An Application of Kind Capitalism through Bottom-Up Economics

By: Youthful Savings

Reverse the Cycle of Poverty and Build a More Inclusive Economy through the Power of Empowered Youth

Youthful Savings (YS) believes that socioeconomic empowerment of youth through kind capitalism and bottom-up economics is a solution to the cycle of poverty. Social and economic factors have historically created the current income inequality that exists in every nation in our world. When income inequality reaches a tipping point, social unrest ensues. Our current political, business, and banking systems are causing the wealth gap to increase at alarming rates. Education can be the great equalizer and our goal at Youthful Savings is to make this theory come true!

Poverty is defined as a state or condition in which a person or community lacks the financial resources and essentials for a minimum standard of living.^[1] We would also like to introduce the concept of poverty of heart. We define this as the inability to provide for others or have empathy for the concerns of others. This is further aggravated by the need to hoard material goods or wealth. The combination of actual poverty and poverty of heart is the cause of social unrest and a human experience that lacks peace. Simply put, world peace can be achieved if poverty - both actual and of heart - is eliminated. We believe that socioeconomic empowerment education can solve poverty. An education ecosystem must include both economic knowledge and character development that increases heart intelligence. Each youth has the ability to undo the harms of the past generations and create a kinder and more inclusive economy and thus society.

The core of our ethos is a shift from nationalistic and competitive economic systems to a more global and inclusive system. By reaching the hearts and minds of the youth, we believe we can rebuild the human experience to include the 3c’s: Compassion, Collaboration and Contribution. All youth in our learning ecosystem are guided to grow their 3Cs. This is a major shift from the current competitive markets that are driving our global economics; however, one youth at a time, we are seeing a tangible shift in our youth and thus a shift in the future of our world. The youth are the future and investing in the youth will yield to a more peaceful and inclusive society.

The Learning Ecosystem

For close to a decade, Youthful Savings has been teaching financial education and entrepreneurship skills to poverty-stricken youth in the United States. In 2016, we had great success selling our most popular curriculum - My Own Business Challenge. We were coast to coast in low-income neighborhoods and teaching directly into classrooms through the train-the-teacher model. However, after the administration changed, funding was cut, and the school system drastically changed. The usual segregation of education that has plagued our school system for decades was re-emerging and we knew that it was time to take matters into our own hands.

We went back to the drawing board. It was time to create our own learning platform that was directed to youth. Our years of working with youth allowed us to understand that it was the adults and not the youth that were creating the cycle of poverty and perhaps it was time for an education system to be built for the youth, by the youth.

The Learning Marketplace (TLM) was created in 2018 with a mission to rebuild an education system that allows anyone having something to teach to partake in the education economy. Competition in education is not needed and a platform that is collaborative could also help create a more collaborative society and thus reinforce the 3c’s. Furthermore, our history books are written by the victors of the many wars we have had, and it was time for an educational platform to allow everyone to write their history and share it with the world’s youth. All learning exercises are created to be experiential and include reflection-based learning. TLM is committed to integrative learning as a way to create more empathetic problem solvers.  More information about our learning exercises and education methodology can be found HERE.

Subscriptions are priced to fit any budget and scholarships are available through our foundation. Our mission is vast and TLM is meant to create a truly democratic system of education.

​​Youthful Savings Marketplace (YSM) was created in 2020 as a way to provide experiential learning to youth during the pandemic for our most popular course - My Own Business Challenge. For close to a decade, we have been helping youth start businesses as a way to understand how to transact with each other and learn how to earn and save money from their own personal gifts. We realized that it was necessary to build a community of youth as a way to combat the isolation that was occurring from the pandemic and forced homeschooling. Despite us having a tough time with opaque structured nonprofits, we reached out to then-Governor Cuomo’s office and his office made warm introductions to reputable and ethical organizations. We brought our most popular program, Youth Entrepreneurship for a More Inclusive Economy, to life via virtual live learning. We also went back to our work in Santa Monica and received funding from Civic Well-Being and taught a virtual live experience at Virginia Park Teen Center (another government-funded organization with financial oversight). We were building a real coast-to-coast community of learners that were committed to ethical business creation and responsible transacting. One of our youth graduates thought it would be wonderful to create a private slack channel so youth could communicate about their businesses, their struggles and learnings, political issues that were affecting them, and really anything else that was on their minds. They had a safe space that was monitored by Youthful Savings’ ethos of compassion, collaboration and contribution. This private online community is now thriving and consists of hundreds of youth globally.

YSM charges a transaction fee for each youth sale. 10% of the fee goes to fund the Youthful Savings Foundation which in turn funds more youth businesses. The youth are creating a kinder and more inclusive capitalizing system through their ingenuity and hard work. Furthermore, YSM increases city, state, and national gross domestic product and provides sales tax revenue to the communities that the youth are a part of. Investing in the youth yields immense benefits to the world at large – one youth transaction at a time.

Youthful Savings Foundation (YSF) was created in 2018 originally as a private foundation with the sole goal of capitalizing youth-owned businesses. The current banking system makes it nearly impossible for historically underserved youth to receive funding in order to increase their current economic status. YSF’s goal is to supplement the banks and provide youth necessary capital for their businesses. In 2019, the IRS reached out and wanted us to turn YSF into a 501c3 public charity. We took this as a gift and wanted to stay true to our values so we decided that YSF would create an open accounting sheet.

When organizations don’t provide a stipend to partake in our My Own Business Challenge course, we set aside a portion of our contracts to YSF in order to provide business capital to youth. We believe access to business capital is imperative to a healthy and inclusive economic system.

