Growing up on a Navajo reservation in Tuba City, Arizona, Andrea Ferrero-Haggerty learned from her father to save money in a hollowed-out book. Her mother didn’t open a bank account until she got a job. Seeing how people in her community struggled to manage money led Ferrero-Haggerty to become a teacher, earn two graduate degrees in education, and start teaching financial literacy to the most vulnerable young people.

In 2008 she moved to New York and teamed up with a friend who is a certified financial planner to launch a financial course for youth in foster care. They named their program Pockets Change, a riff on writer Gertrude Stein’s observation that “money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.” 

Financial literacy is crucial to planning for longevity and can be especially helpful for kids affected by poverty. In 2024, nearly 12,000 K-12 students across greater New York, about 90% of whom come from underserved communities, took financial lessons from Pockets Change. The group says another 85,000 students have accessed its online curriculum. 

And how it is delivered matters. When Pockets Change started, it was a challenge to get the kids interested in the abstracts of finance. That changed when Ferrero-Hagerty’s cofounder Pamela Capalad invited her boyfriend (now husband), rap artist “Dyalekt,” to teach a lesson on how to prepare for a job interview.” Once he started rapping, says Capalad, “everyone leaned in.” 

Now Dyalekt often starts lessons by teaching kids to beatbox, a form of vocal percussion. “Music is a good mnemonic,” he says. “And for the young people that we’re working with, hip hop is something they relate to intuitively and culturally.” Putting students at ease is an important step to helping them talk about habits related to finances. “A big thing is to remove shame,” he says. “The feeling that if we don’t have enough money, we’re failures.” 

The founders say this sensitivity is important for kids growing up in communities shaped by poverty, racism, and critical knowledge gaps over generations. People most affected by the racial wealth gap also tend to have shorter life expectancy and, unsurprisingly, are less likely to be prepared for financing long lives. 

For the youngest learners, instructors incorporate “hype breaks” to release energy by dancing, and they teach concepts such as saving and compound interest in terms children understand. Saving is like planting a seed. If you take care of it and let it grow, one day it becomes a sunflower full of new seeds, reflecting the core idea of compound  interest. The goal, says Ferrero-Hagerty, is to teach kids that saving “should be a habit, not a one-time event.”  

To help kids see their own financial futures as less abstract, the team puts photos of the grade schoolers through age progression filters to show them how they may look in 10, 20, or 50 years. Students then write postcards to their future selves, outlining their savings goals and priorities. 

In 2021, Pockets Change launched FinFest, a rap competition for teens to write and perform songs about money management. The first place winner receives $1,000 and a trip to New York to perform before an audience of students, educators, families, and community partners.

Middle and high schoolers learn about banking systems, building credit, and avoiding predatory lenders. They are paired with a “money buddy” to encourage budgeting goals. 

Teens learn to build budgets around their favorite big-ticket items such as new sneakers or a manicure to think through their spending priorities. “If you begin your budgeting journey with something that you love, then you will adjust your spending habits and create savings,” says Dyalekt. “It opens you up to the idea that saving can bring you the things that you want, and it’s not just this idea out in the corner.”

by Julia Scheeres

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