Building Blocks for Kids’ MORE Program has been successfully running in classrooms at USC Hybrid and Hueneme High School from the beginning of September to current day. Our program is doing everything we can to run the program successfully by bringing in guest speakers, preparing presentations, and creating thought-provoking assignments. The assignments and activities that we provide our students with ensure that they are gaining financial literacy skills that they will ultimately utilize in their future.
In September 2021, Building Blocks for Kids received our first invitation to submit a grant proposal to Third Plateau, a social impact consulting firm. They reached out on behalf of a client, RPO 2.0, a giving circle of seventeen real estate developers in Los Angeles who are committed to positive social change. We took the month to develop our grant for our first ever invitation, where the college interns took the impacts that BBFK was making to show these real estate developers the significance of our financial literacy program. Our organization highlighted the important mentor/mentee relationships that we weer forming, our focus on empowering underserved youth, and our goal to building three strong pillars of our organization: building the involvement of the Los Angeles School District (LAUSD) into our program, developing our website, and creating a strong volunteer base of groups and companies that are motivated to teach our students. Unfortunately, with all this, Building Blocks for Kids was not selected for the grant. Though we were not selected, we are grateful that this process has effectively put our organization on the randar of a number of passionate and well-resourced individuals.
In regards to our November 2021 Golf Tournament, Building Blocks for Kids had the biggest turnout we have ever had! Our organization was able to raise the most money we have ever raised; it was a great success and we can’t wait for next year. We would like to give a shout out to our partners Union Bank, Tito’s, Easy’s and the Dodger’s for their contribution and continued support.
One question our organization seeks to explore is: how much would it take to run our MORE Program throughout the state of California and how much would it cost for large corporations and other groups to fund our program to be fully enacted. The 2019-2020 Department of Education states that there are 1,744,104 high school students in 1,322 schools throughout the state of California. As our program is primarily directed towards sophomores, dividing 1,744,104 by 4 would give us an estimate as to how many sophomores there are in the state, which means 436,026 sophomores. Since our program typically has 30 students per classroom, 436,026/30 leads to 14,534 classes. It takes $30,000 to run our program in each class, so $30,000 multiplied by 14,534 classrooms would lead to $436,050,000 to run our program throughout the state of California to provide financial literacy and career discovery knowledge to high school sophomores per year. If big companies like Apple, Google, Meta, or Wells Fargo were to donate 1% of their earnings to fund this program, the funding would easily cover the costs of the MORE Program to provide essential financial literacy and career discovery to high school students throughout the state of California. If anything, the funding could help make this program accessible not only in California, but in other states as well.