Financial literacy and life skills are the building blocks of development and self sufficiency. We believe that by teaching our youth at an early age about money management, they will develop a foundation for understanding the basic life skills needed to care for themselves and most importantly their community. 

        However, many students and college graduates lack the fundamentals of: Budgeting, Spending less than they earn, How debt works, what is an emergency fund and why it matters, why they should start investing and saving.

        In Baltimore, one-third of our city residents lives in poverty and listed as the 6^th poorest city in the United States. Also, too many college students are graduating with high amounts of Student loan debt, taking out payday loans, and carry high credit card debt which is affecting many young professionals from buying a house, car, job opportunities or to have comfortable  standard of living.

       While literacy - the ability to read and write - is a fundamental part of the education system, financial literacy is often left out of the equation. In the United States, fewer than half of states have any financial literacy requirements for their K-12 education systems, and only four states require high school students to take personal finance classes.

       This event was designed to increase the early learning importance of money management by giving students as well as parents a basic vocabulary to make good sound financial decisions and life choices. To be successful, most kids don't need to learn about collateralized debt instruments, but they do need to know how to open a bank account, how much they need to save each month to reach their goals and, if they borrow a certain amount of money, how much money they will need to earn to pay it back.