Empowering Financial Awareness During Financial Literacy Month

In this episode, State Treasurer Rachael Eubanks rounds out National Financial Literacy Month chatting with Dondreá Brown, founder and Executive Director of Young Money Finances, and leader of the Financial Empowerment Collaborative.

In his work as a speaker, program designer, and author of I’m BROKE: The Framework, Dondreá combines personal experience with practical strategies to inspire others to rethink their relationship with money. His work is rooted in a bold mission, to help families become the last generation that has to start from scratch.

Join Dondreá and Treasurer Eubanks as they discuss modern financial education, keeping a positive mindset and why financial responsibility takes collaboration across the community. 

Transcript

Intro:
Welcome to Treasury Talk, a podcast featuring timely tips and information for Michigan taxpayers, hosted by State Treasurer Rachael Eubanks.

Listen for takeaways from our subject matter experts that will support you, your family, and your business.

Rachael Eubanks:
Welcome back to Treasury Talk, the podcast where we explore the people, programs, and partnerships shaping Michigan's financial future. I'm your host State Treasurer Rachael Eubanks.

April is Financial Literacy Month, and today we're honored to highlight someone who is leading transformational work across Michigan communities.

Our guest is Dondrea Brown, a social entrepreneur, financial educator and community leader dedicated to helping youth and families reshape their financial futures.

He's the founder and executive director of Young Money Finances, and he leads the Financial Empowerment Collaborative, which equips communities with the knowledge, tools, and access they need to earn, spend, save, share, and invest wisely.

Dondrea is also a speaker, program designer, and the author of I'm Broke the Framework, where he combines personal experience with practical strategies to help people rethink their relationship with money.

And beyond all that, he's a proud father of eleven with the bold mission to help families become the last generation that has to start from scratch.

So Dondrea, welcome to Treasury Talk, and thank you for joining us today.

Dondrea Brown:
Thank you, Treasurer Eubanks.

Rachael Eubanks:

I have to say you always wear what every time I see you, a shirt or a sweatshirt that has some fantastic message.

 I wish everyone could see this, but today you're wearing Young Money finances.

 I think I've seen you wear a shirt that says investing is dope.

Dondrea Brown:
Yeah, but I also brought you a shirt that says Nope, I'm not buying that

 I'm focused on my finances.

Rachael Eubanks:
Well, very good.

So you're you definitely wear your message with you from a day-to-day basis.

So let's start with your mission because it's such a powerful one. You said you want families to become the last generation that has to start from scratch.

What does that mean to you and how did this mission begin?

Dondrea Brown:

So for me, what it really means is as I was growing up, I used to watch a lot of people in my family or in our communities pass away, right?

And what we used to always have is we have these opportunities where we were raising money, right?

And there are opportunities where I want to go on trips.

I wanted to buy certain things and I always felt like there was this start from scratch moment.

We never had it already right to the point where there are many times where I heard the word no, can't afford this, or even felt the feelings of frustration, depression in our family.

 And as a young person that stuck with me. As I started to grow older, I made this promise to my kids that we will be the last generation that started from scratch.

Meaning we will start to build the foundations that my family and you know the community can stand on and launch from as we build a better financial blueprint for ourselves and our community.

Rachael Eubanks:

And your work has such a strong focus on youth, teaching kids and teens how to earn, spend, save and invest in ways that set them up for real financial independence.

What are you seeing in classrooms and programs today that gives you some hope?

Dondrea Brown: 

So one of the things I'm definitely seeing is teachers.

They want to assist and support from the financial education standpoint.

A lot of them are wanting to feed from their own experiences.

But the reality is they may struggle with that reality, right?

Sometimes it's hard to practice what you teach, especially something like finances.

I earned my masters in curriculum instruction and I had an opportunity to teach at high school. So when I was teaching history, I didn't really feel too guilty, right?

I'm just teaching what was being provided, or at least what I knew.

