My name is Madison Kim. I started volunteering with Building Blocks in May, and since then, we have been trying our best to work with the challenges of the pandemic and move forward with our mission to bring financial literacy and career development education to high school students.
Knowing that our program could not go back into the classroom this academic year, we needed to come up with a plan to bring valuable information and money to students. As a result, we’ve decided to work towards a new MORE Program Scholarship.
For eight schools, we will be promoting our scholarship competition. The students will research a financial literacy & career development topic and send in a multimodal submission.
Recently, I have been reaching out to students, teachers, and graduates of my high school, Venice High, in Los Angeles. There has been reluctance to take on a new program considering the demands that teachers and faculty will be facing in the official transition to online school. However, I am going to contact the scholarship counselor in hopes of getting our scholarship presented at Senior Awards Night at Venice. This would allow us the opportunity to reach more students through our new program.
Additionally, I have been working with my partner Shashine to find more individual donors through social media. It is difficult to engage with people online, but we have been working to keep generating as much content as possible.
With these difficulties, it has been challenging to see where our work will be best received. Yet, I am still enthusiastic to see how our new scholarship competition will go this semester, and I am looking forward to working with Building Blocks to bring critical financial literacy and career development education to students.