Our Mission:

Without reparations, guaranteed income, and land back, learning how to turn money into more money is not justice. But the right financial education can help prepare our young people for justice. 

The It’s Fin Lit system was designed by a classroom teacher and her students to solve accessibility and relevance problems other curricula do not address: 

  1. New finance teachers learn alongside their students as they teach without any prior training or burdensome prep required. They are provided with every single student facing material needed for the entire semester and can fully prepare for the next day’s lesson in about 15 minutes. 

  2. Students who have continuously had their learning needs unmet, whether those needs are related to literacy, disabilities, emotional responses to injustice, or truancy, have thrived with It’s Fin Lit because students just like them designed our learning system. 

  3. Most fin lit curricula severely underestimate the financial and social awareness of today’s youth. All topics explored by It’s Fin Lit have been chosen by students, and this has made our scope and sequence highly relevant and also highly rigorous. From options trading to limit orders to redlining to corporate welfare, the kids told us what they wanted to learn and off we went. 

  4. All the professional financial educators who accredit our curriculum with their expertise are Black or Indigenous to the Americas, because they are simply the best at what they do.

Our vision is for It’s Fin Lit students and for young Black and Indigenous investors everywhere to be given free brokerage accounts with trading balances funded by grants. It’s Fin Lit students have gone on to make some incredibly successful trades with their savings, and this is progress but not justice.  They should be trading with grants and using their savings to enjoy life today. The joy and rest of Black and Indigenous youth are far most precious resistance than a well managed brokerage  account, and they deserve it all. 

Our Timeline:

Today

Providing a full semester, ready-to-teach financial literacy course free to all Title I schools.

Tomorrow

More collaboration, more profound curriculum, and a year-long course.

Student Testimonials

 

“The course made me comfortable and ready for the real world after high school. Financial literacy should have been a required course a long time ago.”

— Aida

 

“I finally began to learn a subject that not only was going to bring me a step closer to my dreams of wealth, but also motivate me to do better academically.”

— Flash

“I felt as if I had a class that was actually preparing me for life, a class that actually told me what to expect in this world.”

— Damen

 

“The worksheets were done in a way where we could keep them after the course, almost as a thesaurus of information on financial literacy, that I still have to this day.”

— Julien

 

“It was one of the only courses that truly prepared me for the real world.”

— Nour

 

Our Origins

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About Clarity Burke Sanders (Founder & Original Curriculum Designer)

-Taught and designed curriculum in Title I schools for 7 years

-Self-taught investor and financial literacy educator

-BA, Political Science, UCLA/ MA, Political Economy, NYU

-Can usually be found on the phone with former students trying to understand NFTs

An intimate profile of Ms. Burke, a social science teacher, at John O'Connell High School in the Mission District