There became a point where when you start teaching finances, right, it becomes more personal, becomes more personalized.

 And sometimes you fear or may fear someone asked you the question of are you broke?

 How much debt do you have, right.

 So we've seen teachers be very open and honest about this and really seek support.

And then we've also seen some creative ways that teachers are embedding financial education in their classroom.

And for our organization, Young Money Finances, we want to be an added value to that.

We have some teachers who are trying to gamify financial education, right?

We have some teachers who are making it this full experience from first day of class to last day of class. They have these larger capstone projects.

 We also have some teachers that are going to grocery stores with their students, right?

 Really applying things in real time.

So what we are starting to see is we're starting to see teachers think outside the box, be innovative, be creative, and really start to support students in the classroom.

How exciting to see some of those teaching style shifting from knowledge base to skills base and how that can become a very practical day-to-day, you know, usage for the kids that have exposure to these teachers.

I love it because my oldest daughter, she's in college now at Western and she's studying to be an accountant.

She started out in our organization with the best job ever, which was to say when something was boring.

 So she would come home and say, like, that my personal finance class is kind of boring.

 Like, why is it boring?

And she's like, well, we don't really do this.

 We don't really do that.

 I'm like, OK, So what would you do to make it more engaging, right?

 And she would have these great examples.

 Well, we don't play games. We don't even stand up. We don't get a chance to talk about our own personal financial experiences.

So those were some of the tools and resources and strategies we embedded in our own strategies and presentations, and it just added value.

So to see some teachers already riding this notion of finances are boring and making it more fun gives us a lot of hope, but also allows us to partner with teachers in a meaningful way so that when we come in, they're not like, oh, here he goes.

 He's talking about money. They're like, we're ready and excited to, you know, see what he has to bring.

Rachael Eubanks:
That's fantastic in setting that example. So let's build on that and let's ask about let's talk a little bit about representation.

So what role does seeing people who look like you teaching and modeling financial Wellness play in building trust and engagement?

Dondrea Brown: 
It's major. We know one of the first stepping stones to teaching anyone is relatability, right?

And for many people, they see relatability through facial features, colors, like it's that first contact right before we even I I know there are many times we don't want to judge a book by its cover, right?

But when we're talking about young people, that's the first thing they look at.

 When I was learning more about financial education, I studied Dave Ramsey, right?

 This this white guy who people are like you studied Dave Ramsey.

 But for me, I had to get past, you know, that that color barrier.

 But one of the things I found is once I started to go in the classroom and teach, students will walk up to me like we've never seen someone that was black or minority teach finances. So what it did for them is it gave them hope, right?

 Because it's hard to become something that you don't see.

 So if we're sitting in the classroom and we're telling people you want to get your money together, you want to be more financially capable, you want to have more financial freedom, students are like, so where is that represented in our current community, right

 I can't see myself achieving that. So that is major.

 The next piece is relatability.

 Like I said before, a lot of people used to say like, oh, they don't get it, they don't understand.

 But when I'm able to talk about being in foster care, right, 'cause I was in foster care growing up, but also my other experiences, people like, oh, you get it.

 Because finances is so much more than money.

 It's identity, it's behavior, right?

 It's environment.

 So wrapping all those pieces together, that's one of the reasons why we have a very diverse team, right?

 And we stretch ourselves even further to include the voices of our community to inform our curriculum.

Rachael Eubanks:

And that ties so beautifully back to your generational mission and making generational change. So fantastic point there.

 Young Money Finances has grown into a statewide resource and the Financial Empowerment Collaborative brings together partners from across sectors.

 Can you talk about how collaboration plays a role in expanding financial literacy access in Michigan?

Dondrea Brown: 
Yes.

 So I went to a conference, I want to say about six or seven months ago, and the speaker, Doctor Shaq Anthony, said collaboration is the new currency.

 And when he said that, I was like, yeah, that's 100% true because I have this firm belief of it takes a village being in foster care, I learned whether it was my caseworker, other kids, different programs, like I was raised by the community.

