Kids-4Change

We went to present for the Kids-4Change organization.  Kids-4Change is a very unique organization. It was founded by a 11 year old girl named Shaniah St. Catherine. Her mom, Alice St. Catherine, helps manage and run everything. They recruit kids from their neighborhood and put on various events that improve the world and teach the kids valuable lessons about citizenship and becoming a beneficial member of their community. This was also the first time we brought the newest member of our board Craig Brunner along to watch the presentation. When we got there we met the little girl who founded the organization and I have to admit she was better at running an organization than I am! She is a pro at only 11 years old. I hope to be at the level she is in the next year! The presentation went smoothly just like the last one and on the way home we stopped for Five Guys burgers. SCORE!

Mr. Brunner + Our 1st Board Meeting

Craig Brunner is the father of my friend Chris Brunner and one of my dad’s closest friends. He is an accountant. When dad told him about the foundation we had started he immediately offered to help in any way he could. We had been looking for people to be on the foundation’s Board of Directors and Craig, being a friend and an accountant, was perfect for us. So we asked and he said he would gladly be on our Board. This prompted our first board meeting! The three of us talked about every aspect of the Foundation. What our next steps would be, how we get the word out, jobs for each of us, and more. We are hoping to add more members to the Board soon and I suppose we’ll be having many more Board meetings to come.

Conference in D.C.

We just got back from the annual Financial Literacy Leadership Conference in Washington D.C. I almost didn’t go because I had to miss school to do it, but it was a good decision to go because we are just starting out and there are a lot of things to learn about teaching wealth education. Also, there were many potential partners there that we might be able to work with.
When we first arrived I met Ted Daniels. Ted is the founder of his own foundation and is on the President’s Council for Financial Literacy. This was the 3rd Annual Conference his foundation has organized. We had Rosie Rios for the opening speaker. We also met his daughter Una. It seems like she helps run their foundation and was running the details of the conference. She knew my dad and was very nice to us.
Another person we met was Shante’, from the Urban Affairs Coalition. She was one of the presenters and she’s the Director of a program in Philadelphia that seems perfect for us to team up with. Hopefully we’ll have more on that later.
We got to learn about the financial literacy world and meet people to help expand our foundation. It was a win win. There were lots of workshops to choose from. We decided in the car on the way down which workshops we’d spend our weekend going to. We chose the workshops we felt would most benefit us and took notes on what the experienced presenters had to say. One of the workshops was about Cultural Differences and Financial Education and we met Holly Chase, who works at the Pennsylvania Office of Financial Education.
Overall it was a very beneficial trip for us and we look forward to going to the conference next year.

Enterprise Center

This was our first presentation. We presented to many kids in the program called Young Entrepreneurs, which is run by The Enterprise Center in Philadelphia. Each kid was given a certain amount of money to start up their business and The Enterprise Center staff helped them start and run their businesses. I did my intro, which went well even though I was nervous because it was my first time doing it. My dad then went up and did the rest of the presentation. It went really well and I think most of the kids understood the presentation. One thing I noticed, which I found interesting, was that the adults in the room seemed REALLY interested in the presentation and were taking notes even though the program is geared towards high school aged kids. This really pointed out how important financial education is.  These adults are desperately looking for advice to get themselves out of their money troubles and if they had been taught about it as a young adult they could have avoided it. Overall it was a good first presentation and hopefully we will do many more in the future.

Decision to Form

My first ever blog! We’re hoping that more and more people will get interested in what’s going on here at WEF and my blog will be the place where they can come and find out. For this first one, I figured I’d go back and tell you how it all got started.
You might wonder why a 15 year old high school student would decide to start a non-profit foundation. Well, I didn’t do it alone. My dad is a financial advisor so he spends his days giving advice about money and investing to his clients and he is constantly giving me tips about money at home. One day he was telling me about how important it is to get good advice when you invest your money. At the time I was preoccupied and frankly wasn’t interested in listening to him, so I said “Dad, I never have to worry about getting good advice because I have you!” This was my desperate attempt to end the conversation and continue on with what I wanted to do. But from my statement stemmed a long conversation between myself and my dad about how not everyone has a father that is a financial advisor to teach them about money. We think that it’s unfair that they don’t teach about it in schools. It is one of the most important things a person ever deals with in their life and they don’t teach it to you. My dad said he had thought about starting a foundation to teach kids about money himself but that he never had enough time. The more we talked about it the more we thought it needed to be done so we decided that if we did it together, between the two of us we could spend enough time to do it. We thought up the name “Wealth Education Foundation” and that’s when we began planning all the things we needed to do to start.