Youth in Foster Care Learn About Personal Finance

Our Intensive Foster Care team works hard to ensure every youth in our program has a realistic and achievable goal for permanency and supportive adults ready to help them when they leave care. Our staff thinks outside the box for creative ways to include safe and appropriate relatives and other supportive adults in the lives of the youth we serve.

However, when youth in foster care grow from children to teens, it’s just as important for them to learn new life skills, such as preparing for college or learning how to drive, as it is for teens in more traditional family situations. The older teens we serve in IFC face intense challenges in their transition from leaving foster care to entering the world independently. While we work hard to ensure permanency and a network of supportive adults for every youth, we also try to help our teens build the skills they need to enter adulthood successfully.

That’s why the quarterly PAYA (Preparing Adolescents for Young Adulthood) classes we provide to the older teens in our IFC program are so important to us. These classes ensure that the youth in our care have the opportunity to learn about vital skills for living independently, such as attaining and maintaining a job, assessing their options for higher education and how to manage their money.

At our most recent PAYA class, four youth in foster care, ranging in age from 16 to 21, learned about budgeting, banking and eating healthy. The four attendees were very enthusiastic about the subject matter, and they ended up learning a lot.

IFC social worker Brittany helps PAYA attendees make pizza for lunch

Our social workers designed creative and engaging lessons to teach the youth about money and eating healthy. The social workers had lessons on how to read and understand important documents like W-2s, paychecks and credit card bills; they taught them how to choose a bank based on interest rates for savings accounts and loans; and they even took them on a field trip to the grocery store to learn about food prices, teaching them how to plan meals for a whole week while keeping to a budget!

One of the older students, “John,” absolutely loved the class. He took notes on everything, and at the end of the class asked if there was more he could learn. He said he’s going to start packing his lunches for work, to save money and eat more healthily.

One of the most valuable parts of the class was at the beginning, when our social workers showed the students how to calculate their potential cost of living once they leave care. They learned about how choices like living on their own versus with roommates or deciding whether to get a pet all impacted their cost of living in different ways; some choices were cheaper than others, and some things might be worth the cost to them, which would mean they’d have to budget for those costs.

Another student, “Steve,” was excited to use the weekly meal plan calendar tool we provided. He said that he never gets to eat lunch at school because he forgets to plan for that meal, but the calendar tool will help him plan to bring healthy, homemade lunches!

Everyone – our staff and our youth in foster care – was really engaged with the material. Our social workers thought it was our best PAYA class yet! It was great to see the students excited to apply the stuff they learned to their lives outside the classroom. We can’t wait for the next PAYA session!