Colby junior leads effort to teach financial literacy to high school students
It’s been almost a year since COVID-19 brought the world to a grinding halt and forced the shutdown of virtually all social activities. The awkward transition to conducting all interactions through video calls is in the past as Zoom has become the new normal, and sometimes it’s hard to remember the way life was before.
Civic engagement and community service opportunities often bore the brunt of pandemic-related shutdowns, and while some were able to switch to virtual or asynchronous platforms, many were cancelled entirely. But in the midst of this grim outlook, one Colby junior was able to launch an entirely new initiative to give back to the community.
This spring, Maddie Fresco `22 launched an organization with a few other Colby students to educate high school students on the power of investing in the stock market. But they do more than teach the basics of investing — tutor/tutee relationships allow for the club to serve as a source of mentorship and guidance for high school students who may not have such opportunities due to the pandemic.
This Waterville program is a chapter of a broader national organization called First Generation Investors (FGI).
“[FGI] [is] a nonprofit organization that teaches underserved high school students the power of investing and actually provides the high school students with money,” Fresco explained, “which is pretty unique for financial literacy programs in general.”
FGI was started by University of Pennsylvania students Dylan Ingerman, Alex Ingerman, and Cole Mattox. According to Ingerman, their inspiration for starting the organization came from their early exposure to the investment economy.
“My brother Alex and I were fortunate enough to be exposed to finance early on in our lives from our parents. After getting into UPenn, I met Cole who shared a love of finance, and came from a different, self-taught background,” Ingerman said. “We talked about the power of investing, and the unmet need for everyone to have opportunities to join the investment economy. The three of us decided to create the program to offer the opportunity to students who otherwise would not have been exposed to investing and provide them with real startup capital to get them started.”
Since the successful pilot program with three local high school students in Philadelphia, the organization has expanded to over two dozen college campuses across the country.
Fresco went on to explain the fundamentals of FGI activity at Colby.
“We as Colby students are volunteering our time and our knowledge to sort of teach the basics of saving, investing, time value of money, and a bunch of other topics towards these students and then they are given choices to invest their money in. I think one of the things that FGI strives to do is to lower this wealth gap that is very inherent in the US investing world,” Fresco said. “For example, wealthy households are six times more likely to invest in stocks and earn eight times as much than savings accounts pay, so they are obviously benefiting from being able to invest. So that just kind of goes into being able to provide these students with those knowledge skills and tools to actually thrive in this investment economy that we are living in right now.”
Fresco discovered FGI through a friend back home who is part of the chapter at Middlebury and was eager to start her own chapter at Colby.
“I immediately reached out to Dylan [Ingerman], who is the head of FGI, and started talking to him about trying to start a chapter at Colby. But because it was a little bit late in the game, it was too late to try and start a chapter in the fall of 2020. So I just started working and volunteering my time at the national organization, within their corporate and local sponsorship teams, raising money for all the other chapters,” Fresco said. “Honestly it was a blessing being able to learn about the organization before actually starting my own chapter. I think I really benefited from the knowledge that I was receiving and giving to the national organization. I just worked super hard to try and bring this back to the Colby campus, and I’m really excited about the future of FGI at Colby.”
Of course, starting a FGI chapter at Colby came with its own set of challenges, especially considering the ongoing pandemic.
“There were a lot of obstacles — obviously not being able to teach in person has been a challenge in itself,” Fresco noted. “The whole organization has definitely had to test out different ways to teach this knowledge — [as of now] we teach over Zoom to five students.”
Nevertheless, Fresco admits there is one silver lining to starting a community service club at Colby.
“We’re able to teach students from all over the country. So in our session right now we have three students from Maine, but we also have one student from Nashville, Tennessee and one from Durham, North Carolina. We wouldn’t be able to work with either of those students in an in-person environment,” Fresco said. “So FGI being virtual right now is able to reach more students.”
Fresco is hopeful for the future of FGI at Colby, especially when the virus subsides and in-person civic engagement becomes a reality once again.
“I’ve been working pretty diligently with Colby’s civic engagement office to actually make this a real club next year and we’re definitely on the right track for that,” Fresco said. “We actually just had a meeting yesterday with a representative, who we are hoping to partner with next year in bringing sort of more financial literacy just even above FGI to the Waterville high school students he’s gonna be working with, and both of us, I think, are fairly excited about the few prospects, and I’m very grateful for the help from the civic engagement office for the help they’ve been able to provide with those relationship buildings and community partnerships that we’re gonna be starting.”
Ultimately, the launch of FGI at Colby proves that despite the current COVID-19-related difficulties, there are still opportunities for new beginnings.
~ Hae-Jung Kim `24