 Collaboration couldn't happen without, you know, without those aspects.

 But then it became a point where we had to really say, what does that truly mean?

 Collaboration, right?

 And the work that we're doing, we wanted to build an ecosystem, right?

 Not just teachers, not just financial institutions, right?

 Individuals in the community, kids.

 How can we fully represent all aspects or age groups, all walks of life when we're talking about financial management?

 Because we know in financial management, there's no one-size-fits-all.

 I can come in here and teach and I'm yelling and people are like, oh, this is amazing.

 And some kids are like, you're too loud, right?

 So from an education piece, collaboration is essential, but also from an access piece, because when we start to talk about access, collaboration is vital.

 It's really difficult to say, hey, we want you to start saving and get a save savings account if you're not collaborating with the financial institutions that have the accounts, right?

 Because that sometimes there is that automatic barrier where people don't feel comfortable partnering with banks, they don't feel comfortable trusting banks for historical reasons, family reasons, etcetera.

 So for us, one of our main collaborators are financial institutions. I tell people we have the best job in the world.

 We don't have to be the banker, right? We don't have to be the financial advisor.

 What we have to do is create a space where we have real conversations so that when our community members are prepared to have access to these tools and resources, the financial institutions know how to receive them, support them and get feedback from them. So collaboration has been vital.

 We we call our financial empowerment center or collaborative like the next piece in our our vision to have access to financial tools and a better chance to catch people where they are in their journey, right.

 I mean, you know, we had this conversation, I know, at one of our roundtables where, you know, where is the best place to catch people for the first time when it comes to financial education.

 And, you know, I think the outcome was that was school.

 And we're so grateful that we have that as part of the Michigan curriculum now.

 But, you know, there's still a lot of other stages in life where you need to keep reinforcing those messages.

 So I think that collaboration is important and continuing to provide resources throughout that continuum.

 Yeah, 'cause even in schools, again, you get the education in the school, but then you leave the school, right?

 What do you do next?

 How can you start to partner with other organizations?

 I think that's been really good for us to partner with other organizations and help them understand the mental health aspect of financial management, right, The health aspect of financial management.

 So again, like you were saying, like collaboration has been very vital in the work that we've been doing.

 So looking ahead, how can we strengthen those partnerships, the partnerships between schools, nonprofits, local businesses and government to build stronger financial roots here in Michigan?

 Yep.

 So I probably want to said this a couple years ago, but sometimes we have to slow down to catch up.

 And the reason why I probably want to say that because I consider myself a train of extremely passionate, motivated and I'm just trying to get things done and you know, create programs.

 But one of the things that we kind of missed on was opportunity to create blueprints to strengthen collaborations, right, to reimagine re, you know, revise structures, all those pieces.

 So now what we're doing is we're slowing down a little bit in our operation, in our approach and really starting to ask the question is what does collaboration look like?

 A lot of people like to say, Oh yeah, we're collaborating, but not really having solidified realistic clear goals and objectives, but also a vision of where do we want this collaboration to take us.

 So for us, collaboration has been beyond essential, but also a space where we're slowing down and starting to evaluate how collaboration can look now and in the future.

 Rachael Eubanks:
Fantastic. So something I really appreciate about your approach is it's not just about the numbers, right?

 It's about the mindset.

 So in your book, I'm broke the framework, you talk about helping people rethink their relationship with money.

 So for listeners who may feel overwhelmed or stuck, what's one mindset shift that can make a meaningful difference?

Dondrea Brown:
I will honestly say positive psychology, right?

 Starting to turn some of your negative thoughts into positive thoughts.

 That has been very vital.

 I talk about it in my book because broke stands for budget and resources and optimizing knowledge and experiences, right?

 Because typically when we say I'm broke, it has this negative connotation to it.

 You don't have money. All those pieces.

 I was like, let me shift, you know, that term, the narrative around that term to say I'm budgeting my resources of optimizing my knowledge and experiences.

