Financial Literacy For Low-Income Immigrant Community

Youth Economic Advancement (sponsored by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation)

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

The 1850s was a time of racist and exclusionary laws, which prohibited the Chinese from becoming United States citizens. They were not allowed to purchase property and were forced to rent substandard housing for years. It is considered the entry portal for many new Asian immigrants to Los Angeles. These previous laws have hurt many Chinese Americans for generations. Per Los Angeles Times, Chinatown ranked top 3 as the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. For the UCLA study, "Chinatown is a low-income community where the majority of residents are immigrants who not only face language barriers but also have a low educational attainment." We believe in building upward mobility by educating underserved youth on financial literacy and economic stability to improve the overall community. We seek to assist children of limited English-speaking parents with no financial literacy. Our goal is to prevent the youth from the financial struggles that their parents are going through.

This Financial Literacy workshop will provide an avenue for our community youth to learn about various financial and mental health topics that are not offered in their schools or in their homes. The topics will include building credit scores, budgeting, entrepreneurship, creative ideas, savings, real estate investment, stocks, mental health concerns, and team-building projects. The youth in our community are predominantly very low-income and are 1st generation American. They struggle daily to get reliable information or necessary advice from a role model. There are no other resources or opportunities similar to this proposed project that will give them an equal opportunity to compete with youth from Arcadia or Monterey Park. Applying the knowledge from the workshops, our community youth will be able to uplift their families to live a happier and more prosperous life. We will offer a cash stipend reward that will be between $200 to $1,000 depending on their score on the multiple exams and the final team building presentation. The higher the student scores, the higher the cash reward. This method of distribution will incentivize the students to learn and understand that performance and knowledge matter in a professional work environment. This stipend will provide the participants with school-needed material and necessary items such as laptops, printers, educational software, educational subscriptions, and textbooks.

With the success of our project, Los Angeles County will have more youths financially educated with stable mental health. They can pass this essential knowledge to friends and family contributing to more successful Angelinos. We will continue to teach the youths to make educated decisions about their personal finances. We hope this can be a model program that can be expanded and replicated to a larger scale in other communities to educate the youths about everyday financial planning. Our goal is to instill habits and skills that will allow them to navigate the hardships of personal financial management with competence and confidence. It is our long-term goal that the school districts would add this curriculum to high school students to better prepare low-income and immigrant families for their financial future.

Our goal is to educate our community youth members to prepare them better than in the past. This knowledge will assist their family's upward mobility and success. We will collect data and measure successful outcomes by utilizing pre-test and post-test. Our primary target is to provide education for our youths. We will collect data from evaluations at the end of each workshop session for internal improvements to better serve the participants. We will keep all the participants' contact information and follow up with them every 4 months for a five-year period to see if they are financially stable or need further guidance. After the five-year period and if more than 75% of the participants are financially stable and not in financial crisis, we would consider this project a huge success. The project will be most successful if there are participants from here who become the Speakers for future financial literacy projects.