Students Make Sense Of Dollars

Saturday, March 1, 2003

Program Helps Students Make Sense OfDollars (NAPSA)—Merrill Lynch, the nation’s largest brokerage firm, is using an educational program to invest in youngpeople. Studentswill learn what makes it possible to own a business, buy a home, live debt-free and makeit to college. Personal finance, investing, taxes, savings, career and ethics are also part of the course. The program is built on the need for young people to have a better understanding of how money works. Recent surveyresults indicate that 60 percentof all students and 75 percent of low-income students lack a basic grasp of financial terms andprinciples. It is also a response to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan’s call for greater involvement on the part of corporations and advocacy groupsto educate youth on finance. The program—called Investing Pays Off IPO)—wascreated by the National Foundation For Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) for the Merrill Lynch Foundation. For 16 years, NFTE hasbeen teaching lowincome young people, ages 11 through 18, what it takes to be an entrepreneur. The goalis to help them become productive membersof society by improving their academic, business, technology andlife skills. If Laima A. Tazmin is any indication, it is doing just that. A program graduate and—at 13—the owner of her own Website design business, Tazmin said, “The skills that I learned have already changed mylife and made a big difference in the way I look at myself and the world around me.” A new program is designed to help low-income students be- comefinancially literate. To date, NFTE has worked with over 65,000 low-income, underserved young people in programs across the country and around the world. “The Merrill Lynch Foundation,” said Eddy Bayardelle, Ph.D., FVP at Merrill Lynch and Head of Global Philanthropy, “focuses our support on programsthat build a world of increased opportunity for underserved children and youth. With this program we seek to promote exciting, new long-term part- nerships that will result in serving unmetneeds and involve volunteers from our workforce.” Through the Foundation, the brokerage has contributed over $100 million to philanthropic pro- gramssince 2000. To learn more about the Investing Pays Off program or to down- load a free, 15-lesson curriculum visit the Web site at www.ml.com/ philanthropy/ipo.

--- PHOTOS ---

File: 20190816-175657-20190816-175656-56820.pdf.jpg

--- FILES ---

File: 20190816-175656-56820.pdf