 So when I was in college, I was taking a positive psychology course and the professor challenged us before we went to bed to think of five positive things.

 When I say that was probably the most difficult assignment that I wasn't graded on, it was very hard before I went to bed to think about 5 positive things.

 I would think about how somebody cut me off in the parking lot, how I lost something.

 But he was essentially trying to train our brain to think about these positive thoughts because we know as we think more positively, we open ourselves to see things as more opportunities.

 There are many times where we look at we look at life rather it's through history, whatever it is from a a place of scarcity.

 But I challenge people to look at it through a place of abundance.

 And the only way we get there is to start to shift our mindset, which is something that more than likely we can control.

 In the book, I talk about how there are many times where we can't control the economy, we can't control politics.

 There are many factors where we feel like we don't have control over, right?

 But what do we have control over and how can we start there?

 Because we want to instill hope, but we also want to instill action.

Rachael Eubanks:

 I love this idea of mindset shifting and trying to think more positively.

 It's and I think there's studies behind it that show how how effective it is.

 I know actually when I first started working in this administration and the governor mentioned every night she writes either 3 notes in her gratitude journal or three thank you notes.

 And that was something that I took away seven years ago now, and I still do.

 I still write thank you notes every week to individuals throughout treasury.

 And it just helps if you're feeling like you're having a challenging week.

 It really just helps you reframe your mindset.

 So I love that you've taken that and applied that to in the financial empowerment.

 So April is financial literacy month. It is the perfect time for families to take action.

 For parents, caregivers and community members listening, what are a few simple things they can start doing today to build financial confidence at home?

Dondrea Brown:
So I'm glad you said a few because again, I, I will give a whole presentation on many things.

 One of the most important things you can do is start to normalize having financial conversations in the household.

 Again, growing up, that was not something that we would even think about doing for parents as well as youth.

 Create a space where people are comfortable bridging the gap between what you may or may not know about finances.

 I have some Let's Talk Money cards that makes it very simple to say who's the saver in the family, right?

 Who's the spender? Like start there.

 But also, if you were to receive $100 today, where would you share it?

 Where would you give it and why?

 We want to start to normalize these conversations because let's be honest, other types of conversations are being normalized so that I think that's one easy way to start to bridge the gap.

 When I talk to my kids about money management, I'm learning just as much as I'm presenting because they are seeking and they're going out and learning information.

 The other pieces create at least One Financial goal together.

 I tell people all the time, a family that plans together achieves together.

 It can be the simplest financial goal.

 Let's save $100 as a family unit.

One, what that would do is that will start to instill confidence, not just for the adults but for the kids earlier on.

 But two, that will start to expose them to an environment that says this is OK, it is OK to start to implement this financial goal.

 And here's the other cool thing.

 Once you accomplish it, you give people opportunities to create another one.

 And then finally, I say this all the time, yes, we can scroll, but if you scroll, just hashtag on social media some financial term and learn at least one thing, one little thing.

 People are always walking up to me like where should I invest?

 What should I do with my money?

 I'm like, open up your phone and start to learn.

 My professor in college, he gave me the best lesson ever.

 He said you no longer need permission to learn about money.

 So what I started to do was self learn a lot of things about money management and it gave me the confidence to continue to learn and see that as a journey and taking the families learning together is what a phenomenal outcome.

 I mean, I think like, OK, this is geared towards the kids, but the parents having the chance to learn it as well.

Rachael Eubanks:
So before we wrap up, I want to ask something about something that's core to your story.

 You mentioned, we mentioned this at the beginning, you're a father of eleven.

 So how has your family shaped the way you think about financial empowerment and generational impact?

Dondrea Brown:
So I'll call them my little village.

 They have definitely shifted my mindset behind a purpose, passion, mission.

 I had my first daughter when I was 18.

 I was a freshman in college at that point.

 I went to school completely for free.

