A Remote Design Sprint Breakthrough

Posted on 08.01.2022 by admin

Recently, Moneythink Product Designer Jeanmarie Levy spearheaded a virtual design sprint – a feat which included organizing colleagues in three different time zones and several countries. The goal of the sprint was to improve the DecidED Advisor Dashboard and promote a more collaborative creative design space.

Design sprints help make DecidED more user-friendly. Traditionally, these events take place in person; however, to increase accessibility, Jeanmarie organized this virtual version to ensure everyone had a seat at the table.

We are excited to share Jeanmarie’s story and process with you, and highlight how we’re already improving DecidED. As a nimble fintech non-profit, we believe in empowering our team to explore cutting-edge approaches to improve the lives of everyone who uses DecidED.

(Jeanmarie was interviewed by our Communications and Marketing Consultant, Melissa Ramos. Our interview has been edited for clarity.)

Our Q&A With Jeanmarie

Melissa Ramos: Thanks for meeting to talk about your most recent design sprint! Tell us about your background and how you found yourself at Moneythink.

Jeanmarie Levy: My name is Jeanmarie and I serve as the Product Designer here at Moneythink. I am most excited about this work because the organization’s mission directly aligns with my core values of promoting access, retention and advocacy for first generation students. I myself identify as first-gen. Also, I am a former educator. I saw oftentimes where students would fall through the cracks of the college application process. Moneythink’s overall goal of reducing student debt is truly exciting for me. I have always been passionate about service and nonprofit organizations and how technology can improve people’s lives.

Melissa: It seems like your career and life experiences have helped you create a better informed product with DecidED, because you have a holistic understanding of the type of person this product serves.

Jeanmarie: Absolutely.

Melissa: Switching gears, can you explain the idea behind a design sprint?

Jeanmarie: The idea for design sprints is a forward-thinking concept, where essentially, a team has a certain number of days to meet specific goals. These days are fully devoted to improving a product or design. Sprints bring teams together for cross collaboration, since it is beneficial for organizations to collectively come up with ideas together, instead of putting all the pressure on individuals to make big decisions. Design sprints allow us to do deep creative work around a specific problem, using our brains fully for this purpose.

Moneythink: How do you feel design sprints help Moneythink improve DecidED?

Jeanmarie: Design sprints help inform our product because we make time to take a step back and view the problems we are tackling more holistically. Design sprints give us the opportunity to empathize with users. We pride ourselves on being an equity centered organization, and we are constantly thinking about our users as a result. In this recent design sprint, we wanted to take things to the next level, so we brought in all of our teams – engineers, the development team, the partnership team, everyone. Design sprints help our product, our organization and employees better understand why we do what we do.

Melissa: Can you talk about human centered design factors into design sprints at Moneythink?

Jeanmarie: We strive to do human centered design and more so, equity centered design. Human centered design means the user is at the center of all decisions, but equity centered design invites users directly into the conversation. Equity centered design gives users the agency to make these bigger decisions with our product improvements. This is how we ended up on this particular design sprint topic: trying to improve our Advisor Dashboard. We made improvements based on real time advisor feedback.

Melissa: How did this fully remote design sprint differ from a traditional design sprint?

Jeanmarie: Improving the Advisor Dashboard was a big challenge. We knew we needed a diverse team in order to make this happen – and I want to shout out Ben May (our API Product Manager) for helping me think outside of the box with this design sprint.

We involved our engineers because they are our product experts. They help to build this product every day. They’re all located in different countries. Our engineers are contractors, and we as an organization strive for them to have full ownership of this product. We are cognizant of the fact that we are an American organization working with contractors outside of the US. My biggest goal was to make sure our engineers felt included and that their expertise was highlighted. It was very impactful to have all of our engineers there, some of whom have been working on DecidED from the beginning.

