Program Director Introduction Interview

My name's Kristen Ruhl and I'm the program director at SecureFutures. SecureFutures is a non profit out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and our mission is to empower teens through financial literacy. Financial literacy is basically how you manage your money. So it's everything from understanding cash flow to budgeting and savings, how to open bank accounts and manage them responsibly and then managing credit and things like that. So really understanding how to live with a responsible kind of financial life. We believe that teens are the best age group to do this sort of education with. They are right at that point in life where they're about to maybe get their first job, go off to college, start a career right after high school and we wanna get them the information that they need before they get out into the work force, before they get those student loans and they make mistakes. Often when you're working with adults the mistakes have already been made. If you're working with younger kids, it's too, it's not relevant to their lives so it seems like that 18, 16 to 18 year old range is the best. So we have two main programs. The first one is called Money Sense and that's a classroom based program where we bring volunteers from the business community into high school classrooms where they teach a series of lessons covering all of the basics of financial literacy. Our second program is called Money Coach and that's a small group mentoring program where we bring together about 12 students and three volunteers and they meet over a whole semester of school and build a supportive relationship around financial management. We we work with about 8,000 students every year and we partner with about 110 different educational partners both high schools and community based organizations. We work throughout the entire state of Wisconsin and do a little bit of work in Chicago as well. As the program director I manage a staff of, or a team of three individuals and they're the people who are really on the ground doing the work. So we've got a program manager for each of our individual programs as well as a volunteer manager. So it's my job to supervise their work but also to be working on curriculum development, volunteer training, all the materials that we use in the classroom, building community relationships with other community leaders and making sure that my team is able to get their work done. So I kind of, I'm there to help them overcome obstacles and do some of the big picture planning around the programming.