For optimal creation of a viable program for teaching young adults about money, you can find all the materials you need here. To help you understand the process, we’re including the following illustration:

Richard Chase, loan administrator at Bank of the Southwest, was interested in teaching young adults about money because he believed financial knowledge would help them get approval and better rates when they came to apply for loans. Richard was active in his local Catholic Finance Association, a lay association of Catholics in the finance industry, and many of the members were young adults. He thought he might be able to engage them in financial education. Prior to the next CFA meeting, Richard sent out a brief online survey to all the members, and the results showed that they were quite interested in learning how to approve their chances of getting car loans.

Since the CFA members were at a prime life stage for learning about loan qualification, Richard set an initial goal of doing a two-hour workshop that would cover relevant topics. This was a relatively short time frame, so he was fine with just laying out the fundamentals of how loans got approved. His longer-term aim, though, was toward teaching young adults about money on a broader scale. For the first workshop teaching money skills, Richard decided to shoot for getting the members to the Analyze stage of Bloom’s Taxonomy, where they understood relationships between their own financial behaviors and whether they qualified for a loan.

Richard’s immediate goal and future designs for teaching young adults about money had become clear. Now he was tasked with choosing program delivery modes. He decided his workshop would be built around components based on a timeline, and delivered online using the latest web conferencing technology. That would allow the CFA members to take the workshop from the comfort of their own homes, but would hold them accountable to complete the instruction.

Teaching young adults about money required a further step for Richard: selecting topics to present. Their interest in loan qualification helped guide that choice. Richard thought he would meet his goal to teach teens about money principles centered around qualifying for auto loans with good interest rates by focusing on the topics of managing debt, building a credit profile, and risk management.

Richard’s next action was to find a well-prepared educator with competency for teaching young adults about money, who had credentials in both education and personal finance. Richard discovered that the NFEC offers a CFEI – Certified Financial Education Instructor – course which offers those credentials. Richard signed up to take the coursework so he could demonstrate his own skills and ability in the financial education space and lay the foundation for his interest in becoming a money coach in the future.

Mr. Chase had another task: choosing the curriculum resources upon which to draw for teaching young adults about money. He sought materials that could accommodate any schedule, so he could present them in the online format. Richard found what he was looking for – a curriculum that was independent, compliance-approved, and designed flexibly to adapt to any scheduling constraints.

Richard delivered his workshop through the online web conferencing software, and 18 CFA members attended. The assessment Richard had decided to use to measure program impact was whether the participants could gain approval for an auto loan. In the month following the workshop, 15 young adult CFA members applied for car loans at BOS, and 13 were approved (86.7%). Richard designed a report that stated these data, and gave it to his boss for the purpose of increasing the bank’s interest in supporting future workshops.