Professor Irene Foster partners students with organizations like Global Kids and Sasha Bruce Youthwork to design and facilitate engaging financial literacy workshops, empowering young people with essential money management skills.
For information about Community Engaged Scholarship at GW: https://go.gwu.edu/cesc
Semester Reports
Spring 2025
Instructor: Irene Foster
Students Reporting: 20
Time Reported: 275 hours
Community Partners:
This semester, students engaged with multiple community partners to deliver financial literacy education, with the most significant collaborations being Global Kids and Sasha Bruce Youthwork.
Global Kids: Students designed and led budgeting workshops for high school students, teaching them how to build basic budgets, understand needs versus wants, and make smart financial choices. They used hands-on activities and real-life examples to make budgeting concepts relatable and useful for everyday life.
Sasha Bruce Youthwork: Students presented finance workshops covering topics ranging from SMART goals and budgeting to setting realistic financial goals for program participants. They created presentations on key elements of personal finance and conducted interactive sessions to help young people develop essential money management skills.
Additional partnerships included Wissahickon High School, Our Stomping Ground, Latin American Youth Center, and some on-campus GW programming where students educated fellow students about budgeting dining dollars and campus food resources.
Student Comments:
"I learned how to communicate financial concepts in a simple and engaging way. It helped me build confidence in teaching and public speaking, and I realized how important financial literacy is for empowering young people."
"Gained insight into the need for this type of education as the kids are not receiving it within their typical high school curriculum."
"I really appreciated the option to go back to my own high school and give back to my community. It was really great to see how excited the students were to learn about these topics they otherwise would not learn in school. They greatly appreciated learning about credit cards and were blown away with statistics about how fast debt can accumulate with high APR cards."
"I learned how to engage the audience, and how excited kids are to learn new things, that are not traditional schooling, but still helpful."
"We learned how much of an impact budgeting can have when it comes to your finances. We also discovered how many people on campus don't know of the other resources available to them, mainly freshmen because they are still new."
