Colleen Gearns
Colleen Gearns serves as Executive Director at Cents Ability. She holds a BA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in Economics and Cultural Anthropology, as well as a MS from New York University in Global Affairs.
February 11, 2015
Cents Ability is a nonprofit dedicated to educating and empowering high school students to achieve their goals through the prudent and informed management of their financial resources. Since 2004, we have done this through teaching free financial literacy workshops to students across the New York City area. All of our classes are taught by trained volunteers, often times professionals in the finance field looking to give back and serve others while using their skill sets.
Teen participants benefit from our curriculum which covers topics and resources typically left out of traditional instruction. 60% of sites that we work with (high schools, after school programs, YMCA’s, etc.) report that we teach material their teens would not have had access to otherwise. Moreover, 54% of our students self-report that that do not discuss money with their family. If neither at school nor at home, where are these students supposed to learn vital money management skills necessary to survive and thrive in our society? Who is going to help them navigate student loans, credit card offers, even tasks as basic as opening their first bank accounts? Cents Ability has been filling that need for ten years.
However, while the program is great for students and sites, coordination can be extremely time consuming for our team. A high school in the financial district may want us to come for 40 minutes every Wednesday afternoon for eight weeks while a YMCA in Queens is only looking to have two-hour evening classes. Each workshop is unique and needs to be handled with care. Bluewolf is helping us do this better.
As an extremely small organization, resources are tight, which makes our pro bono-based relationship with Bluewolf that much more precious. And the quality and effort they have dedicated to our project has been astounding.
In the short time we have been working together, Bluewolf employees have already saved hours of personnel time for our team every day. Jon Paz has automated emails prompting sites to distribute our pre and post surveys to teens. Liz Swarthout created a new template that fills in information vital to both our volunteers and host coordinators. TJ Kelly fixed broken links to our website, so that we now have records for every interested volunteer and can invite them to our monthly training sessions. Jen Igartua has championed our cause and managed her team seamlessly, anticipating our needs before I can even put them to words.
On a larger scale, members of the Bluewolf pack are also working on retooling our logic model within Salesforce to cut our program coordination time in half. I cannot contain my excitement thinking about how many more workshops we will be able to hold, and how many more students we will be able to teach with all of that coordination time that has been freed up for outreach.
Bluewolf’s generous gift of pro bono services has already increased the functionality of our systems and cut the number of hours consumed by program coordination. I’m excited to see just how much time they will be able to save our team when our new logic model is revealed. Time that can soon be dedicated to more important tasks such as training more volunteers, partnering with more sites, and most importantly, teaching more students.
I could not imagine a better experience working with the Bluewolf team. Every employee I have interacted with has been professional, creative and innovative — suggesting improvements I had never dreamed possible. Their work has been nothing but stellar and I look forward to many more collaborations in the future.
Interested in learning more about Bluewolf’s CSR efforts and Pack Pro Bono program? Check out our philanthropy page, or contact us.