 Then I got into $189,000 in student loan debt, right?

 So I had my daughter, but I was also managing so, so many financial mistakes.

 So as I was graduating, I promised myself that I would be the last generation that started from scratch.

 But that also meant teaching it to my kids and family.

 The cool thing about teaching my kids is they are great accountability partners, right?

 I remember a couple of years ago, my daughter had walked up to me and she was like, are you supposed to buy that?

 Is that a part of your financial goal?

 I'm like, wow, right?

 Think about how many times in our lives we just needed that yellow light, someone to slow us down from our decision making.

 But here's the cooler thing.

 I educated her and taught her to be an accountability partner for me and then for the organization.

 They have meant so much for my life and the organization.

 Young Money finances would not be cool without them.

 Our designs, our curriculum, what we do for our camps, the topics that we cover all come from my kids.

 We have little business meetings, which are hilarious because some of my kids like we should do this with finances or let's focus on investing in Bitcoin.

 I'm like, hold on, son, slow down, right?

 But at the same time, they feel comfortable, confident and not like they've also contributed to something.

 My daughter and I were. We were just at the Foster and Future dinner the other day and one is near and dear to my heart because again, coming from the foster care system, so I was bringing my kids there because they know my story and my daughter was like, can I donate some money?

 And I'm like, you're not donating none of my money.

 She said I budgeted for it.

 I said, OK, so whenever someone again, my kids are like, I plan for this because we teach, plan, prioritize, pay, the decision becomes a lot more simple and easy because my goal for my kids is for them to make decisions that they prepare for.

 It's a no brainer that way.

Rachael Eubanks:
I have to ask, is the daughter that question your purchase, the accounting major?

Dondrea:
No, she is the the giver.So my accounting major, she's the saver.

 She will save to basically my kids because we have a account, acorn account and all the kids are looking at each other's investments and hers climbs up so high because she saves her money.

 My other daughter, Nadia, she's the second oldest, she's the giver, she volunteers all the time.

 She goes to gala. She like that's her.

 And that's what I mean by like finances being a part of your identity, right?

 I tell people, money doesn't make you real.

 It exposes you and exposure isn't bad.

 It just highlights your behavior and your identity.

 So your goal is to budget and financially plan around who you are at your core.

Rachael Eubanks: 

So you've clearly done some fantastic things with your own family.

 So thank you for setting such a a tremendous example.

 Is there anything you'd like to add today that we may not have touched on?

Dondrea:
Well, first, I definitely want to thank you for allowing us to come on and talk about Young Money finances.

 We started out in Grand Rapids, but we are definitely going to different spaces.

 We're in Ohio, Columbus, OH, we've been to New Jersey, New Mexico, so we are definitely expanding our reach.

 We are thankful that the state of Michigan has mandated financial literacy to be taught.

 But we also want to nudge a little further to say we encourage the state of Michigan to adopt A standalone course, like have it be its own course so that families and students can really focus on the personal financial side.

 And then finally, financial literacy can be fun. It's definitely scary and intimidating, but there are so many different resources and tools that can help and assist you.

So I encourage people to check us out on our website at www.ymfgr.org or even just Google us Young Money finances and chat with us.

 Ask us the tough questions.

 How do you really budget and financially plan as a family?

 Because again, our goal is not to keep all these lovely secrets, but to be an asset to our community.

Rachael Eubanks:
Absolutely.

 Well Dondrea, thank you so much for sharing your insight and for the work you lead everyday to uplift Michigan families.

 Your passion for financial empowerment is making a difference in classrooms, living rooms, and communities throughout our state.

 So to our listeners, thank you for tuning in.

 If you'd like to learn more about financial empowerment resources available through the Michigan Department of Treasury, visit michigan.gov/my Money Matters or connect with us at treasuryoutreach@michigan.gov.

 As Dondrea mentioned, additional information about young money finances can be found at ymfgr.org

 And until next time, take care and thank you for listening to Treasury Talk.