To the HEFWA Community:
Since our first Summit back in 2014 (then known as the National Summit on Collegiate Financial Wellness), our goal has always been to figure out ways to help expand access to financial wellness in the higher education community. We’ve reached thousands of you through our seven Summits (so far), monthly webinars, Alliance Coaching Experience (now entering its second cohort), the occasional podcast, and e-mail inboxes via our listserv community..
None of this has been possible without all of your support. When we held the first Summit, we had no idea if anything would come of it and whether it was just a one-off event or if we may get lucky and return for a second year. But your willingness to volunteer, to support, and to believe in what we were doing kept driving us to do more and try harder. And we did this not just because we felt we needed to, but because this community had become something we cherished.
We’re always looking to find the next thing that could help our community and help us recognize our vision of, “Developing financial wellness for students to support responsible college financing, remove barriers to degree completion, and provide lifelong skills for economic prosperity.” And in the past few months, we’ve been working on a way to help us take us one step further toward recognizing this vision. HEFWA is becoming the new home for CashCourse!
Since 2007, the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) has done a tremendous job in building, curating, and maintaining CashCourse as a way to provide free access to financial education for students all across the country. Currently, there are over 1,200 institutions and over 385,000 students who use the program. They have truly been providing a great service to students.
At HEFWA we have always had respect for NEFE and all they have done to enhance financial wellness. As they transitioned out of the providing programming, we realized a mutually beneficial opportunity to continue to provide a needed service to the community. We appreciate their willingness to work together these past few months to come up with a way to have HEFWA serve as the new home for CashCourse, and to allow institutions across the country to continue to have access to the platform.
We’re going to have a lot more information coming out in the next few days/weeks/months to provide as much details about how all of this will work because, quite honestly, we’re still getting everything figured out. But for now, here’s a bulleted list of the most important things we think you should know right now:
- Access to CashCourse at an institutional level will be provided to any institutional member of HEFWA. This does mean there will be a nominal cost associated with access to CashCourse, but it will be incredibly cheap relative to the number of students at your institution. We will be posting the costs on the HEFWA site in the coming days.
- If you are already a member, you will have access to CashCourse until June 30, 2022 without having to pay anything additional.
- All HEFWA memberships (current and any new ones) will now expire June 30, 2022 instead of December 31, 2021.
- We are requiring membership for access to CashCourse in order to provide the on-going support that institutions have become accustomed to with NEFE. With the adoption of CashCourse our organization is going to have new expenses we’ve never had before, such as full-time IT support and an actual full-time staff member (we're hiring!) By including CashCourse as part of HEFWA membership individuals who use the platform will also receive the support of our financial wellness community and can learn how to supplement their usage of CashCourse with a robust financial on campus wellness program.
- Anybody who signs on prior to the Summit will be able to take advantage of our programming for the upcoming year, which does include the 2021 virtual Summit.
We will have an FAQ on our site that tries to answer as many questions as we think there might be. But, of course, if you have other questions, reach out and we’ll be happy to help you.
Thanks so much!
We’re excited to be able to expand our programming with the addition of CashCourse. We thank each and every one of you who has supported us through the years. Without it, this wouldn’t be possible. Thanks so much!
