Nationwide — Kevon Chisolm and his 16-year-old son, Kamari, the founders of Junior Wallstreeters, Inc. a non-profit, are offering online summer camps for children for the fourth year in a row. Their camps are great for preventing learning loss and offer fun environments for students to learn wealth-building concepts with other like-minded students.
The course is called Junior WallStreeters: Empowering Youth with Financial Wellness and will teach students lifelong financial education skills and discipline through 10 lessons with an emphasis on African American history and culture.
Kevon comments, “In addition to topics like budgeting, banking, and investing in the stock market, our camp goes beyond others by exploring community wealth building through investment clubs.”
He adds, “Our goal is to teach financial education to address the wealth gap by showing young people how to properly use money as a tool.”
Recent calculations by Federal Reserve data, show only 34% of African American households owned any stocks and 24% of Latino households owned any stocks, while 61% of white households did.
Kevon and Kamari believe that one way African Americans and Latinos can address this disparity is by becoming more financially literate at an early age. These camps are not only for African Americans but all underserved communities.
One child that participated last summer wrote:
I absolutely loved the Financial Literacy Program with Mr. Chisolm and Ms. Goslee. It has given me some experience with the stock market and showed me new things that will help me as I become an adult. This class is perfect for kids and teens. It teaches you not only about the stock market, but also about African American history, credit and debit cards, and insurance. As someone who never got the chance to learn about insurance in a regular school setting, this made a big impact on me. I look forward to doing more classes like this in the future.
