Students Win Scholarships at Financial Literacy 2022!

This past weekend, students from across the Greater Washington region gathered for what we hope is the last virtual tournament for a long time for WUDL’s Financial Literacy program. 

Our financial literacy program, now in its fifth year, is a powerful, proven method to increase financial literacy among the young people that we work with. Students take a pre-test to set a baseline of their knowledge, then attend a workshop to learn key terms. They then have three weeks to prepare their cases and dive deeper into these concepts. Debating about these concepts at the tournament cements their knowledge and takes their knowledge from purely academic to actionable and tangible. 

This year, we focused on access to credit and the development of credit scores. Too often, young people have struggled to properly understand how to develop credit and how to avoid common scams and traps that leave their victims debt stricken, unable to fulfill their dreams of college attendance, home ownership, or other future goals. This is compounded by discrimination against people of color and the failure of most states to teach financial literacy as more than a throw-away elective. 

We had a great tournament this weekend, with the top two teams and the top speaker (that wasn’t on one of the top two teams) getting a college scholarship upon graduation. It was a hard fought competition, but some incredibly worthy young people rose above the rest and added a little cash to help fund their futures. 

Our scholarship winners: 

  • Tournament champions (and top speakers): Jules Delehant and Favour Gam, DuVal High School
  • 2nd Place: Clarke Dickens and Joseph Villaflor, Capital City
  • 3rd Speaker: Ayisha Rodriguez-Akande, College Park Academy
We are excited to see Jules and Favour win the tournament — this intrepid pair of novices wrote the smartest case I’ve seen at this tournament in years. They have a very bright future, as does our 3rd speaker, Ayisha Rodriguez-Akande, the youngest winner of a scholarship  at this tournament we’ve ever had. We’re excited to also support Senior Clarke Dickens as she heads to the University of Pennsylvania this fall.