Community banks often promote financial education from time to time. Cambridge Savings Bank decided the task needed full-time attention.
At CEO Robert Wilson’s urging, last year the bank created the new position of financial education manager, filled by longtime bank employee Evan Diamond. In that time, Diamond has conducted 211 financial education sessions for 3,126 participants of all ages and backgrounds – from kindergartners in their classrooms to un-banked adults who want to get their finances in order.
With the help of other volunteers, Cambridge Savings is getting financial education into the community by sponsoring theatrical productions and setting up booths at town fairs – and basically any other way it can.
Evan Diamond
Title: Assistant Vice President, Financial Education Manager, Cambridge Savings Bank; Cambridge
Age: 48
Experience: 21 years
Robert Wilson
Title: President and CEO, Cambridge Savings Bank; Cambridge
Age: 61
Experience: 35 years
How did you get the idea to make this a full-time position?
Wilson: It got started a couple years ago. …With the financial crisis, the housing bubble, and all that stuff, I started thinking that the bank, … [and] the industry as a whole, could probably do a better job of educating our customers and folks in our communities about different financial needs that they might have. …My focus was getting people access to the banking system who really didn’t have that access, didn’t have a checking account, didn’t know how to get one, [were] going to payday lenders … The problem is, they just don’t know enough about how to go about getting themselves a bank account so they can start cashing their checks there. Maybe get an ATM card, a debit card, things we take for granted. So I thought we needed to do more in terms of finding out how we could help.
But now you teach a lot of different groups – how do you figure out what to teach?
Diamond: We make contact with each individual group, and oftentimes it’s a group that we have a former relationship with of some kind – either we’ve given donations to them or done community work in collaboration with them. We want to find out what the community members that they serve need to know most: What are the pressing concerns? What areas would they like to learn about? For example, they might say, “They’re really confused by credit and all the different credit cards that are out there, and different mortgage options and what affects your credit score,” and things like that. So we’ll put together a program that really can very broadly explain that topic … I teach them some really simple-to-understand concepts …and also from an emotional standpoint: Saving is comforting, while debt is stressful. That gets through to people. I try to give the lessons with an emotional impact, because that creates a more lasting memory than just words.
Are some of your adult students basically starting from square one on this topic?
Diamond: You have to sort of gauge what level your participants are at, when you talk … we make particular efforts to reach out to low-income individuals and minorities as well, so we reach out to the Somerville Homeless Coalition, the Salvation Army. They serve people that have had difficulties in their lives and are looking to have a fresh start, to start improving their lives, and that work was particularly rewarding. I just felt it, being in the room. There’s a group called the Umoja Group, it’s part of the Salvation Army, and these are guys that have had tremendous difficulties [that] often had been to prison. But they responded very happily to the lessons, and they were very engaged and asked a lot of questions, because they really saw this as an opportunity to get their lives economically back on track. They had credit issues in the past, they had legal issues, they had sometimes criminal stuff happening, but this could give them a fresh start, and it’s very rewarding. We want to help as many people as possible, and if you’re helping people that have struggled the most or are at the lowest income level, then we’re doing a good thing. We want to always be delivering a quality program, and we do measure the increased knowledge of our participants. We give the participants a 40-question survey, and we see what percentage gain they get in correct answers after the session. Two recent ones, we had like … a 72 percent gain and a 60 percent gain in the number of right answers… sometimes the high school students even have gains [of up to] 90 percent of right answers. And then we actually hand out the right answers at the end so they have 40 pieces of knowledge to study. You could do financial education without measuring it anyway, but then you don’t know how well you’re teaching it and you don’t know how much people are learning. But that was an important part we built into the program early on, to give it a little more validity, really.
Do you think the word has gotten out about what you’re trying to do?
Wilson: Almost every school we talk to now wants to participate in the program. They’re really lining up for us to come in and present something. I think it’s going to become something that will become part of their curriculum. Not saying we’re going to be doing it, but I think the schools might be providing more [education] along these lines.
Facts About Cambridge Savings Bank’s Financial Education Program:
The bank is working with Central Square Theatre’s Youth Underground to create a play about financial education.
Cambridge Savings’ booth at town fairs is popular – it hosts mini-quiz on financial matters.
Session participants take quizzes to test knowledge before and after Diamond’s lessons. He says they often improve by 60 percent to 70 percent.
The biggest surprise? How even young kids want to learn about credit and how to avoid getting into trouble.
Kids are instructed to go home and tell their parents what they’ve learned – Diamond figures they might learn something, too.
