{"id":35220,"date":"2024-10-17T16:55:53","date_gmt":"2024-10-17T20:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=35220"},"modified":"2024-10-17T16:55:54","modified_gmt":"2024-10-17T20:55:54","slug":"williams-students-working-to-spread-financial-literacy-through-coins-connections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/williams-students-working-to-spread-financial-literacy-through-coins-connections\/","title":{"rendered":"Williams students working to spread financial literacy through Coins & Connections"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Financial literacy can be a challenge at any age, but a pair of Grade 11 students from Dr. G.W. Williams are pooling their expertise to help their peers make sense of it all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coins & Connections: Empowering Financial Literacy is a free weekly financial literacy event for students in Grades 6 \u2013 10. Hosted at the Aurora Public Library, the initiative is the brainchild of Andrew Huangjin and Ryan Wang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFinances are extremely important in everyday life, but it\u2019s not being taught at school when you get your primary education,\u201d says Andrew. \u201cDuring that time, there\u2019s a limbo effect where you don\u2019t know what to do with your funds. Sometimes you tend to not spend it the most wisely, so that is why we thought we would be able to help them a little bit more.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both students come to the table with a record of excellence in business courses within Williams and at competitions further afield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFinancial literacy is just becoming more and more relevant for youth today,\u201d says Ryan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the areas of financial literacy the students tackle are taxes, budgeting, and credit. While they welcome the Province\u2019s move to instill more aspects of financial literacy into the curriculum in future years, they say they believe it\u2019s never too early to learn and get a running start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important for youth to learn about the importance of credit, especially now,\u201d says Andrew. \u201cRight after you graduate from university, it\u2019s extremely hard to have that initial lump sum to buy a house directly; you need to borrow money from an external source, maybe a bank, maybe something else \u2013 that\u2019s where credit comes in and I don\u2019t think that is being taught in schools at the moment. It\u2019s a big topic we\u2019re excited to cover, but not only that, we\u2019re looking for feedback from our participants on any specific topics they\u2019d like to cover. Anything related to financial literacy, we would be more than happy to host and teach them that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew and Ryan got Coins & Connections off the ground this past May after presenting their idea to an organization called Promise 1000, which gave them $1,000 to use towards the materials they needed to make it a success. In doing so, they drew upon their own budgetary expertise to maximize the investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result is a free and non-profit program that meets each week, starting with a 10-minute lesson before applying that lesson in group workshops designed to tackle real-world scenarios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By participating, registrants earn \u201cfake currency\u201d that can be used to earn prizes along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of an incentive for youth to participate in our workshops and apply their skills and knowledge to previous lessons,\u201d says Ryan. \u201cOur main emphasis is on building a community oriented around financial literacy. This is why\u2026it\u2019s all oriented about youth and making connections\u2026 We\u2019re excited to make a long-term impact on youth around York Region and more widespread than that. We hope that this program continues.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more information about Coins & Connections, visit sites.google.com\/view\/coins-and-connections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Financial literacy can be a challenge at any age, but a pair of Grade 11 students from Dr. G.W. Williams are pooling their expertise to help their peers make sense of it all. Coins & Connections: Empowering Financial Literacy is a free weekly financial literacy event for students in Grades 6 \u2013 10. Hosted at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":35221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/2024-10-17-03.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-9a4","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-07 12:06:36","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}