Volunteering in Financial Education

[Account Closed]

Hey guys - I just finished listening to episode 8 of the Biggerpockets Money podcast. Aside from the fantastic guest, my biggest takeaway was learning there are volunteering programs focused on the financial education space. For some reason I had never even thought of that when thinking about which charities to get involved with. 

So while I spend the next couple hours googling this some more, I was curious to hear if anyone on BP volunteers with a financial literacy non-profit, and what your experience was like?

[Dave Van Horn]

@Account Closed Also glad to hear you getting involved with volunteering! Love the idea of this post to get people thinking and bring more awareness to different financial literacy programs.

I was involved in a program called Thresholds a few years ago, where I worked specifically with inmates in a local prison. It wasn't solely financial advice but more about decision making and setting goals. If I'm remembering it correctly it was an 8 week program with a couple days of training.

It was certainly a challenge to say the least. Not only was it tough to see how incarceration could wear on a person's mindset (in a multitude of ways, but even in this case financially and how they plan or feel about their purpose), but it was also struggle to try to cover so much ground in such a short period of time. When you think about it, it probably took many of us years in the working world and investing world to cultivate our personalities and structures for our working lives. The majority of people like those I was helping were really starting at a point that was less than zero when they got out of prison. And trying to figure out a person's financial situation when they have no place to live and when almost no one would hire them is no easy task! Sometimes financial problems aren't just about numbers, sometimes they're about opportunity.

That said, the interesting thing about this particular program was, I remember a statistic that wast something like 2 out of 3 inmates that go through this program avoid recidivism and re-enter society.