Session on "Working with Youth to Create a New Generation of Savers"

I've been working with Maria Sison of Juma Ventures on the development of SaveTogether, but we had never met in person, so I wanted to be sure to attend the session in which she and researcher Ed Scanlon of the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare talked about the success of Juma.

Juma merges youth-focused social enterprise with leadership development, financial education, and matched savings accounts. While they've always worked to achieve college readiness for the youth in their programs, they recently reformulated the mission to make that the explicit goal of all their work: "We break the cycle of poverty by ensuring that young people complete a four-year college education."

Scanlon attributes a lot of Juma's success at motivating youth to its being such a hip organization, one that youth identify with. It's refreshing to see that savings and financial education can be made to seem hip.