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Commissioner explains new financial education initiative for youth
0:33:25
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170 sec
Commissioner Vilda Vera Mayuga details DCWP's new financial education empowerment initiative for students. The program aims to provide financial education to youth, primarily targeting middle school and up, with plans to expand to all school districts by 2030.
- Three components: financial educators in schools, a resource hub, and in-school banking with a match savings program
- Workshops will be provided for students, teachers, and parents/guardians
- Initiative will start in January 2026 in selected school districts
Vilda Vera Mayuga
0:33:25
Thank you.
0:33:26
And, I am absolutely obsessed with this topic and I think, you know, we all take obviously from our personal experiences, and I have two young kids myself, so I really want to make sure that they and others receive the support and the tools that they need so that they become, the time they become adults, right, they know what to do.
0:33:45
And the way that that's going to be looking like is that we have three components to our approach to financial empowerment and youth.
0:33:53
We certainly are building on our proven track record, right, success of financial empowerment for adults.
0:34:00
So right now, we're actively working with NYC public schools to identify the school districts where we will launch in January of twenty twenty six.
0:34:11
And so that's the first component.
0:34:12
We are looking to place financial educators in a number of districts starting in January.
0:34:18
Those financial educators are sort of like that glue that's going to keep it all together within the district that they're assigned to.
0:34:25
And that means developing workshops that will be provided by these educators to not only students, but also to the teachers and the parents and guardians and everybody that is supporting our youth in our New York City public schools.
0:34:40
Those workshops also are meant to be two generation, right?
0:34:46
So it's not just for the students, but also for the adults so that they know how to support their youth.
0:34:52
In addition to that, we are also building a resource hub so that we can have a repository of information and tools that are available that are culturally competent and address the various issues that our youth need to tackle and learn at the various ages since we obviously want to make sure that we are targeting primarily from middle school up because research has shown that that is just the sweet spot where we want to make sure that there's this intervention happening and the knowledge that is being passed through.
0:35:24
As we expand, right, I mean the goal is to expand and have a financial educator in every school district by 02/1930.
0:35:31
So we're very excited about that.
0:35:33
Where we're at, like I said, we are very close to identifying and sharing the locations of where we will have these financial educators starting in January, and then that will be paired with the conversations that we're having with financial institutions to launch in school banking as well so that we can develop and promote safe banking and asset building within our youth.
0:35:57
And then the last component is that we want to make sure that we teach the youth how to interact with money, how to develop the proper behavior about it through a match savings program and make sure that they understand what that means and what that looks like as they enter adulthood.