This month on Future of the Business World, Wharton Global Youth talks with Sam Purcell, a high school student from Vancouver, Ontario, Canada, who founded MyFLY to build and implement a financial-education curriculum in schools worldwide. Sam’s vision is to empower school investment and finance clubs, educators, and school districts with stronger and deeper financial knowledge to prepare students in all ways for making wiser and better-informed decisions about their money.
a reminder of the importance of nurturing our financial well-being is timely as we head into Financial Wellness Month in the U.S. in January. “I feel learning about finance is a necessity to living a successful life where you can live comfortably and not experience times of financial hardship,” says Sam. How will you begin to make smarter money decisions in 2023? A youth financial-education Future of the Business World podcast archives at globalyouth.wharton.upenn.edu to listen to them all.
Today, we welcome Sam Purcell to the show to talk about a much-loved and sometimes overwhelming topic — money.
Sam, welcome to Future of the Business World.
Sam Purcell: Thank you, Diana. It’s great to be here.
Wharton Global Youth: You attended our Leadership in the Business World program this summer, and it’s there that we learned about your organization, MyFlyGlobal. You are operating in the world of financial literacy, which basically means empowering people with the skills to understand, manage, and grow their finances. School helps us to become more literate in things like reading, writing, and math, and many believe it should also help us understand money from a younger age. I was just reading today how a rapper from L.A. is launching a financial literacy program in 2023 to teach kids from underserved communities all about saving, investing, and even spending their money more wisely.
So, tell us how MyFLY fits into this crowded financial-education market?
Sam: Yeah. So right now, I feel that school curriculums are very limited, and especially in different countries, the topics that they teach may not be very practical, and they also may not meet the needs of students today, which is why we’re trying to directly implement financial-education curriculum in school classes and also clubs in eight countries.
Our goal in MyFLY is to target schools by creating chapters of financial literacy curriculum that teachers will be able to take and teach within existing business courses that they offer. So right now, there are many different third-party organizations, such as Junior Achievement, FBLA and DECA. However, one thing as a student talking with other individuals across multiple countries, we’ve all found that these organizations do not tend to directly target the school curriculum. And I’ve also found that typically, only interested students will be the ones participating. So, to throw in an example — my investment club. We took part in Junior Achievement’s programs, but in a school of roughly 1,500 students, we only had about 100 students with actual access to the programs. By creating an actual course that’s taught for Wharton Global High School Investment Competition, because I know that you have wanted to talk with us more about that, and it fits very nicely into your discussion of having a practical application of these skills. We have thousands of students competing, and they’ve just now submitted their final reports. We’re excited to see who the top 50 John Gamba, and he’s entrepreneur in residence and also an ed-tech entrepreneur. So, [I’d like to be] focusing on education, technology, and creating initiatives that students can directly benefit from.
Wharton Global Youth: You’re starting a business-themed talk show. Who is your first guest and why?
Sam: The first guest that I would do would be a local businessman in Canada named Frank Giustra. And he’s actually the cousin of a close family friend of mine. One thing that really inspires me about Frank is that he’s a great leader and someone who’s motivated and very hardworking. He came to Canada from Italy with next to nothing in his pocket, and it’s really been his hard work and Source link
