In Clarke County School District in Athens, Georgia, every high school senior has an investment portfolio.
It’s a stark contrast to the state of financial literacy in the United States, where one in five teens lacks personal finance skills, according to the National Endowment for Financial Education.
Gifted Savings — a nonprofit that gives high school seniors $1,000 in an investment portfolio, coupled with weekly lessons on the essentials of saving and investing — wants to change that.
They have a few pilot programs running across the country in California and Ohio, but their biggest rollout is in Athens.
“We’re making Athens the very first city in America where every senior has a chance to graduate as an investor,” Gifted Savings executive director Josh Landay told Good Good Good.
All 800 seniors in the school district were invited to participate in the program this year, and 90% of eligible students are now enrolled and consistently using the Gifted Savings program.
Why high school seniors? According to Landay, it’s at the essential crux of both financial and personal opportunity.
“It's that point where you're starting to think about, ‘who do I want to be? And what do I want my plans to be 10, 20, 30 years down the road?’ And if you're a student who has not had the chance to learn about investing — and let’s face it, almost none of us have that chance — you’re going to see money as an obstacle to doing these things,” Landay explained at TEDNext 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia.
“So … let's give them real investment assets along with real-world hands-on education. And that’s the spark to get them thinking about future opportunities that might not have otherwise been on their radar.”
Additionally, starting investment accounts and personal finance endeavors early is crucial to see major gains.
“If you don’t find out about investing until your mid to late 20s or 30s, you’re also missing out on that key period of compound growth,” Landay added.
So, these young people are given real money that has real consequences — and real benefits.
And in Athens, specifically, this real money can also be a conduit to end generational wealth inequality.
“There is a large Black community, and a large Hispanic and Latino community, as well,” Landay explained about Athens. “And the thing that everybody told me about Athens before I went down there for the first time, which was then reiterated by community partners, government officials, school folks, too, was Athens has — in their words — one of the highest rates of intergenerational poverty in the country.”
Landay believes the next generation can change those facts if they are given the tools to do it. The Gifted Savings program also aims to destigmatize conversations about money that would have otherwise remained taboo across the community.
“The other piece is that every student gets the same portfolio in the school. It’s a community thing. So, students are telling us that they're looking at the app and then they’re talking about it in the hallways and in the cafeteria,” he said.
“We think that by giving students the opportunity to have those conversations, we’re also helping to bring the community together, talk about money in ways that they tell us they’ve never talked about before.”
Gifted Savings is focused on students, but it’s keeping the families of those students in mind, too. Landay said the organization sends home quarterly newsletters and allows lessons to be accessed by any family members in the Gifted Savings app, so “moms, dads, aunties, uncles, and grandparents” can watch them, too.
“Another thing that we realized has been an obstacle is that families don’t talk about money. Whether you come from resources, in which case it's not okay to talk about money, or if money is an issue because you feel like you don't have enough of it, then you don't talk about money because it's a source of stress,” he explained.
“So how are we building conversations within the home as well as within the school?”
It seems to be something top of mind to the 12th graders, too.
“I will save money to start off my future right,” one student from Athens said anonymously. “That way I can have money to give back to my family.”
In these schools, money is also one tool in a broader approach to building opportunity on the ground floor. Gifted Savings has a partnership with TED-Ed, the education arm of TED.
Logan Smalley, founder and executive director of TED-Ed, said his organization's role is to help students gain confidence and skills to generate and build on their big ideas. Gifted Savings helps them learn how to bring those ideas to life.
“We see [Gifted Savings] as an incredible intervention to help students gain something that's pretty critical in the pursuit of developing an idea: Resources and the knowledge to grow those resources over time,” Smalley told Good Good Good.
In Athens, students already work with TED-Ed to learn how to share their ideas and stories. Then, Gifted Savings infuses them with resources to actually execute those ideas, which may even be shared in TED Talks of their own.
“Our hope is that, at the end of the year, when students give their TED Talks at an event, some number of them will be that much more ambitious and audacious,” Smalley said.
Although the program has not yet concluded in Athens, initial findings from other schools indicate it seems to be working.
“What those students told us from our baseline survey to our year-end survey was that it fundamentally shifted the way they think about money. They used to think of it as something to spend; now they try to think about how to save it first,” Landay said, about findings from a South Los Angeles program.
“We also saw double-digit increases in how they think creatively to generate new opportunities for themselves. We also saw that their confidence in their knowledge of investing significantly increased, and also how they view their influence over the direction of their lives.”
In Athens, students are three months into the program, and according to Landay, starting Level 2 of the curriculum. It’s built into the school day and takes place during an advisement period, a homeroom-style environment which helps students with career and college readiness.
And with engagement numbers hovering around a 76% weekly completion rate, Gifted Savings is ready to grow even more.
Next year, Landay said, the organization plans to implement across 12-15 schools nationwide. Applications are open for any interested participants, and now, Gifted Savings is working on finding a diversity of clients and communities, serving urban and rural schools in every region in the U.S.
Landay said the program’s operating expenses are completely covered, and now the goal is to match donors with schools to help fund these very real accounts.
“Every cent that a donor gives goes straight into the kids,” he said. “Because we think that every single high school student in the country should have this.”
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Header image courtesy of Alexander Mills/Unsplash
