Community Financial Education Foundation

An important tenet of CFEF’s commitment to financial capability is serving the residents of Washington DC. In the fall of 2010, CFEF launched a partnership with So Others May Eat (SOME), a community organization that helps the poor and homeless of the nation’s capital. CFEF and SOME initiated after-school financial education classes for students aged 6-15 at two separate SOME locations.

At the Thea Bowman House, staff member Hythia Phifer helped coordinate the eight-week financial education sessions in tangent with a Thea Bowman House program called SOME Bucks. The initiative, which encourages students to earn points and prizes in exchange for attendance and behavior, was bolstered by CFEF’s efforts.

“The class helped the children understand currency,” Phifer says, “and fostered an understanding of the importance of being responsible with whatever money they accrued.” After designing their own currency, learning to write checks, holding auctions and participating in other engaging educational games, the weekly classes “only improved [the youth’s] participation in the SOME Bucks program,” Phifer says.

CFEF is grateful to have a community partner such as SOME that recognizes the intrinsic need for quality financial education. “Most of the families [we serve] are just learning how to budget for the first time,” Phifer notes. SOME encourages all recipients of its services to make wise decisions about spending; yet by specifically targeting SOME’s youth population, Phifer believes that SOME can “break this cycle” of mounting debt “and foster financial independence” for all DC residents.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2011 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Success Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.