We were lucky to catch up with Shayan Parikh & Keon Attarha recently and have shared our conversation below.

Shayan Parikh & Keon Attarha, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.

Our entire mission focuses on serving the underserved. We recognized that financial literacy has historically been less accessible to immigrant and underserved communities, leaving individuals without the knowledge or resources to navigate key aspects of personal finance, such as budgeting, credit management, and investing. For example, we partner with Jubilee Park in South Dallas to support their after-school programs for middle school students. Every Wednesday, we spend an hour teaching these students essential financial concepts, including understanding taxes, building and managing credit, and protecting themselves from scams. By providing this education, we empower students to make informed decisions and take control of their financial futures as they transition into adulthood.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Our journey into financial literacy education began when we noticed a significant gap in our school district’s curriculum. We realized that financial literacy wasn’t offered, and economics courses were limited to 12th grade—far too late for students to acquire crucial life skills.

To address this, we, along with peers Raymond Zhang and Aryan Chilakamarthi (now freshmen at UT Austin), launched a local finance and economics club at Jasper Junior High School, Shepton Junior High School, and later Plano West Senior High School. Our goal was to integrate basic financial education into the classroom, filling a critical gap in the core curriculum. While students are taught essential subjects like math, science, and English, they often miss out on practical skills such as budgeting and saving—skills that are vital in adulthood. We believe that financial literacy is an essential life skill that should be taught early.

This commitment led us to create the National Finance Economics Collective (NFEC), previously known as GDFEC, to advocate for financial literacy in the DFW area and beyond. Today, we continue to pursue our mission, collaborating with organizations like Bank of America, NuMinds Enrichment, JPMorgan Chase, and others to provide financial literacy education to over 10,000 underserved students in Texas and across the nation. Our work has even expanded internationally, with a partnership in Lebanon through NuMinds Enrichment.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

It has not been a smooth road. Starting a non-profit organization is challenging in itself, but doing so as high schoolers presents an even greater set of obstacles. In the beginning, we faced significant struggles, particularly because many financial literacy organizations are adult-led and have established credibility. We often found ourselves competing against these organizations, which made it difficult for us to gain recognition.

There were countless instances where we were ghosted by community centers, professors, and potential sponsors, even after having engaged conversations with them. As we became more established, we still encountered resistance due to perceptions of us as “immature” high schoolers who couldn’t add any value.

Recognizing the need for a change in our approach, we took several steps to improve our outreach. We focused on enhancing our website and social media presence, elevating both to a professional standard. Focusing on an expanded curriculum, which is our selling point as an organization, we needed to work extra hard due to us not having the initial credentials as high schoolers to deliver a world-class and comprehensive set of slides for all finance economics topics. Our VP of Curriculum, Emory Yi, has been absolutely instrumental to our success, leading this initiative with remarkable vision and dedication. Her efforts helped us establish several key partnerships with organizations, showcasing the value of our newly-built modules and elevating our impact in the community. For these partnerships, we found that going in person to meetings and events also made a significant difference in establishing connections and gaining credibility.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Raymond Zhang, one of the co-founders, and I swam for years on our local club swim team together. However, he went to Jasper High School (I went to Shepton High School), where he introduced me to Aryan Chilakamarthi and Keon Attarha, both classmates of his and both of whom were motivated to close the financial literacy gap as well. And the rest is history. 

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nationalfec.org
• Instagram: @nationalfec
• Other: [email protected]

Image Credits

Sumehra Mahmud
Jubilee Park & Community Center