Building Financial Confidence for Lifelong Economic Security
Closing the Wealth Gap equips middle school, high school, and college students with the knowledge, tools, and confidence to make informed financial decisions and develop practical financial plans.
Why It Matters
Financial literacy is not a luxury — it is a foundation. Yet for too many young people in underserved communities, it is never taught. Not at school. Not at home. The result is a cycle of avoidance, anxiety, and missed opportunity that compounds over a lifetime.
Closing the Wealth Gap breaks that cycle. By meeting young people at every stage — middle school, high school, college — the program builds financial knowledge before habits calcify, shifts the financial culture of entire households, and equips first-generation students to make confident decisions at the exact moment those decisions matter most.
Financial Literacy • Economic Security • Generational Wealth
How It Works
Closing the Wealth Gap meets young people at three critical moments in their financial development — middle school, high school, and college — with programming designed specifically for where they are and what they need next.
Students engage through an interactive textbook available in English and Spanish, video content, in-class facilitation guides, and a Capstone Project where they build a complete financial plan for their own created character — making every concept personal, practical, and theirs.
The Curriculum
Closing the Wealth Gap is powered by Money Vehicle — a nationally recognized financial literacy curriculum built on the Jump$tart Coalition's National Standards and designed to meet every type of learner where they are.
Program Outcomes
Participants gain:
A foundational understanding of earning, credit, budgeting, saving, investing, entrepreneurship, and wealth building
Practical skills to make confident financial decisions
The mindset shift that money is a tool for opportunity
Answers to the first 10 questions they'll face on their financial journey — and more importantly, the first 10 actions to start building a plan that's actually theirs.
