Thank you to all the personal finance educators striving on a daily basis to improve the financial capability of our students. We thank you for your efforts and for your support this year. Your ideas for new offerings, your words of encouragement, and your suggestions are always appreciated. We are here to serve your needs so please keep that feedback coming. As I reflect back on our year, I marvel at what our team accomplished in both meeting your needs for new content as well as developing new professional development opportunities.

Our 2015 Year in Review:

• Launched monthly Flash Surveys in February to answer educator questions on current practices in personal finance education including..
  • What Primary Resources Do You Use?
  • Who’s In Your Network?
• Launched our monthly Webinar Series (since replaced with Virtual PD) in March with our most popular webinars being…
  • Teaching Budgeting with Student-Centered Activities and Projects
  • What’s Trending in Personal Finance?
• Restructured the NGPF website in May to make it easier for educators to navigate and find NGPF lessons, activities and projects
• We hit the ground running in September with several new releases:
  • Created new Taxes and Insurance units to bolster our curriculum
  • Created a new Assessment Bank to provide educators with multiple choice questions to assess student knowledge
  • Created a Project Bank after educators told us they wanted to incorporate more PBL into their lessons
  • Introduced a series of Case Studies so students could apply their knowledge to real-world situations
• We stayed busy in October…
  • Launched new podcast series where expert educators and personal finance experts provide ideas that teachers can use in the classroom
  • Released two new lessons based on teacher feedback: Investing for Retirement and Budgeting during College
  • Added to our Assessment Bank
• In December, we focused on a few pilot projects to augment our professional development offerings. Stay tuned for more news coming in January around these efforts!

Throughout the year, we engaged with teachers and students from coast to coast through classroom instruction, workshops and conferences.

Some numbers to put this activity in context:

• Served over 2,000 students, parents and educators through conference workshops and panel discussions
• Traveled more than 50,000 miles attending fifteen conferences leading workshops and as a sponsor and exhibitor too!
• Developed curriculum and taught a 25-hour personal finance course to high school seniors (winter quarter) and incoming freshmen (summer bridge program) at Eastside Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, California

As we look back on 2015, we are encouraged by the fact that we had more visitors to our website on a DAILY basis this month compared to the number of MONTHLY visitors last December.  In order to continue this growth, we need your input!  Please let us know how we can continue to serve you better. Send me (tim@ngpf.org) your ideas for new content, units, professional development opportunities, activities, projects, etc.  Our best ideas come from the community!

Happy Holidays and best wishes for a healthy and happy New Year!

The Next Gen Personal Finance Team

Andrew, Jessica and Tim

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.