Our goals going into the design sprint were composed of two parts. We wanted a solution for Advisor Dashboard improvement, but we also wanted to build this inspiring and collaborative team where everyone felt they had a voice. As a result of this design sprint, we have seen an increase in morale and trust, and overall positivity among all of us. The feedback was that it was awesome to have all teams cross collaborate and learn more about what our users go through.

Melissa: As the architect of this design sprint, what do you feel were the key takeaways?

Jeanmarie: Our advisors and educators have such a challenging and overwhelming role since they are trying to advocate against so much bureaucracy. Currently, our tool does a lot but not in a simple way. With new improvements, we are scaling everything back to make our advisors’ lives easier.

Another big takeaway is the idea that cross collaboration among diverse thinkers and people is truly the way to solve big problems. When we work in silos, it’s an echo chamber. When you hear from another person, in another country, or with a different experience, it brings up a lot that hasn’t come up before. Giving people ownership helped reinvigorate a sense that there is a lot of power and capacity in the human brain – especially when we provide safe spaces. Now I have a solution for this design, but that’s because of our collaboration. I wouldn’t have been able to do this alone. It’s a big reminder that community always needs to be at the center of our work.

Communal work is of critical importance to so many things. I think that we hit the biggest goal which was to make sure that the design sprint team felt heard, empowered, and seen. I wanted the team to feel this was a good use of their time. Some feedback I got from folks was that this space equalized all of us and our voices.

Melissa: What improvements will come to DecidED now that you have completed this particular sprint?

Jeanmarie: Lots! We already built a prototype and tested it with a long-time DecidED user. This particular educator commented that the improvements are lightyears ahead of our current dashboard. As a former educator, I keep in mind that when we design products we also need to teach users how to use this new product. I was happy to hear that this educator felt the improvements aligned seamlessly into his current work flow; it didn’t create extra steps, and it improved his work experience.

Our improvements will lead to clear, actionable steps that educators can take with students. We know the new way the tool will look will make this seamless and will help advisors in the long run.

Melissa: Very exciting that the improvements are already well received. We look forward to launching the new and improved dashboard soon!

Interested in learning more about design sprints? Check out our resources below.

What’s a design sprint and why is it important?

The Design Sprint

And learn more about Jeanmarie and the rest of our team by visiting our Team & Board page.

Reducing Income and Wealth Inequality: How Moneythink Supports All Students

Posted on 06.30.2022 by admin

The road to a college degree is precarious for many, especially for students who do not have access to support systems or guidance throughout the application process. Moneythink addresses and solves these gaps. Our organization was founded by and for students through student-driven grassroots movements. That’s why we are uniquely poised to empower students on their college journey. We have firsthand knowledge and experience thanks to the incredible students who founded our organization, and we continue to center diverse and ever-changing student needs in everything we do.

Challenges Students Face

Our students come from unique backgrounds. They are aspiring, imaginative, gifted, creative, and powerful, but many are denied access to necessary systems, support and crucial information during the college process. Roadblocks include confusion around financial aid, lack of personal support, a confusing application process, and more.

These roadblocks lead directly to missed opportunities, increased student loan debt, and put students in cycles where they cannot thrive or obtain true economic mobility. Our organization’s mission is to remove as many barriers as possible in the way of students’ success at this stage of their life journey. We directly address the gaps that students may fall through, and tackle head on the interrelated and complex issues of college affordability, student success, and loan debt.

How Does Wealth Inequality Impact Students?

We can’t talk about social justice without naming the wealth inequality many of our students face. For students who already lack resources, cycles of income inequality affect them disproportionately compared to students with simultaneous access to resources and access to wealth. Often, access to wealth correlates with access to important resources and support systems.

Take this startling statistic: a lower-income but high-performing student has less of a chance of graduating college than a high-income lower-performing student. Much of this disparity exists because wealthier students have access to resources and support than lower-income students do. For instance, wealthier students are often placed in better resourced school districts, complete with financial literacy coaching, college counselors, standardized testing preparation, and family support.

