A Course on Financial Education for the Poor Will Change Your Life and Theirs

Here’s how an idea about financial education for the poor turned into a movement.

Alex volunteered at a community center. She saw a need for a financial education program for the poor. She started by defining who she wanted the program to reach: people from low-income families, ages 30 thru 50. Her work at the community center provided plenty of evidence that there was an immediate need.

She needed guidelines to figure out how to build such a program. She found exactly what she needed at the NFEC.

Alex wanted her students to get to a level of knowledge that would enable them to use what they learned in class. This meant getting them to the skills and concepts stage of Webb’s Depth of Knowledge scale. She would push them to reach strategic thinking, but if that was asking too much for this first class, she’d be OK with that. A course with 32 hours of class time would be sufficient to empower them to make positive changes in their financial behavior.

How to Deliver the Course Material to Maximize Financial Education for the Poor

The course would be presented to low-income adults who were old enough to know they had to plan for retirement and young enough that it wasn’t too late. Since this audience might not have a computer and internet, she decided that live instruction at the community center would make the class more accessible than an online program. The pace would be a hybrid system, based on a timeline and achievement. This would enable Alex to keep the class moving while making sure the students were ready to advance to a deeper level of knowledge.

Considering her target age group of 30 to 50-year-olds, it was a safe assumption that they all had previous experience with money and debt. The idea for this class was to help students see the importance and give them the ability to plan for retirement. This would also include investing and risk management as a secondary focus that was directly related to retirement planning.

Curriculum Considerations in Financial Education for Low Income Families

The next step was for Alex to consider the necessary and desired aspects of her financial education curriculum. It had to meet formal educational standards, so the class would be credible. It needed to be flexible and offer modules where students could dive deeper into topics that interested them. It also had to be directly relatable to the real-world situations that these low-income families struggled with every day. Helping poor adults with their immediate financial struggles would keep them engaged and incentivized to learn more.

Now Alex needed to find an experienced financial educator who was trained and certified by the NFEC and understood why financial education is important for this for this demographic. Thanks to the help of the NFEC, she found the perfect Certified Financial Education Instructor with years of experience teaching financial literacy to poor adults and low-income families. The certified financial educator instructor designation increased the legitimacy of the program and the experience would help the students relate.

Alex’s Course on Financial Education for the Poor is a Success

Of the 23 registered students, 19 of them graduated. 82% was a higher completion rate than Alex had anticipated. Those who graduated showed significant improvement in their financial knowledge.

Alex compiled the data into a report showing the undeniable value this program had on the community and the individuals within it. She would make the report the center piece of her application for funding and growth.