-: My name's Kristen Ruhl
and I'm the program director at SecureFutures.
SecureFutures is a non profit out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin
and our mission is to empower teens
through financial literacy.
Financial literacy is basically how you manage your money.
So it's everything from understanding cash flow
to budgeting and savings,
how to open bank accounts
and manage them responsibly
and then managing credit and things like that.
So really understanding how to live with a responsible
kind of financial life.
We believe that teens are the best age group
to do this sort of education with.
They are right at that point in life
where they're about to maybe get their first job,
go off to college, start a career right after high school
and we wanna get them the information that they need
before they get out into the work force,
before they get those student loans
and they make mistakes.
Often when you're working with adults
the mistakes have already been made.
If you're working with younger kids,
it's too, it's not relevant to their lives
so it seems like that 18,
16 to 18 year old range is the best.
So we have two main programs.
The first one is called Money Sense
and that's a classroom based program
where we bring volunteers from the business community
into high school classrooms
where they teach a series of lessons
covering all of the basics of financial literacy.
Our second program is called Money Coach
and that's a small group mentoring program
where we bring together about 12 students
and three volunteers
and they meet over a whole semester of school
and build a supportive relationship
around financial management.
We we work with about 8,000 students every year
and we partner with about 110 different educational partners
both high schools and community based organizations.
We work throughout the entire state of Wisconsin
and do a little bit of work in Chicago as well.
As the program director I manage a staff of,
or a team of three individuals
and they're the people who are really on the ground
doing the work.
So we've got a program manager
for each of our individual programs
as well as a volunteer manager.
So it's my job to supervise their work
but also to be working on curriculum development,
volunteer training, all the materials
that we use in the classroom,
building community relationships
with other community leaders
and making sure that my team is able to get their work done.
So I kind of, I'm there to help them
overcome obstacles and do
some of the big picture planning around the programming.