The chasms of wealth are becoming more prominent in our country and it’s clear that the obstacles many students face are not individually created, but systematically imposed. As our organization grows, we are adapting our work to reflect and address this reality.

How Our Work Has Evolved With Students at the Center

From our inception, we’ve kept students at the forefront of everything we do. Throughout all of our iterations – from our financial mentorship programs to virtual coaching to the creation of our free, college cost comparison tool, DecidED in 2020 – we have pivoted to meet student needs.

While our initial mentorship and virtual coaching programs focused a lot on teaching students how to manage college related finances, we’ve realized that the issues many students face go far beyond what any individual alone can fix. DecidED is such an important leap in our work because our tool allows us to reach more students across the country, anytime, anywhere, while providing support, and the free, crucial and transparent information they need to attend college with the least amount of debt. DecidED is a game changer because the information our tool provides helps students make resourced and informed decisions.

When students use DecidED, they upload financial aid award letters, and compare colleges based on both financial information and other important fit factors, like majors, graduation rates, and more. Advisors can also use DecidED to keep in touch with students and provide further support. However, we designed DecidED so that students could navigate the college application process on their own, especially if they come from under-resourced situations.

If students are able to make a fully informed decisions, they are able to reduce the amount of debt they take on to finance school, and are able to utilize their degree in ways that help build wealth and stability.

Students Benefit From Our Work

Addressing college affordability remains at the heart of our work because we understand the crucial importance of obtaining a college degree. A degree can help lift students and their communities out of poverty, particularly if graduates do not need to worry about exorbitant loan repayments or debt.

One of our recent alums, a student from Pittsburg High School, says of college affordability: “If we are going to be honest, finances play a big role in choosing where you go whether you like it or not. Being able to afford college is what we need.”

Our work has helped over 33,000 students afford college across the country since 2008. These successes speak for themselves. As of 2018, our students have received over $2.4 million in financial aid, with 82% of Moneythink students completing their FAFSA (compared to the 55% national average). Over 80% of our students created a responsible financial plan to pay for college and ended up graduating from one of Moneythink’s recommended affordable schools.

With recent improvements to DecidED, we have pivoted focus on helping students quickly and easily understand college affordability criteria, so they can make fully informed decisions faster than ever before. The affordability rankings within our tool also match recommendations from reputable college access organizations.

Thanks to these usability improvements, students are more engaged with DecidED. Over 98% of student users utilized DecidED beyond the sign up stage, by uploading award letters, adding schools to their list, and comparing colleges. Although many of our student users are based in California, we have also expanded outreach all across the country, with highest engagement coming from students in Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Maryland.

And most important of all, over 57% of DecidED users selected an affordable college.

You Can Support Students, Too. Here’s How.

Our work wouldn’t be possible without supporters like you. In order to maximize our impact and outreach, spread the word about Moneythink to your friends, families, networks and communities. If you know a student on their college journey who is in need of financial aid information or support, encourage them to sign up for DecidED. (It’s free!) And if you’re able, consider donating to Moneythink. With your help, our work can reach more and more students, and provide game changing resources to those who need it the most.

Employee Voice Series: Elizabeth’s Success Story

Posted on 08.01.2018 by admin

By Elizabeth

As a first-generation college graduate, I feel a deep connection to the work we do at Moneythink. The students we help are smart, hard-working, responsible, and strongly committed to getting a solid education despite their odds. I love that our work helps to address the problem of unequal access to education in our country by providing personal support to students. I believe in using my experiences to help guide students’ success stories.

My Beginning

I grew up in a small town in Oregon with limited educational opportunities. I was raised by an incredibly resourceful single mother who worked and saved to provide for her four children.

With the support of my older brother, I moved to a bigger city where I attended community college while working two part-time jobs. When I see our students managing work and school — as well as family responsibilities — I empathize with the everyday stress they experience and the strain this can have on their academic success stories.

