Hey everyone! It’s been a while since I last posted but we have been keeping busy. This has been a long and somewhat frustrating year for the Foundation. It seems like everything is moving very slo-o-o-w. Nevertheless, we have been making progress. “Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working”(Unknown Author).
Early in the year we were excited about several non-profits (including WEF) working together with the City Controller’s Office to put together Financial Literacy month in the schools. The bad news is that the person running it from the City Controller’s Office left, which halted most of the program. A new guy (we don’t know who he is yet) recently took over and is in the process of getting it back up to speed.
The other thing just making us crazy right now is that we filed our 501c3 application (which would make us a charitable organization) with the IRS and it has just disappeared. The IRS is supposed to come back to us with comments or give us the license and they haven’t done anything yet. We’re just waiting for whenever they get around to it. Very frustrating because we need the 501c3 to apply for grants.
Some good news is that Dad and I just got back from the Society for Financial Education and Professional Development’s (SFE&PD) Fourth Annual Financial Literacy Leadership Conference in Washington D.C. My dad has been to the conference every year and I have been there the last two years. It was great to see Ted and Una Daniels, the father-daughter team that runs the SFE&PD and puts the conference on every year. Every year they personally greet us and, to my surprise, remember who we are. They are always very nice and warm towards us and everyone at the conference. The conference provides valuable information that can help organizations like ours grow. Perhaps the most beneficial thing about the conference is the networking. Everyone there has a unique thing they bring to the table and if you find the right people, the networking alone can extremely benefit your organization. For example, this year we met several people that could potentially help us. One person that we met was David Anderson, the Executive Vice President of the non-profit Working in Support of Education (W!SE). His organization is dedicated to promoting financial literacy, business and social entrepreneurship in secondary schools nationwide to prepare students for college and the workplace. One cool thing about W!SE is that they have a certificate program where kids can complete a financial literacy course and get a certification By having W!SE’s name behind us, we could potentially teach our financial literacy curriculum in schools which is important to completing our task of reaching as many kids as possible. These kind of connections are what will help our organization get bigger and more effective.
We also reconnected with Shante’ who is with the Urban Affairs Coalition. She was excited to hear we are almost ready to send her our full curriculum. She needs to get it vetted and approved and then the Coalition can start using WEF to fulfill some of their mandates to teach financial literacy through their program. The great thing about that is we just have to bring our “Rules of Money” curriculum and they handle the funding and put together the groups.
That just about brings us up to date. From here we are pushing hard to finish up the expanded curriculum so we can get it out to several partners who are waiting on it, hopefully get our 501c3 and becoming associated with W!SE.
