Hey NGPF Community!

My name is Ikenna Okoro and I’m a new intern at NGPF. I’m so happy to introduce you all to my new NGPF blog series for the month of October: Kenna’s Korner! 

Let’s break the ice with a fun game of two truths and a lie! Don’t worry, I’ll start:

1. I have been awarded over $5000 in grant funding
2. I am the co-owner of an LLC
3. My father is a financial professional 

While you’re trying to dissect the truths from the lie, I’ll share a few additional facts to help you out. I’m currently a sophomore at Columbia University pursuing Neuroscience and Behavior on the pre-med track, and I’m very passionate about personal finance education. During high school, I co-founded a non-profit organization called Fair Guide, which focused on teaching low-income students of color in my community about financial literacy. I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio - where half of the students hail from low-income households and 33% of adults live below the poverty line.  

My interest in the financial well-being of my community started with my father. As an accountant, he would hold pro bono financial skills workshops for members of my community, young and old. One day he asked me to help him pass out informational pamphlets and other worksheets during one of his sessions, and while I was there, a realization came to me. If so many people in my community, from young adults to senior citizens, were lacking essential personal finance skills, then there must have been some sort of gap in the education they received when they were my age- on their way to adulthood.  

That’s when I knew that a lack of high school financial education was a big part of the issue. To address this problem, I wrote grant applications and used the funding that I was awarded to bring workshops, led by personal finance professionals, to my school community as part of the solution. As a student advocate for increasing access to personal finance education, I connected with the team at NGPF and was offered an opportunity to join the team for the summer of 2019! I was overjoyed to spend a few months working on the planning of several projects like a podcast and the PAYBACK Challenge: Cleveland, which will award scholarships to students in my hometown to help them with their educational expenses.

Every Friday for the month of October, I'll share a blog post. My posts will include updates about the scholarship campaign, as well as general updates about my internship. To end my first post, I want to give a huge thank you to Tim, Yanely and the NGPF Team for this opportunity, and lastly say that I am not the co-owner of an LLC… yet :)

Ikenna Okoro

Kenna’s Korner

About the Author

Ikenna Okoro

Ikenna interned for NGPF during the summer of 2019. As a sophomore at Columbia University studying Neuroscience and Behavior on the pre-med track, he's very much interested in understanding why people make the choices that they make. He spent his internship working on several projects such as assisting with FinCap Friday, organizing The Payback Challenge: Cleveland, and even launched a student-led podcast series! Ikenna has a series of posts live on the NGPF blog every Friday of October 2019.