Oftentimes, understanding financial management, budgeting, investing, and other financial skills can feel overwhelming and stressful. Let’s be honest, our education system tends to lack a comprehensive financial curriculum, leaving students feeling unprepared for real-life situations. Teaching youth financial literacy is not just about learning how to balance a checkbook or making money, but having a working knowledge of the economy, and how it functions on both a personal and corporate scale. We want to share with you some engaging, hands-on projects to introduce youth financial literacy!
A few takeaways we hope you gain from this blog are…
- How financial literacy fits with entrepreneurship education
- New projects I can introduce into my financial literacy class
You can also access our FREE Financial Literacy Subject Kit with even more approaches to bringing entrepreneurial finance into your classroom. Additionally, if you are seeking consistent entrepreneurial projects for your classroom, head to our “GET STARTED” page so we can help!
Youth Financial Literacy + Entrepreneurship
Financial literacy and entrepreneurship for youth are quite wonderful compliments to one another. While we often think of financial literacy as the ability to navigate our personal finances, it is much broader and can be directly applied to all things entrepreneurship. Whether you want to start a non-profit movement like Marley Dias or a for-profit empire like Alina Morse, knowing how to manage money is an absolute necessity.
Being able to take personal finance skills and apply them to ideas that inspire, excite, and motivate us to contribute something larger than ourselves is an incredible ability. Your student just learned how to make a budget? Great! Let’s apply those skills to starting their first Youtube Channel or opening their own Etsy shop! The possibilities are endless when we take the skills we learn and apply them to the things that get us excited!
Project Ideas for Teaching Youth Financial Literacy
#1 Financial Literacy Website Project
- Why: Creating a website does not have to be an extensive endeavor reserved for people who can code. Tools like Canva and Google Sites make websites accessible to everyone, and we can use that to make financial literacy accessible to a group that could use some support!
- Check out our latest blogs about how to build a Google Sites page and teaching students how to create business websites for more guidance around site building and design
- What: Students create a simple one-page website with the goal of teaching one specific element of financial literacy (e.g., budgeting, saving, investing) directly to a group of people that may need it.
- Students become experts in a specific financial category and create a simple, easily digestible site that helps their target audience!
- Have students present to the class and gain feedback from their peers to ensure their sites are as comprehensible as possible.
- Examples:
- Teaching grocery budgeting to first-generation college students shopping for their own food for the first time while managing their money alone. They can share it with their local university resource center.
- Creating an Intro to Saving Accounts website for high school students working their first jobs. They can share it with their school guidance counselor to give to working students.
#2 Business Proposal Project
- Why: This one is a longer-term project but really gives students an opportunity to use financial literacy skills from the perspective of an entrepreneur.
- What: Students will embark on an entrepreneurial journey to solve a problem for a customer group of their choice. They will then use their financial literacy skills to develop a financial plan for that business to seek out funding. When complete, they will pitch their idea to the class and their teacher for an investment!
- Examples:
- Build a food company that creates fun candy bars in different colors and sizes to revitalize the chocolate bar aisle that hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years. Sell the chocolate bars in boxes of 12 to grocery stores, snack stands, and individuals for $10 per box.
- Create a service company that matches students with small businesses in the community for social media internships. This solves the problem of several small businesses run by older community members not being able to connect on social media and gives younger students a new work experience for their resumes. The company will make money by charging the small business owner a fee of $150 for connecting them with qualified high school applicants.
We hope you enjoyed a few of these creative ideas for implementing entrepreneurial youth financial literacy projects in your classroom! Get your students learning tangible skills that will serve them in every area of their personal and professional life, whether they become entrepreneurs or not! If you’re looking for even more resources, including relevant books, podcasts, and more, check out our full youth Financial Literacy Subject Kit.
For additional FREE DOWNLOADS like this, check out our other classroom resources. If you are looking for support implementing entrepreneurial projects in your classroom, head to our “Get Started” page; we would love to help!
