In partnership with the Wells Fargo Foundation, AISES Advancing Indigenous People in STEM developed Native Financial Cents: Supporting Financial Capability for Native Americans Curriculum (NFC) to engage Native communities in supporting financial education for youth and young adults.
Financial education is a critical component of workforce development, ensuring students and professionals can persist and thrive in their educational and professional endeavors while successfully managing personal finances. Financial skill development helps students and early career professionals to advance more quickly both personally and professionally. Additionally, this financial knowledge will extend beyond personal finances to positively impact workplaces and communities, given the financial principles learned are not exclusive to individual use, ultimately having a ripple effect throughout Indian Country.
Learning money management skills at an early age can help youth prepare for a stable and secure financial future. AISES’ NFC Curriculum was designed to complement content from Wells Fargo’s Hands on Banking® Curricula which provides financial education for elementary, middle, high school, and young adults to help students start their financial lives smart and strong.
This program is delivered through educators who have participated in a Train-the-Trainer Workshop. While this project is anticipated to train educators and instruct elementary, middle school, and high school students throughout the U.S., the results from this project will potentially benefit thousands of American Indian/Alaska Native students nationwide by serving as a community-based education model.
The goal of the Native Financial Cents curriculum is to increase the financial knowledge, capacity, and confidence of Native learners within their communities, educational institutions, and throughout Indian Country through development and access to culturally contextualized curriculum and training opportunities. The long-term impact of this project is to increase the financial capability of Native youth and professionals.
The NFC curriculum incorporates Native customs, traditions, and culture so that content will be more relevant, easily understood, and applied by Native learners. The curriculum focuses on the importance of the participants‘ connection to their culture and the important role of community educators as part of that connection. The curriculum addresses commonalities among Native nations, borrowing examples from individual groups when necessary, and also provides an opportunity for narrative content to be customized to reservation and urban Native communities.
This curriculum falls into 4 categories:
- Culturally-relevant: Culturally-relevant curriculum empowers participants intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using culture to impart knowledge skills and attitudes. Culturally-relevant curriculum utilizes the backgrounds, knowledge and experiences of the participants to inform the curriculum, e.g., including Native values in the implementation of the curriculum.
- Culturally-Informed: Culturally-informed curriculum refers to curriculum that, during development, includes specific cultural components. Users of the culturally-informed curriculum learn about and engage with the cultural components of the curriculum.
- Project-Based: Project-based curriculum allows participants to gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period to investigate and respond to authentic, engaging, and complex questions, problems, or challenges.
- Life-Stage Appropriate: This curriculum is designed to be appropriate for a variety of participants in various stages of their life from elementary school age to young adults.