I understand first-hand the challenges that face our students, many of whom don’t have the same financial and social advantages as their well-resourced peers.
Elizabeth

My College Experiences

With support and encouragement from my community college professors, I transferred to Amherst College in Massachusetts in just a few years. I was very lucky that Amherst has numerous resources for first-generation and transfer students.

However, I was far from home. It was my job to make financial and academic decisions largely on my own. When I see the confusion my students have about how to talk to their professors or how to make sense of their financial aid awards, I understand all too well. By providing guidance when they experience similar confusion, Moneythink is filling a huge gap in our students’ lives and guiding them on the path to success.

Working with Moneythink

Before becoming a part of this amazing team, I had worked for several years in different areas of education. Throughout my professional life, I’ve always been excited about supporting youth and improving education.

What drew me specifically to Moneythink is the opportunity to work in a small but powerful organization that is focused on well-developed, creative solutions to removing barriers to higher education.

I carry such a strong connection to our mission, and I love our approach. We work with students who already have the will to go to college, but who just need that extra help with designing the way.

As far as I’m concerned, there is no good reason why students should ever drop out of college due to a lack of access to sufficient information or support networks.
Elizabeth

Moneythink is addressing this issue by providing exactly the kind of timely, highly-focused support that students need when navigating their journeys to and through college.

Be a part of the solution by making a donation, referring a partner, or becoming a corporate contributor.

Employee Voice Series: Juan Cortes

Posted on 03.23.2018 by admin

By Juan Cortes

Growing up, my parents always told me that I had to go to college, but they never said how I was going to pay for it. By the time I reached my senior year of high school, my sister was already in college, so I was lucky to have her to guide me through the FAFSA process. But grants and federal aid could only cover so much; in order to avoid taking on any debt, I had to take the community college route instead.

Even though I did not have to take out loans, my community college’s remedial courses were always overfilled and hard to get into due to the limited spots available.
Juan

The limited space in classes prolonged my time in college, and I had to go through junior college for three and a half years, instead of the two years people expect you to do before you transfer to a four-year university. During this time, I worked as a busser and a waiter, saving my money for when I transferred to a four-year school. Since I didn’t know how to find scholarships, I paid my tuition and school costs out of my own pocket with the money I earned from working.

However, whenever my friends and I got together during school breaks, their incredible stories and experiences about college life made me feel like a disappointment who was left behind.

As they were working towards their future careers, I was cleaning dishes and taking remedial courses. These feelings of insecurity pushed me to work hard on transferring to my dream school that nobody thought I could get into: UC Berkeley.

The Next Step

When I transferred to Cal in the Spring of 2013, I felt so out of place. Everyone in the dorm was significantly younger than me, and I had to take out loans for the first time. While other students knew how to find grants and scholarships to fund their study-abroad programs and unpaid internships, I continued working in restaurants and focused on studying. I budgeted my earnings and saved as much as I could so I didn’t have to worry about dropping out.

My hard work paid off, and I got to walk in the Winter graduation of 2014: I was a college graduate!
Juan

However, due to one of my credits not transferring from junior college — a fact that my counselor failed to point out to me until three days before the Spring semester began — I had to come back for another semester I had never planned for. For just this one credit, I ended up having to take out the most debt I had ever had.

This left me crestfallen, but — like I have done my entire life — I persevered and pushed myself to work harder.

This experience made me realize that colleges and universities, despite providing numerous resources and support systems, do not effectively advertise to students the resources that are available. This is especially problematic when it comes to students who are first-generation and have no example in their life of someone who has gone through college and can explain how to navigate its bureaucracies.

Moneythink and Me

A few years later, when I found Moneythink, I saw how their coaching team reaches out to students who went through the same experiences that I had.

