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| From Bite Club website |
Young adults without jobs and without family support are always on the edge of homelessness, if not already on the streets or in
shelters. Even if you have a job, it’s
hard to pull together the money for the deposits for an apartment. Financial literacy and being able to put
together a small bit of savings are powerfully important steps for young people
making their way towards adulthood.
How are we are teaching these skills to young people? They
certainly drop off the mainstream college and career readiness list of
skills. Most youth programs I have
visited will have some segment dedicated to financial literacy – an in-classroom
lecture, discussion and a few activities.
Is it effective? I don’t know if financial literacy can be developed in
a one-shot class. I know I learned at the knee of my grandfather, who role-modeled
and engaged me in conversations for years to make sure I understood what it
meant to be financially responsible. So
I wonder, are there other ways that we can help young people hone their skills?
How about gaming?
Doorways to Dreams, a Boston-based
non-profit creating saving innovations for low-income consumers, has created Bite Club. It’s
a web-based video game that allows you to earn money running a bar for vamps (I
successfully got five vampires to the dance floor, earning $12,000) and then
apply it to debt or savings. It seemed like a pretty good exercise – certainly
made me think. However, I don’t think teens and the 20-something generation are
thinking about retirement. It would make more sense to me if the game provided
options for saving for college or saving for a deposit or down payment on a house.
They’ve got other games such as Celebrity
Calamity to teach about credits cards, Farm Blitz,
complete with vicious looking debt bunnies to introduce how to survive
emergencies, Groove
Nation to learn budgeting. By the way, Bite Dreams, Celebrity Calamity and
Farm Blitz are available in Spanish and English.
They are piloting Summer Quest right now, a new game for
college and career readiness. According to its materials, Summer Quest “challenges high school students to complete
twenty (20) educational quests in one of three objective areas: college readiness, test preparation (SAT/ACT), and
financial literacy during 4 weeks in early summer each year. SummerQuest asks
students to spend on average, 5 to 30 minutes completing real-world activities
to educate and expose them to topics including saving, budgeting, the FAFSA
form, and college loans and financing options. Students complete practice ACT
questions, play D2D Financial Entertainment titles, explore potential career paths, and
navigate the FAFSA form as they experience the game.”
Or matches? They seem to be effective in helping folks to
save. MDRC just released a
report on Save USA, a voluntary program
launched in 2011 in four cities (New York City, Tulsa, San Antonio, and
Newark), that encourages low- and moderate-income individuals to set aside
money from their tax refund for savings. At the end of the first year, two-thirds
of the participants had saved and received a match averaging $291. The problem
is that it is hard to imagine getting match programs into public policy at this
time.
What other strategies and techniques can be used to help stabilize young people’s lives so that we can keep them from the street and the dangers of sex trafficking?
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