How hard could it be to give away free financial planning? Harder than I expected. I’ll be honest. When I started reaching out to community-based organizations earlier this month, I expected momentum, excitement and to be in high demand. I’ve spent forty years in this industry. I understand financial planning. I genuinely want to help. How hard could it be to give it away for free? Harder than I expected. And more instructive than I deserved.
Here’s Where Things Actually Stand:
The first organization I reached out to was a financial literacy program for younger people (coaching and mentoring), exactly the kind of work I enjoyed when I did a few sessions with Philadelphia Financial Scholars. So I sent my application to a similar organization and heard nothing. No confirmation, no acknowledgment. Ghosted!
I won’t pretend that didn’t sting a little. Then I remembered: we’re in June. It was a school-based program. They’re probably not thinking about fall programming while the school year is winding down. That’s a very reasonable explanation. It just required me to slow down enough to think of it.
The second organization replied after a few days and wanted to set something up. I replied immediately with available times. Then silence again. Two more weeks of nothing. I’m not going to lie, at that point I started to wonder, at least briefly, whether this whole thing was going to work. Then they came back with a genuine apology. They were overwhelmed. Could we find time to connect? We did. And it changed everything.
More on that in a moment. The third organization hasn’t responded yet (it has been a while) but the fourth responded almost immediately with an automated text and email. There were follow-up questions, an educational component to complete before being matched with clients. Responsive, structured, proactive. It’s a larger organization with real infrastructure, and the difference shows.
So: two non-responses (so far), one ghost-then-recovery, one smooth onboarding. If I’m being honest, that’s probably a pretty representative sample of what this work looks like in practice.
Lesson in Humility (and Listening to Your Wife)
My wife is the Executive Director of a nonprofit and is my trusted advisor in this journey. I should have remembered what she tells me on a regular basis before I started checking my inbox every hour. One of the hardest parts of running any nonprofit, she says, is donor and volunteer management. In many small organizations, nobody owns that role other than the already too busy ED. In medium-sized ones, it’s a fraction of someone’s job. The pace isn’t slow because people don’t care. It’s slow because the product isn’t profit like we may be use to, it’s outcomes. And outcomes take time. In other words, we need to remind ourselves: “In business, the scorecard ends with profit. In nonprofits, it ends with impact."
If you’re thinking about doing this kind of work, read Good to Great for the Social Sector by Jim Collins. I’ve recommended it to others for years. It reframes what success looks like in a nonprofit context in a way that makes the slower pace not just understandable, but intentional.
Now, Back to Organization Number Two.
After we finally connected, I learned they work with roughly 75 interns mostly late high school age, early college, but a few are older and working through GED programs. They wanted a session on financial literacy delivered by a profesional, but not a boring budgeting worksheet type. Something interactive and outside the box. Something that would land with a group of young people who have a lot going on and very little reason to trust that a financial presentation is going to matter to their lives.
I thought about what actually matters to someone at that age who hasn’t had these conversations at home, hasn’t been taught this in school, and is just starting to figure out how the world works financially.
And I kept coming back to something I’ve said for years: we teach kids that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. We make sure they can identify symbolism in a novel. But we send them into adulthood without ever explaining how a credit score actually works, what the six components are, or why a bad score at 22 years old can follow them for decades.
The session I’m building is called Money Hacks Nobody Taught You in School. The central idea is simple: your GPA matters for getting into college, landing your first job. But your credit score follows you for life. It shapes whether you can rent an apartment, buy a car, get a mortgage, or even land certain jobs. And the things that move it up or down are not complicated. They’re just not taught.
I’ve built out a full presentation and a takeaway sheet covering the key concepts including a few financial “traps” that many younger people can avoid that will help down the road. The session is scheduled for July 14th. I’m genuinely excited about it in a way I haven’t felt about a presentation in a while. If you work with a school, a youth program, or any organization that serves young people and could use these materials, reach out. I’m happy to share them. It should be a fun, interactive and interesting presentation.
The bigger lesson from all of this is one I probably knew intellectually but needed to feel: patience isn’t passive. It’s part of the work. The organizations that are slower to respond aren’t less worthy of your time. They’re often the ones with the deepest need and the least capacity to manage a new volunteer relationship on your timeline.
We’re used to a world where responsiveness signals seriousness. In the nonprofit sector, seriousness often shows up differently. It shows in the depth of the mission, the loyalty of the staff, and the impact on the people they serve.
Adjusting that expectation isn’t a concession. It’s a prerequisite in working with them. More to come. There are conversations ahead with larger organizations and programs that I’m looking forward to sharing. But I wanted to write this one first while the stumbles were still fresh enough to be honest about.
We’re figuring this out together. And if you’re thinking about doing something similar, I’d love to hear where you are in the process.
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