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Effective financial education for young people is real-life, relevant and personalized, suggests the CEO and cofounder of Moneythink , which trains college students to be financial mentors to high schoolers.
In 2008, with the Great Recession in full swing, a small group of University of Chicago students set out to help teenagers attending area high schools build their financial life skills. Following in their footsteps, Moneythink chapters in colleges across the country have been established to sponsor mentors who’ve worked with 10,000 high school students, many from low-income neighborhoods and schools.
“Our college mentors work in small groups with their high school mentees, meeting with them on average once per week for the entirety of the school year,” explains Moneythink CEO Ted Gonder. “We focus on building meaningful, credible, relatable relationships between the mentors and mentees.”
Among the tools Moneythink mentors rely on are an app called Moneythink Mobile, which offers digital challenges to build financial awareness, habits and skills. Partnerships with other youth-serving organizations supplement the curriculum.
“And we are currently building tools that are available to anyone, anywhere. One example is our college calculator that helps students understand the financial costs of college that are often not apparent, such as rent and books,” Gonder says.
“One of the things we pride ourselves on at MT is the ability to track our programs and the impact we have had along the way,” he adds. Among the lessons learned over the past eight years is that financial education should:
- offer contextually relevant content;
- be channeled through strong and personalized delivery channels;
- be able to access support structures for students and the program;
- offer opportunities to apply concepts in real life; and
- provide clear ways to drive and measure behavior change.
Moneythink welcomes partnerships with credit unions to use its educational products, Gonder says. For more information on the organization, visit its website.