Moneythink connects students to resources on their campuses, helps create financial plans so students can manage their finances in college, and provides a support system to check in on students who may be too afraid to ask for help for fear of being chastised for not knowing something they would have no experience of. Moneythink’s mission to help first-generation, low-income students obtain an education is why I decided to join their coaching team and dedicate myself to helping students achieve their dreams and make an equitable future for America through education.

An Open Letter to Platforms that Use Emojis

Posted on 03.02.2018 by admin

To those who provision emojis,

Thank you for the work you are doing. You have provided many people with a fun and convenient way to express themselves in digital conversation. With so many users flocking to your platform at an ever-increasing rate, you’ve made it easy for individuals and brands to convey ideas to their family and friends, clients and colleagues.

To provide such a simple yet powerful means for people to express themselves is quite a privilege.

And because you provide for so many people — a delightfully heterogeneous medley of humankind — you have taken on a responsibility to furnish emojis representative of all the identities and experiences of such a gloriously vast array of humanity.

Are you doing enough with using emojis responsibly?

Here’s our assessment: You’re pretty well-established at this point, at least in terms of brand recognition and daily active users. Your business is doing quite well, fending off competitors while maintaining a solid foothold in your realm of the marketplace. And thus, with such a magnitude of power and influence, you have this tremendous opportunity to improve the inclusivity of your emoji selection.

In your current emoji selection, there is a patent lack of representation for so many folks: for the people of color whose hair colors and skin tones are not yellow-white, for those who cannot conform to the gender binaries of cis-male and cis-female, for those whose partners and families are not mono-ethnicities or do not look like hetero-norms.

For this exquisite assortment of users, your current emoji selection can feel quite exclusionary.

And so you have before you this magnificent opportunity to improve it.

Now, it’s possible that you don’t yet have a design team dedicated to the care-taking of your emojis.

Let’s talk about that.

When it comes to the question of whether to outsource emoji creation or to manage your emojis in-house, you of course must take business concerns into account. And although your initial thought might be “Emojis are not our business,” let’s challenge that reaction by expanding on a conviction you hold most dear: is it not your business to change the world?

As a corporation, is it not your mission — your business — to change the world? As an individual, is it not your ambition — your business — to change the world?

So if your business is indeed to change the world, then begin here: wield your influence in the realm of emojis. Change the world by changing the emoji selection that you provision.

You have an enormous power to impact the lives of so many people in such profound ways, as this impact is compounded and magnified by your platform’s daily use. So it would be revolutionary for you to manage your own emoji offerings, to make small, deliberate changes to your emoji selection, and to see that change resonate, like ripples of influence ever-expanding across our globalized world.

So here is our invitation to you, the people who provision emojis.

Take responsibility for the emoji selection that you provision: acknowledge your power and seek to make your selection more inclusive.

Seize this opportunity to change the world. Make decisions and prioritize work that you can be proud of. Embrace critique and leverage it to become better. Set aside perfection in favor of effective, intentional action.

Move with courage, even if — and especially when — you’re the first to move in that direction.

Let’s take radical ownership of our power, and co-create the world in which we want to live.

Onward!

The Moneythink Team

Student Success Series: Bartee Taylor

Bartee smiles at the camera in a red shirt.

Posted on 02.28.2018 by admin

Bartee enrolled in Moneythink’s coaching program during January 2017 as a senior from Perspectives High School of Technology. He joined the first cohort of students in Moneythink’s College Financial Coaching program. In September 2017, Bartee sat down with Moneythink staff to discuss his experiences with the program over the last few months, and his journey to college. This is how Moneythink guided Bartee’s student success story.

Raising the Bar

As the first of his siblings to graduate high school, Bartee “wanted to raise the bar even higher for my younger siblings from graduating high school to graduating college.”

His mom received her Bachelor’s degree in psychology; with an extended family of nurses, he knew he wanted to pursue a similar career path and could turn to them for support. As Bartee was exploring his options for college during his senior year of high school, Chicago was barely on his radar. “I didn’t want to stay in Chicago. I’ve been here all my life and… I was trying to experience something different.” He ended up applying to schools in the South and in the West and ultimately chose to attend a university in Texas.

