Her Funds Advocacy
The ASPIRE Initiative
A policy resolution by Sophia DeGregorio and Simone Morden, Stuyvesant High School
In 2025, New York City launched Financial Literacy for Youth (FLY), a citywide initiative to teach public school students how to save and spend money. It's a real step forward - but as Mayor Adams himself put it, "too many students leave high school knowing about chemical bonds but not Treasury Bonds." FLY teaches budgeting, credit, and banking. It doesn't teach investing.
ASPIRE (Advancing Student Portfolios and Investment Readiness Education) is a resolution proposing to close that gap - folding real investment education directly into the FLY curriculum already rolling out across NYC public high schools.
What ASPIRE would add
- Structured lessons on the stock market, bonds, retirement accounts, compound interest, diversification, and the relationship between risk and reward.
- A semester-long Simulated Portfolio Project, where every student manages a virtual sum of money - researching companies, deciding what to buy, when to diversify, and when to rebalance - modeled directly on the stock-picking simulation Her Funds already runs with its own members (see the exhibits below).
- Teacher training and professional development, delivered in partnership with NYC's Financial Empowerment Centers.
- Family and community involvement - office tours, trading-floor walk-throughs, and job-shadow days with finance professionals, especially in school communities (like ours, near Wall Street) where that access already exists.
The case for ASPIRE isn't just anecdotal. NYC public schools serve a student body that is 42.2% Hispanic and 19.5% Black, with 73.5% of students classified as economically disadvantaged - yet stock ownership remains sharply unequal: 70% of white adults own stock, compared to 53% of Black adults and 38% of Hispanic adults. Research also backs the approach itself: students who learn through active simulations like The Stock Market Game™ score higher on financial literacy assessments, retain concepts better, and report greater confidence making financial decisions than students taught through lecture alone.
In short: ASPIRE argues that teaching kids to budget isn't enough if they never learn how money grows. That's the exact gap Her Funds was built to close - and this resolution is our attempt to close it citywide.
Exhibits: Her Funds' Own Portfolio Simulation
Exhibit A: Capital Divas vs. Wealth Riches - two Her Funds teams competing head-to-head over a semester, each starting from a simulated $100,000 portfolio.
Exhibit B: The digital dashboard students used to track individual stocks and reflect on their investment decisions.
Read the full resolution, including citations and research sources.
Download the ASPIRE Resolution (PDF)