ESSER Funds + FirstRoot
Empower Your Students with Participatory Budgeting ✨💸✨
ESSER funding offers a unique opportunity to help your school system recover from the impact of COVID-19. With FirstRoot, you can multiply the impact by empowering students to be involved in the investment decisions.
Why FirstRoot is a Great Fit for ESSER
- FirstRoot gets students involved in decision making with Participatory Budgeting
- FirstRoot features project-based learning at its best
- FirstRoot can be run virtually, on any time frame, even in the Summer
- FirstRoot’s financial literacy focus and methodology is built from the ground up for educational equity
How FirstRoot Works
Traditional financial education is based on hypothetical scenarios that often have little bearing on the reality of students’ lives. Instead, we teach financial literacy by putting real money in the hands of students. They decide together how to invest that money in their school through a process known as Participatory Budgeting.
What is Participatory Budgeting?
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which a group of students determines how to invest a shared budget to improve a school.
PB authentically motivates students to learn and practice the “Four Cs” of the 21st Century curriculum: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration —all while teaching design thinking, civics and jump-starting their journey to increasing financial literacy.
Students experience true agency and stewardship over their futures, learning through their own experiences how money really works.
“It has been so wonderful to see the students’ enthusiasm for the opportunity to improve their school while exploring design thinking! They are grappling with the real-world challenges of digging into the costs and logistics of project proposals to evaluate their feasibility.”
SHANA CASH
Participatory Budgeting Teacher & Coach
Purdue Polytechnic High School