The ACII Alumni Spotlight Series features original pieces by participants from Round 1 of our Afghan Community Impact Incubator (ACII) reflecting on their community service projects and lessons learned.
By Manzora Nero, ACII Round 1 ChangeMaker, on behalf of Let’s Talk
“Money comes and goes, but if you have the education about how money works, you gain power over it and can begin building wealth.”
– Robert Kiyosaki in Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
We launched Let’s Talk to create a platform where young adults can feel supported and encouraged to reach their full potential. With our recent event called Financial Literacy Series: Let’s Talk Money Moves, we wanted to focus on what was not taught in school: financial literacy. One’s level of financial literacy affects their quality of life significantly and ability to make financially responsible decisions. Through our Financial Literacy Series, we wanted to educate students and young adults on the importance of financial literacy, and provide a basic understanding of some key elements of how money works and how you can make, manage, invest and spend your finances.
We were lucky to get grants from YWCA Canada through their Look Back, Push Forward project, and from #RisingYouth by TakingITGlobal with help from AYEDI through their ACII initiative. With these grants, we developed our Financial Literacy Series, which was a 10-part online series of crash courses on financial education. We were able to engage financial experts to partake in our crash course videos.
Overall, developing this series has been an amazing experience, and we felt very supported by AYEDI during the whole process, from development of project idea to proposal writing and project implementation. Creating a crash course series was a new learning experience for us, as we learned to:
- develop a list of key topics
- work with animators to create interactive educational content, and
- connect with financial experts who were willing to partake in our series
Our Financial Literacy Series was a challenging project to work on, with a tight schedule, lots of coordination work, and many parties involved. We are glad it was successful in the end and are excited to implement some lessons learned from this experience for our future events. We look forward to engaging with AYEDI on more projects, getting to see other amazing projects come to life with the ACII initiative and learning from the community.
To learn more about our Financial Literacy Series, or about our Let’s Talk initiative, make sure to check out our website!
Views expressed solely represent the opinions of the writer.