said they were more confident raising their hand, an increase from 44% at the start. More than 80% said they were better equipped to manage cash flow in a business and felt more financially literate in general.
In its original incarnation, the program brought together girls from different socioeconomic backgrounds who lived relatively close to one another. But it has expanded to reach girls around the country, with some paying the full $ 495 tuition for the program and others receiving financial aid through the group’s mix of individual and corporate donors.
The program has allowed participants to focus on real- world issues such as the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“One of our graduates said entrepreneurship is activism in disguise,” said Josephine Panzera, the organization’s chief operating officer, who has a background in corporate finance. “She wants to take her frustration and execute on it.”
Neha Shukla, a 15- yearold high school sophomore in Mechanicsburg, Pa., began worrying in April about her grandparents contracting the coronavirus.
She applied to the program, and with her interest in engineering and technology, she began working on a device that would keep people 6 feet apart. The result is a hat with sensors that beep and vibrate when someone breaches the 6foot perimeter.
“I just realized that it’s difficult to estimate 6 feet,” Neha said. “Once I programmed the device, wired, soldered and assembled it, it really came together. You no longer have to guess.”
About three weeks before the stay- at- home orders were put in place, Openshaw addressed a group of women at a fundraiser in Greenwich, Conn.
But it was the young women who talked about their ventures who brought the affluent women to consider making donations. One of them, Kellie Taylor, 19 and a Girls With Impact participant, started her business two years ago as a senior in high school. Her company, named Cleo after her grandmother, is building an app to find beauty and fashion resources for African- Americans.
Taylor, who grew up in Stratford, Conn., said her business was inspired by her braids.
“I had the hardest time finding someone in Stratford or Bridgeport to do my hair,” she said.
She was encouraged by her mother to start a business. Two years later, Taylor is refining it.
“I still have my mentor’s number,” she said. “I text her whenever I need her help.”