Dime-a-saurus helps children develop financial management skills during a Qualla Financial Freedom program.

Roseanna Belt is the director of Western Carolina University’s Cherokee Center.  Several years ago, she began to see that the annual per capita payment that each enrolled EBCI member started receiving several years ago as a result of gaming revenues generated by the EBCI is creating special issues for the tribe's young people.

The per capita payment, which varies depending on the tribe's revenues from gaming and has been in the neighborhood of $6,000 annually per member recently, is held in trust for young people until they graduate from high school and reach their 18th birthday. It is very tempting for them to withdraw their funds at this time. Many of these young men and women have not learned financial management skills. As a result, many have spent their trust funds very quickly on cars and other items young people crave, only to find belatedly they do not qualify for financial aid for college. The federal government views the single trust payout as a sizable annual income.

Belt talked with many people in the EBCI who work with young people and came to the conclusion that the Cherokee Center should develop a financial education program, targeted at children as young as nine, so they can learn financial management skills long before their 18th birthday.  She applied for a CPFdn grant.

Simultaneously, Heather James, 4-H Family Consumer Education Agent for the NCCES, was also taking note of the per capita payment related problems the young people of the EBCI were having, and she began to think about creating a financial education program for 12- to 16-year-olds that would teach personal financial and entrepreneurial skills. Financial education traditionally has been one of the services that NCCES provides.  She, too, applied for a CPFdn grant.

For more than 25 years, the CCCS has been helping people in WNC manage money and credit better through free, professional money management counseling and debt repayment programs. In 2000, after recognizing that many EBCI members were driving to Asheville to get help from its staff members, CCCS began providing one-on-one counseling services on the Qualla Boundary several times per month, thanks to a grant from the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina. In 2002, wanting to have a wider impact on the EBCI community by offering large financial education workshops in addition to its one-on-one counseling services, Celeste Collins, executive director of CCCS, applied to the Cherokee Preservation Foundation for a grant. Not being part of daily life at the Qualla Boundary, CCCS was not familiar with the Cherokee Center or the North Carolina Cooperative Extensive Service.

After receiving the three proposals, the Cherokee Preservation Foundation saw immediately that it had been approached by three organizations with similar visions, each staffed by very good people. Unfortunately, none was aware of the others yet, but CPFdn quickly fixed that problem.  The Foundation told all three it would award the sought-after grants to each organization, provided that the Cherokee Center, the North Carolina Extension Service, and Consumer Credit Counseling Service of WNC all worked together to create a single collaborative effort.

The three organizations shared needs assessments they had done, brainstormed about the curricula they could offer, began to research resource material, and together, they interviewed and hired the staff for the program that they named Qualla Financial Freedom. After testing Qualla Financial Freedom on a pilot group of young people through an after-school program, they began offering the program to a broad EBCI population that is now giving the collaborators rave reviews. With one comprehensive program instead of three redundant ones, the Qualla Financial Freedom partnership is providing EBCI members with local opportunities to learn the money and credit management skills that ensure a solid financial future and prevent crisis situations.