Bartee worked with his Moneythink coach to create a comprehensive financial plan for his school in Texas. During his time working with his coach, he discovered a first-year financial gap of nearly $8,000 that he and his family would have to come up with to pay for his tuition. Although the cost of attendance was higher than Bartee and his coach had hoped, he was determined to get out of Chicago and was excited to move in the fall.

Bartee’s situation is actually quite common. Many students believe that working more hours or taking on more loans will be enough to see them through these large financial gaps, forgetting to consider the consequences.

Change of Course

With his paperwork submitted, orientation complete, and just a few weeks to go until his move-in date, Bartee was ready to begin his college journey. However, at the beginning of August, Bartee’s mother came to him with a major surprise: she had found his acceptance and award letters to the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). With a tuition that was significantly less than his school in Texas, Bartee’s mom urged him to attend UIC instead. But Bartee was stubbornly set on going to Texas, which led them to frequently butt heads.

“It was hard for me to accept that I couldn’t actually go anywhere I wanted… [and] how expensive it was to go out of state.”
Bartee Taylor

Bartee’s Moneythink coach worked with him to ensure he understood the full extent of his decision to attend school in Texas. His coach warned him of the potential financial risks it could pose. “My coach wouldn’t let the problem escalate,” Bartee said. “They were like ‘if you want to do that [go to school in Texas], then do that,’ but they were very helpful in guiding me on what I should do.”

Eventually, after some long and often frustrating talks with his parents and Moneythink coach, Bartee decided to go to UIC. “I realized my parents would struggle to pay for my education if I went out of state. I have five younger siblings. I just thought it was too selfish of me to make my parents pay so much for me knowing that they have other kids to take care of.”

These sentiments of ownership and guilt about the potential financial burdens of higher education are all too often felt by students across the country. In fact, 40% of students who choose not to go to their first-choice school do so because of cost related reasons.

Back on Track Toward Student Success

When Bartee let his Moneythink coach know he was switching schools, he was surprised not only by how much his coach knew about the variety of his financial options, but also how quickly they were able to come up with a new financial plan. In fact, his Moneythink coach discovered that because he was commuting to school instead of living on campus, Bartee would actually receive a refund on his financial aid. By choosing to go to UIC instead of Texas, Bartee had effectively closed his potential financial gap from $8,000 to $0. Realizing he wouldn’t be in debt for school was a positive step forward in his student success story.

Although Bartee was initially uncertain about how he was going to pay tuition, by working with his Moneythink coach, his fears soon disappeared. “I didn’t have a plan. I was just like ‘Mama, can you pay this?’ That’s all I knew! But [my coach] helped me build a [financial plan] and it really helped, because I was stressing out about nothing! I was thinking, ‘how can I pay this?’ not knowing that I was actually getting money back from UIC. My coach helped me get to that.”

When Bartee was planning to go to Texas, he’d thought he was making the best decision available to him, but by working with his Moneythink coach, he was able to discover new pathways to college that he had never considered before. Bartee realized that his student success story could take different forms that were ultimately more beneficial to him and his family.

“My Moneythink coach knows what they’re talking about… It was like they could tell me what was going to happen before it actually happened.”
Bartee Taylor

Bartee is currently in his second semester at UIC studying nursing, and he is continuing to work with his Moneythink coach to ensure he is prepared for his coming second year.

Be a part of the solution by making a donation, referring a partner, or becoming a corporate contributor.

Student Success Series: Gabby Davis

Gabby sits outside of her school. She wears a black shirt.

Posted on 12.01.2017 by admin

Gabby joined Moneythink in January 2017 as a high school senior from Perspectives Leadership Academy in Chicago. She was part of the first cohort of students in Moneythink’s College Financial Coaching program. In early September, Gabby sat down with Moneythink staff to discuss her experiences with her Moneythink coach over the last few months. Her warm personality and diligent attitude were immediately apparent and amplified when you meet her in person.

