Money Bites is an organisation founded in the ACT in 2019 with a YWCA Canberra Great Ydeas grant. The focus of Money Bites expanded to workshops for young people in the ACT, with support from the Snow Foundation. The aim was to ensure that more young people in Canberra had a grounding in financial literacy, to support them in navigating the financial system and undertaking steps to financial wellbeing. It’s an economic justice issue, and as we cannot choose whether to engage with the financial system, all young people have a right to access the literacy required to navigate the system.
To inform the issue, research of the ecosystem was scoped and summarised across multiple sources to form a literature review of background research. This included engaging with research by national youth organisations, such as headspace and YLab, to identify young people’s current financial pressures; and from universities, including Monash University’s Australian Youth Barometer.
An evaluation framework for the project was drawn from the National Financial Capability Strategy. The evaluation metrics and theory of change for the workshops were also drawn from the Strategy’s Financial Capability Monitoring and Evaluation Framework.
Co-design with young people was the primary focus of the project. The first co-design workshop with young people took place on 30 July 2022, with the aim of better understanding the barriers, and the support needed for them to move towards financial wellbeing.
From the co-design workshop, Money Bites first focused on tertiary students in Canberra as the project’s primary focus. The content derived from the co-design workshop was piloted with young people in Semester 1 of 2023, with evaluations undertaken pre- and post-workshop. In Semester 2, they piloted the project at scale, delivering workshops to all three universities in the ACT at no charge, to ensure that funds were no barrier to access. Each workshop involved continual evaluation iteration and improvement of content between workshops.
The Money Bites workshops serve as an introduction to financial concepts and skills for tertiary students to start them on the journey of learning more about money and working towards financial wellbeing. Ongoing measurement of the workshop indicates that participants feel more confident managing money after the workshop and feel more motivated to take action to achieve their financial goals. As a next step for this project, they are examining how to ensure that school leavers in the ACT are provided with access to financial literacy education.
