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Written by Tracy Correa Lopez
For the past six months, 20 high school seniors, mostly from Oakland, have given up their Saturday mornings to study personal finance, investing, and wealth creation in classrooms on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.
Last Saturday (February 10), they completed their final class and a celebration was held before family and friends received their certificates for completing the Economic Equity and Financial Education Program. Each student also earned her $8,000 college scholarship from PG&E and the PG&E Corporation Foundation (PG&E Foundation) to help invest in her education.
This is the second class of students to successfully complete this unique academic program, which admitted its first students in fall 2022. Three-quarters of this year’s graduating class are women, and most of the students are Black.
One of the students, Erica Washington, 17, of Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, said she was grateful for what she learned.
“Through this program I gained a lot of confidence and no longer see money as scary. I am confident that with the knowledge I gained from this program I will be able to make good financial decisions in the future.” ” she said.
PG&E created the program after two years of planning as a racial justice initiative in the wake of the George Floyd tragedy to address economic challenges faced by African Americans. PG&E and the PG&E Foundation provide more than $500,000 in funding to the program each year through its community philanthropic organization, the Better Together Giving Program. The program is one of several funded by PG&E and the PG&E Foundation, which provides support and scholarships to students pursuing higher education goals across PG&E’s service areas. The money comes from PG&E’s shareholders, not from PG&E’s customers.
They partnered with UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Berkeley Executive Education, Northeastern University’s Mills College, and Amenti Capital Group to develop a program that prepares students in Oakland and the Greater Bay Area to attend both universities in the future. supported. Financial success and academic leadership.
Students took courses taught by Haas professors and financial industry experts on topics that are unfamiliar to most teens, including personal finance, capital markets and wealth creation, and financial data analysis and investing. . African American Haas undergraduates also served as student mentors.
The program launched in late 2022 and produced its first 24 graduates in May 2023. Otis Ward is one of them, and he shared his own journey in his PG&E short film, Change the System: Building Black Wealth. Ward is currently studying computer science and engineering at Stanford University.
An additional 24 students celebrated on Saturday.
Speakers include Panos Patatukas of the Haas School of Business and Jason Miles, an African-American venture capitalist with more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry and founder of Amenti Capital Group. It also included people who did. They praised the students and discussed what they could achieve.
During the event, harsh facts such as “The median net worth of black households in 2022 will be $44,900, less than 15% of the median net worth of white households of $285,000,” and “the gap between rich and poor.” projected on the screen. The population in 2016 was about the same as it was in his 1962, two years before the Civil Rights Act was enacted. ” It was to remind students why what they learned was important in order to make a difference.
Vincent Davis, PG&E’s senior vice president of customer experience, was one of the commencement speakers. He emphasized the importance of his education and talked about his early career as an accountant and overcoming his self-doubt to find success.
After the event, he said he was impressed with the students and optimistic about what they could accomplish.
“My intention was to inspire and support them. Luckily, I saw first-hand the endless possibilities for their bright futures, so I was inspired too,” Davis said. Told.
The program was created by PG&E Community Relations Director Jimi Harris, who was also one of the commencement speakers. He said he will be able to see another class of students complete the program and “partner with a top academic institution like the University of California, Berkeley, to provide this opportunity to these outstanding young scholars.” He said he was excited about it.
He said he was proud to see another group of students complete the program and gain important knowledge, and said he hoped the program could encourage similar curriculum in schools.
Mr Harris said: “We are confident that this program will help these students prepare for future academic and financial success. Additionally, there is a growing demand to make financial education more widely available to California students. We hope this program will serve as a model for increasing access to this type of educational content.”
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