"For people who are new to Canada, who are low-income and who might not speak English, managing and understanding finances can be overwhelming," says Rosamma George manager of community development with Scarborough nonprofit Warden Woods. "That's why it's so important give people the opportunity to learn financial literacy."
Thanks to a TD bank grant, Warden Woods will soon be providing financial literacy training for community members. And more than that, the training will be made available in
five languages.
Warden Woods is one of nineteen community organizations recently awarded a total of $1.4 million in grants from the
TD Financial Literacy Grant Fund, a multi-year fund administered by poverty and education nonprofit,
Social and Enterprise Development Innovations (SEDI).
The mandate of the fund, as laid out on the SEDI website, is to provide "grants to charitable or other non-profit organizations that serve low income and otherwise economically disadvantaged persons and groups in Canada to support and promote financial literacy."
"What these organization are doing that’s so important is translating financial literacy in a way that makes sense to the people they serve," says Elizabeth Mulholland, chief executive officer with SEDI. "Sometimes that translation is into different languages, as with Warden Woods, but sometimes it's about adapting curriculum and examples so they are really relevant and accessible to the group that you're working with. It's going to be a little different if you’re working in a women's shelter or if you're working with youth or if you're working with newcomers. You always have to adopt the content so it applies to people in a real way otherwise the learning won't happen. The more the training connects to peoples lives the more successful it will be."
Warden Woods’ challenge, says George, is not only to communicate financial literacy in a way that resonates with the community members they serve--predominantly newcomers to Canada--but also, to communicate it literally, in a language their members understand.
"We are offering the training in English, Arabic, Tamil, Mandarin, and Bengali," says George. “Those are the most common languages in our community and there's no point in offering a financial literacy training course if people can't understand it."
In order to reach the greatest number of community members, Warden Woods is adopting a train-the-trainers model to disseminating financial literacy education. Warden Woods will provide intensive training to community members, who, once they are versed in the material and capable of teaching it to others, will then lead their own training sessions.
"The trainers will be assisted and monitored throughout the process," says George. "We want to make sure that the right information is getting out."
Warden Woods curriculum comes courtesy of SEDI, an organization that has years of experience developing financial literacy resources for low income and vulnerable populations.
"TD funding helped our Center for Financial Literacy to develop a tailored financial literacy curriculum geared to the reality of low income people," says Mulholland. "That keeps being updated and revised and that’s the training we provide to frontline workers [like those at Warden Woods]. Once they’ve mastered that they have access to our online curriculum. We don’t release the curriculum without the training because we want to make sure they’re teaching the right stuff. But once community group have access to it they also have access to educational resources and worksheet that are available in different languages."
Warden Woods will use these SEDI resources to empower their trainers to reach hundreds of community members over the next year.
"Financial literacy is so important in terms of creating opportunities for people and their families," says George. "The end goal is to empower people to make better decisions so they can create better opportunities."
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Rosamma George, manager of community development, Warden Woods
Elizabeth Mulholland, chief executive officer, SEDI