Bringing financial literacy to teenage girls through Rock the Street, Wall Street

Advisers are desperately needed in the nation’s schools to teach students, or to help instructors teach students, about personal finance, according to program founder Maura Cunningham.

See also: Using music to share financial literacy with young students – bringing Funding the Future’s concerts to Miami

Transcript:
Rock the Street, Wall Street is a financial literacy program designed to spark the interest of high school girls into careers of finance. As of today, we are in 15 US cities in 28 high schools, and have served over 1,700 girls.

Financial literacy should matter to the financial services community because they hold the knowledge.
One of the things we discovered in our research is that over 80% of the teachers in the United States self report, and I’m going to repeat that, self-report, that they don’t feel competent enough to teach financial literacy.

So, can you imagine if you had over 80% of the history teachers self-reporting that, or the English teachers for that matter.

And as you all know, we use financial literacy every day, every hour of our lives, in terms of of assessing value to our lives.

So I think it’s critical that the financial advisory community gets involved with local communities to help to fix this epidemic.

As you may also know, of the college debt that is out there, the trillions of dollars, two-thirds are owned by women, and there’s a reason for that as well – which has to do with the fact that they really don’t understand what they are signing.

And so we create some of these products so we should own some of the responsibility of making sure they understand what they are signing.

Financial advisers can get involved in financial literacy efforts in their local community by going into the schools. We desperately need them there since over 80% of the teachers self-report that they don’t know, or
are not feeling competent enough, top teach financial literacy. So we need to solve this epidemic by bringing in people who can walk the talk on matters financial.

One of the things they can do also is sponsor a program such as ours, Rock the Street Wall Street, where we go into local high schools throughout the United States and we work with our corporate sponsors in mobilising many of the women in their ERG groups and their DNI groups to go into those schools and create a more literate student population with regards to finance and financial products.