The Beginning of Gabby’s Student Success Story

Ever since Gabby was little, she knew she wanted to attend college.

“I was always telling my mom, ‘I wanna be a dentist, I wanna be a dentist!’” Both her parents were college graduates. Gabby knew college would not only help her get a good job, but also was a way to “do good for [herself] and her future.” However, she also knew that paying for college was going to be a large obstacle. “It was hard finding a good college because you need money to go out of state, and I didn’t have scholarships at the time, so I knew I was going to go to a community college first no matter what.”

Gabby began looking at community colleges in Chicago and was drawn to a college because of its dentistry program. With help from her school counselors and mother, Gabby applied and was accepted. However, it was her Moneythink coach that kept her on track throughout the summer, a time when many students run into problems that can derail their college plans.

Up to 40% of students who intend to go to college never show up on the first day. The causes are often small and avoidable.

Over the summer before college, students are asked to complete a number of complicated tasks. This is a time when they have very little access to support from a high school counselor. Researchers call this phenomena “summer melt.” Unfortunately, the complications Gabby ran into are incredibly typical.

Running into Complications

Gabby is a recipient of the Star Scholarship, a scholarship offered to high-achieving Chicago Public School graduates that allows them to pursue an Associate’s Degree completely free of cost. However, Gabby had trouble receiving her scholarship on time. She worked with her Moneythink coach, Miesha, to figure out what was wrong. Miesha helped guide her through each of the steps she needed to take to get the issue resolved.

“Miesha was telling me where to go and… basically guiding me to ask my advisor questions I never thought to ask. She gave me things to think about that I needed to know in order to be successful.”
Gabby Davis

Orientation dates were passing by and classes were beginning to fill up quickly; but without her scholarship, Gabby was unable to complete any of her summer tasks.

After checking to make sure her FAFSA documents were accurate, Miesha encouraged Gabby to call the college’s financial aid office. It took five attempts to get somebody to answer the phone. Even then, the financial aid officer couldn’t provide an answer to why her scholarship was not going through.

Determined to figure out the issue, Gabby went down to the campus’ financial aid office herself. She learned that because she had taken a class at a different city college in the spring, the system still had her enrolled there. This meant she couldn’t receive her scholarship or even enroll in her classes until the issue was fixed. Because of Gabby’s Moneythink coach pushing her toward student success, Gabby was able to fix the situation.

Gabby was proactive in arranging a meeting. As a result, the school was able to correct the mistake within the week, process her scholarship, and register her for orientation.

One small glitch in the college’s system required multiple phone calls, emails, and an in-person visit to resolve — this is the kind of seemingly small detail that could result in a student never making it to the first day of college.

By nudging Gabby to stay on top of her summer tasks, her Moneythink coach was able to not only help her navigate the complicated process of receiving her financial aid, but guide her on the path to student success. Moneythink’s coaching program also gave Gabby the confidence to be proactive about finding the right campus resources that could provide support.

“We don’t know each other personally, so for [Miesha] to tell me ‘you can do it’ and believing in me… it just really gave me a feeling like ‘they believe in me, so I should believe in myself and that I know I can do it and I can get far.”
Gabby Davis

After receiving her Associate’s Degree in Dentistry, Gabby plans to transfer to University of Illinois at Chicago to pursue her Bachelor’s, and is continuing to work with her Moneythink coach to ensure she stays on track.

Be a part of the solution by making a donation, referring a partner, or becoming a corporate contributor.

Our History: How We Use Education-Technology to Inspire Change

Student holds mobile device with Moneythink app on the screen.