The ultimate goal of YSF is for the youth to continue funding each other through their sales on YSM. 10% of their transaction fees are contributed to funding YSF. The youth receive bitcoin or cash for attending monthly classes on TLM which is funded by YSF. Together, they are creating a kinder capitalizing system that incentivizes inclusive economic growth and higher learning through our Community Investment Fund (CIF). We also created an Engaged Youth Customer Mentorship program where members of the community can buy from our youth, invest in the CIF and receive a % yield from YSM. This way everyone is winning with the youth! We believe in hand-ups and not handouts and the youth deserve positive, reliable investors! We also host Youth, Art, and Good Vibes dinners where youth, mentors, and socially conscious artists can all inspire each other. We sell visual and functional art in order to fund the CIF.

More information can be found HERE.

Expanding the Ecosystem

Integration of Asylum-Seeking Youth: Through a fortunate meeting on Lunchclub, we were able to connect with Human Rights First in early 2021. They were working on a grant from Western Union in order to provide social services along with their amazing work of processing asylum paperwork and were interested in utilizing our ecosystem as part of this grant. A few months later, they received the grant!

The work with Human Rights First allowed us to start teaching and translating our learning exercises into new languages and it really tested our ability to create a community. We realized that incoming youth would benefit from past graduates as youth buddies that could help them integrate into our ecosystem. We also were excited to see actual growth in the youth and their communities. Most of our youth-created businesses started making money, and drastically increased their English and tech skills! TLM learning exercises have proven to be a great resource for increasing their English speaking and writing skills. More information about our work with Human Rights First can be found HERE.

Expanding our services to asylum-seeking youth across the world is immensely necessary if we want to live in a peaceful and inclusive world. When youth are isolated, they can turn to violence for refuge. Our goal is to expand our work to as many languages as possible and continue partnering with reputable organizations that have the same mission as us – inclusion and kindness for a stronger world.

Key Learnings

Hybrid Learning: We realized that our work needed to become more hybrid as the youth were exhausted from strictly online learning. We supplement our online learning with in-person events in order to create more touchpoints and trust with our youth. All our events and programming can be found under Live Experiences on TLM.

Train the Teacher Model: In order to impact more youth, it is necessary for us to return to our train the teacher model. Youthful Savings loves teaching; however, the next iteration of The Learning Marketplace will be Youthful Savings training organizations on how to utilize all that The Learning Marketplace offers. We will continue to be involved in community events and grow our My Own Business Challenge graduates, and keep on inspiring youth graduates to join our global community. 

Encourage Youth to Sell: Since the launch of YSM, we have learned that youth need assistance in selling their products and services. We are excited to launch our newest learning exercise, The Art of Selling in the Digital Age. In order to economically empower youth efficiently, it is imperative that youth possess the skills and resources necessary to increase top-line sales and profit. We are also excited to launch our first brick-and-mortar YSM store in partnership with the Community Corporation in Santa Monica, CA as well as have a YSM presence at Hester Street Fair in NYC. Our foundation will be providing capital to youth in order to facilitate their growth into producers.

Goals for the Future

Explore Education through the Metaverse and Implement Machine Learning: We are committed to integrating TLM on impactful technology platforms. Google classroom has proven to be the leader in this space; however, we will explore various platforms that are creating education on the metaverse. Our socioeconomic metrics provided in the supplemental information below will provide the data points necessary to see if the metaverse can solve long-standing challenges in education equity. We also plan to integrate machine learning into TLM so that we can increase youth engagement and impact.

In 2023, we are working on a 3rd iteration of TLM to incorporate machine learning with Google Education. YS is an official Google Build partner.

Integrate Bitcoin and Blockchain Education: We have integrated Bitcoin into our ecosystem through a key partnership with OpenNode along with new TLM learning exercises on NFTs, Bitcoin and Technology.  More info can be found HERE.

Financial Innovation: Our ecosystem requires various third-party financial technology integrations. Youthful Savings would like to build a financial innovation arm in order to lower the financial burden of third-party transaction fees. This will further bypass the hurdles that often contribute to the cycle of poverty and democratize finance in order to create economic empowerment for all.

In 2023, we built a partnership with USIO and Mastercard in order to provide prepaid cards to  our youth learners and entrepreneurs. This allows youth to bypass hurdles in access to banking and capital.

Expansion: As we expand to other countries, we will continue to impact historically underserved youth and the asylum-seeking youth population. We will also aim to include more economically fortunate youth in our sponsored virtual Live Experiences. Inclusion in education is important and our mission is to impact all youth. As the youth begin to learn and create together, the world will be happy, free, and peaceful. Education can and will be the great equalizer!

Conclusion

We are forever grateful for the youth who bring YS to life. It is part education, part new economic system, and part civic and public service. Instead of a top-down approach that the majority of our current systems operate with, YS offers a new perspective: bottom-up economics through kind capitalism. Since capitalism is the driving force of our modern geopolitical system that drives our global economic system, reforming capitalism is at the core of our mission. Our vision is to see capitalism be more inclusive and equitable. We empower the youth to bring equality through equity. Each of our youth business owners, along with the team behind the youth, owns their equity. Everyone is an entrepreneur. We are collaborating on our mission together.

We bet on the youth. We treat them to be capable humans and we push them to be the best versions of themselves every day. They are inspired to tackle the enormous challenge of resetting the way humans transact with each other which ultimately leads to reforming our global economic system.

YS is first and foremost an educational endeavor. If our education ecosystem is built with compassion, collaboration, and contribution, then our youth will rebuild all human systems to have those same key pillars which will eventually result in a kinder and more inclusive society.

The better the youth, the better the world. Let’s work together to invest in the youth!

Supplemental Information

Our Metrics: We measure socioeconomic empowerment by three categories: mental well-being, economic empowerment, and community development. We then further break down the categories into the following sub-metrics: