Citizens Fourth Annual Women’s History Month Partnership with YWCA Brooklyn

At YWCA Brooklyn, we believe an important component of preparing girls and young women of color to be successful adults and leaders in their communities is economic empowerment, including exposing them to a variety of careers they can aspire to obtain and helping them to build their financial literacy. As part of our YW Brooklyn LEAD program, we engage women of color who have obtained high-level positions in a variety of fields to share their educational and professional experiences with our participants, helping them to see themselves reflected in the successes of women who look like them and to inform their own career paths. We also partner with companies in the financial services sector to provide educational workshops that will further to our participants’ economic mobility.

Contributing to this work, YWCA Brooklyn partnered with Citizens for Women’s History Month 2024 for the fourth consecutive year to introduce girls and young women in our YW Brooklyn LEAD program to their employees’ college-to-career journeys and to help them build financial literacy. This year, Citizens engaged a diverse group of employees from different departments to educate our YW Brooklyn LEAD participants on their professional journeys as women of color. Echo Lu Chang, Middle Market RM, Senior Vice President; Taylor Roberson, Counsel, Assistant Vice President; and Ruby Chambliss, CRE Portfolio Manager, Senior Vice President volunteered their time to participate in a career panel where our YW Brooklyn LEADers were able to learn about:

• The women influenced our panelists when they were younger;

• Their college-to-career journeys;

• The variety of careers they can aspire to in the financial sector; and

• How their career paths brought them to work at Citizens.

Additionally, Citizens also provided a financial literacy workshop for our YW Brooklyn LEAD participants at our building in Downtown Brooklyn on the importance of having a savings account. We were joined by Aida Toure and Avile Jones from the Citizens Flatbush/Nostrand Retail branch and Jennifer Smith, Vice President and Community Development Market Manager for the NYC Metro area whose workshop taught participants about how savings can affect one’s financial well-being and explored the types of life goals one saves money for, the short- to long-term accomplishments that can be achieved by saving money, earning interest on money in a savings account, and how to make decisions that will allow them to save more money.

We are grateful for Citizens long-term support of our YW Brooklyn LEAD program and continued partnership this year and their employees’ dedication to the economic empowerment of girls and young women of color in our program!