Posted on 12.01.2017 by admin

In the midst of the 2008 economic collapse, a group of University of Chicago undergraduates saw the opportunity to improve the economic state of their community by providing basic personal finance lessons to students from surrounding Chicago high schools. The undergrads started a club to recruit, train, and place college mentors in local high schools to teach about saving, budgeting, and the importance of financial planning for college and beyond. As students reported back incredible stories about how their newfound understanding of money was helping them in their first jobs and freshman year of college, college volunteers at other universities began using the model to found identical clubs on their campuses. By the fall of 2011, Moneythink had grown organically from a University of Chicago student organization into a 501(c)3 nonprofit volunteer movement on two dozen campuses across the country with a focus on using education-technology to help students make informed financial decisions, especially around college enrollment.

In 2012, Moneythink was awarded the White House Champions of Change award from then President Barack Obama, and raised initial seed funding from the Blackstone Foundation, Ariel Investments, the Lefkofsky Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, Nielsen, and others, to form a central headquarters that could provide strategic direction for the grassroots movement.

Since then, Moneythink has become a leading organization in the financial capability field. In 2013, collaborations with the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) and IDEO.org brought financial education out of the classroom and into the real world via our mobile application, MoneythinkMobile. This pioneering education technology application used social media to flip the typical financial behaviors of teens by “instantly gratifying delayed gratification decisions” through likes and comments.

MoneythinkMobile was the first of several education technology iterative experiments on our relentless ambition to discover and prove effective and meaningful applications of financial education. Blended learning technologies, behavioral science, and human-centered design have fueled Moneythink’s innovation engine and helped us achieve meaningful results repeatedly in the classroom, workforce, and college matriculation settings.

MoneythinkGoals: a mobile saving goals application coupled with our Youth Employment Curriculum to help students save their paychecks for the future.

Moneythink College Calculator: web-based application used in conjunction with our college persistence curriculum to help students compare and contrast their college options.

The power of human-centered design — a concept we absorbed from our friends at IDEO.org — is that you learn to listen to your beneficiaries and design your solution for what they need.

As we listened to our students from 2012 to 2016, we realized that the transition to postsecondary life — specifically getting a job and affording college — was the greatest area of stress and concern for students.

Thus, in 2016, we launched a research study to educate ourselves on the financial obstacles that first-generation, under-resourced college students face. We interviewed 93 students at 7 different university campuses across the US. They showed us the strong influence financial (in)security has on a student’s likelihood to successfully persist through college and the clear need for under-resourced youth to receive support and guidance when facing important fiscal decisions. Since then we have sought out to design a program that specifically addresses the financial stresses that surface during this influential period in a student’s financial capability development.

Moneythink’s College Financial Success program uses the most effective aspects of our programming — high-touch mentorship, technology, and curriculum — and brings it directly to the student’s fingertips. Our Moneythink Coaches utilize a web-based text-messaging platform to assist under-resourced, college-bound young adults navigate the financial decisions that occur between the beginning of their senior year of high school and the end of their freshman year of college.

We’re able to be there for students whenever and wherever they need us most: outside of the classroom at the exact moments when they’re making some of their most important life decisions.

Since launching our College Financial Success program in the fall of 2016, we have reached 1,080 students in Chicago, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, and our coaches have sent and received over 51,000 text messages. Our students come to us with questions that range from something as simple as “how do I get to campus?” to as complicated as “how do I know if I’ve been chosen for FAFSA verification?”

More often than not, a student’s Moneythink coach is the only person they have available to discuss their college and financial issues, thus it is imperative that we are so easily accessible whenever these questions arise.

With an unprecedented model, Moneythink is able to meet students where they are to provide the most effective resources and guidance with the highest potential for impact. When students are navigating the FAFSA process, choosing between scholarship opportunities, or even just organizing required health forms to send to the school, a student’s coach is available right at their fingertips to answer questions and demystify the college process.

We walk alongside students in high school, leading up to college, and throughout their freshman year, helping to connect them to the best support and local resources available to keep them on the path to graduation.

And the journey is just beginning.

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