GIMG’s Chairman Rick Rieder founded the organization with the purpose of providing an educational platform for undergraduate students to learn about investing strategies on a deeper level and also engage with underserved high school students to teach them about financial success. Our Community Involvement team has created an eight-semester-long financial literacy curriculum dedicated to students in the Atlanta Public Schools. Our goal is to work with students in different classrooms for their entire high school experience by offering finance-focused programs. Through our workshops, these students start learning simple topics like wants vs. needs and budgeting, and then move on towards more complex topics like stock and bond investing to retirement plans to FinTech.

We have been working primarily with two high schools: Maynard Jackson High School (MJHS) and Druid Hills High School (DHHS).

Our partnership with Graduation Generation has opened up many doors for us to connect with the MJHS students. For the past three years, we have stayed in touch with a very valuable teacher at MJHS who teaches an engineering class. GIMG members have joined his classroom twice per semester introducing college application components as well as finance concepts that can be applied to their interest in engineering.

Additionally, our brand-new partnership with Student Educational Experience Development (SEED), an organization at Emory that promotes awareness of higher education among underprivileged students, has allowed us to further share our knowledge, guidance, and advice with an Advanced Placement (AP) class at MJHS. We are very satisfied with our SEED partnership as we were able to deliver a rewarding experience to the MJHS AP students during a business centered event that SEED hosted on Emory’s campus last spring semester. Our team really enjoyed participating in SEED’s event since the workshop that we hosted was very unique and different compared to what we had done in the past. We created an interactive trivia game where we had the opportunity to get to know one another and discuss finance topics in a station rotation model. The students were very motivated to be learning about financial planning as they were actively asking about topics, such as saving in college, importance of having a credit card as a college student, and time value of money.

Our enduring alliance with Emory’s neighboring school DHHS has had a great impact on the Community Involvement team. DHHS was the first school who received us with open arms many years ago; and its staff are the ones who allowed us to develop our strong passion to serve our community through a financial literacy curriculum geared towards underserved youth.

In the spring semester of 2019, we hosted for the first time ever a DHHS high school classroom at the Goizueta Business School for a day full of interactive activities. By bringing the high school students to the Emory campus, this new project let us reach our pinnacle for the academic year as it gave the high school students the opportunity to visit our beautiful campus while learning from sessions delivered by both GIMG members and a finance professor. This redesigned program took meticulous brainstorming, planning, and collaboration. The Community Involvement team wrote an improved financial literacy curriculum with more advanced and clearer lessons to challenge the students to think critically and come up with creative solutions. Also, the team brought a Goizueta finance professor as a lecturer with the objective of providing the high school students with a snapshot of a college classroom experience. We received great feedback from both the high schools’ students and teachers. It was a very fulfilling experience for the GIMG members as we increased the engagement and participation levels from the high school students.

As a result, the Community Involvement team is excited to keep innovating our financial literacy curriculum and adapting to this ‘new normal’ in which we are currently living in. We are looking forward to maintaining our partnerships with MJHS and DHHS and expanding our program to other schools in the local Atlanta area to support more underprivileged students. We are committed to using our skills to our fullest potential to build more rewarding experiences and keep uplifting the Atlanta promising youth.