A group of Carlmont High School students is working to give students across the country better access to financial education through their organization, Finance4Everyone.
Finance4Everyone is a nonprofit founded by the Carlmont students Gianni Haggarty, Max Rich-Gayko, and Raziel Yanovsky that provides financial literacy education to students through a variety of methods. Their program is primarily based on a website and was founded in 2025 through their Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) chapter, a national student business organization.
The team has already reached over 1,000 monthly readers and published more than 50 articles on a wide variety of topics, from reading a paycheck to understanding the stock market.
“We are Finance4Everyone, a student-led nonprofit, and we’re aimed at closing the gap in modern financial literacy,” Haggarty said. “We’ve created a bunch of articles, we have a 12-part article series on our website, and a bunch of interactive puzzles and tools.”
The idea for this program was fueled by the advantages they had growing up in the Bay Area.
“We got to thinking about things that we’re gifted in and that we have the privilege of having in our everyday lives,” Yanovsky said. “We realized that a lot of people in less privileged areas don’t have as many options to certain educational courses like business, finance, and investing, and we wanted to expand this to as many people as we can.”
Receiving access to financial literacy education is invaluable for the younger generation, according to David Weyant, an intro to business and entrepreneurship teacher at Carlmont.
“Having this exposure in high school gives students an advantage over peers who have an interest in business but no exposure to any business curriculum,” Weyant said.
The Finance4Everyone website includes many ways for students to learn financial literacy beyond easy access to articles. Their website includes over 20 structured lessons, interactive puzzles and games, a budget simulator, a mock stock training tool, and a library of 35 educational videos.
This organization doesn’t just help people learn through their website; they also go out into the public and teach. Finance4Everyone has presented at Carlmont, appeared at the San Carlos Farmers Market, and created social media videos to reach a larger audience. Nevertheless, creating a wider network has been a challenge for the team.
“Getting to a large number of people in our demographic has really been a challenge, just because we’re early on,” Haggarty said. “We don’t have much of a demographic base, but we’re going to expand, mainly through social media. We’ve already started to see significant growth in our following.”
Unlike many other financial literacy organizations, Finance4Everyone is run entirely by high school students, meaning that adolescents are taught by their peers.
“It’s more personal that we’re doing it,” Yanovsky said. “You have student educators as opposed to some random adult.”
The team has also taken steps beyond their local community. They recently met with Rep. Kevin Mullin to discuss how their project aligns with current financial literacy legislation and plan to have a follow-up meeting in the future.
“We hope to have more meetings at that legislative level,” Yanovsky said. “This can really help us expand our project to the needs of the students.”
The group hopes to continue expanding in many areas in the future of their program, particularly by prioritizing increased interactive learning over self-guided.
“In our future, we’re working to create a financial literacy card game, as well as an app for students to take a more guided tour in learning financial literacy tools, such as managing credit,” Rich-Gayko said.
