Week 3 Recap: Investing, Building Community Partnerships, and Pitches!

It's been a tireless Week 3 of our summer internship program and our interns have been hard at work diving into the development of investing workshops, creative marketing, state politics, and local community outreach. 

Here’s a look at what our amazing team accomplished this week:

Financial Literacy Bills at State House

A team of our Fortune Avenue interns headed to the Massachusetts State House for the MASC Day on The Hill event. Our interns, Caroline, Boe-Yee, and Jonathan, listened and supported a proposed bill requiring Massachusetts high school to offer a semester-long financial literacy course. During the event, Caroline (who is interested in marketing) filmed a promotional reel detailing the event and posted it on the Instagram.  After listening to the guest speakers at the event, interns then had the opportunity to network with experts such as a children’s book author, state leaders, and policy advocates. 

Pitches

Workforce development includes learning how to present and pitch one’s progress to others  – and the interns got to do just that this past Tuesday. After working with executive team members to develop their pitches, our interns were able to plan and present their progress. Our interns Jonathan and Luke fundraiser presented their fundraising pitch to four SuccessLink members and explained their idea, strategy, marketing, and plan of execution. Another team of interns (Caroline, Catherine, and Rye) presented their FIFA World Cup Watch Party event and how they pivoted when the weather took a turn for the worse. Rather than cancel it entirely, they rescheduled the event and helped coordinate the handout of free T-Shirts with the help of one of our senior interns (thanks Elamin!). Elamin prepared financial literacy materials and free ice-cream to handout during the day of the finals. These pitches helped prepare our interns for real world practice in public speaking and presenting 

Meeting with Local Community Leaders

Businesses don’t succeed without partnerships, and we wanted to introduce our interns to what a potential partnership meeting might look like. Our interns Boe-Yee and Gianni, who are interested in policy work and the government, joined Daniel and Rebecca to meet with District 7 City Councilor Miniard Culpepper to share Fortune Avenue’s mission and model. They learned about how to improve Fortune Avenue’s structure and truly execute our core mission. The team also learned more about Culpepper’s ideas for youth empowerment. 

Community Workshops

Rye, one of our interns who is looking to pursue a career in finance, is currently learning how to develop our financial literacy curriculum. He, along with Daniel and Rebecca, returned to City Hall to deliver an investing workshop in partnership with Henry Santana. After learning about basic terminology, the room split into three to learn about the different types of investing, how to start investing early, and diversifying their portfolio. 

About 83% of participants identified as either Black or Hispanic.

After the workshop, participants' understanding of how to read basic stock information jumped from 2.2 /5 to 3.8/5.

Independent Projects

Fortune Avenue is committed to helping every intern reach their career goals. One of our interns, Catherine, is interested in pursuing a career in health. To support that goal, Fortune Avenue encouraged her to start an independent project. Over the past week, Catherine has been researching the connection between health inequity and economic empowerment to develop a project focused on cancer awareness.

Catherine's project began with cancer awareness research. Through that research, she found that transportation is a major barrier to early cancer detection — many cancer deaths could be prevented if caught early, and missed or late appointments are often caused by lack of transportation. This week, she started creating a form and poster to distribute in neighborhoods with high cancer rates, such as South Boston and Roxbury, asking residents what they think needs to be improved about transportation access.

It has been an eventful week and an even better halfway point to our program. Stay tuned for more updates as our interns continue to build themselves to become high-agency individuals!