MyPath reaches 4,000 youth each year, ages 14-24, and focuses on building economic pathways

A national non-profit based in San Francisco, My Path integrates banking and saving into youth employment programs. Senior Program Manager Carlo Solis uses Money Habitudes in MyPath’s foundational summer and year-round youth employment programs partner sites — all while students are working at their jobs, which provides rich context for discussion. After doing Money Habitudes, in successive classes, they move on to learning financial skills and continue to refer back to what they learned about their financial habits and attitudes insights.

Outcomes

Since implementing Money Habitudes, MyPath has been able to:

• Train its own facilitators with Money Habitudes prior to welcoming youth into the program, allowing the adults who will be working with participants to gain valuable new financial self-knowledge.
• Show a 99 percent correlation in how participants’ money personality mixes accurately with their financial tendencies.

How They Use Money Habitudes

• Solis says a key part of MyPath’s model is to work with low-income youth at the time they get their first paychecks, a crucial time to capture their attention and help them develop healthy financial habits.
• MyPath students work in groups of 15-20, spending about an hour sorting and interpreting their Money Habitudes. They use Money Habitudes to better understand their financial habits and attitudes and explore their relationship with money.
• Students look at big and small decisions, with many seeing even daily choices, like buying a movie ticket for a friend, in a new light.