St. Louis Fed’s Economic Education Wins Prestigious Award

The Institute for Financial Literacy recently honored Econ Lowdown, the economic education resources from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Econ Lowdown received the 2017 Excellence in Financial Literacy Education (EIFLE) Award for Education Program of the Year: Children, General.

The award was given for the following Econ Lowdown resources:

• Page One Economics: Focus on Finance, a quarterly publication that provides students a simple, short overview of a current economic event with cover essays that focus on personal finance, and
• Making Personal Financial Decisions, curriculum that teaches personal finance lessons grounded in economic history; it was created with the Minnesota Council on Economic Education.

The EIFLE awards are given annually to recognize leaders in the field of financial literacy education. St. Louis Fed Econ Ed staff members received the EIFLE award Wednesday at the Institute for Financial Education annual meeting in Chicago.

“We are very excited to receive the EIFLE Award for these two new products,” said Assistant Vice President Mary Suiter, the bank’s economic education officer. “We selected Making Personal Finance Decisions because it is a curriculum of 20 new, very active and engaging lessons and is unique in its focus on economic decision-making related to all aspects of personal finance. We were proud to partner with the Minnesota Council on Economic Education to provide this new, revised version of this curriculum.

“Page One Focus on Finance was chosen because it is a unique publication that is produced four times a year at a high school and middle school reading level,” Suiter added. “Each issue covers a personal finance topic and provides the opportunity for students to engage in close reading strategy to answer questions related to each article.”

In 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis received the EIFLE award for nonprofit organization of the year. To see more award-winning resources from the St. Louis Fed, visit stlouisfed.org/education/awards.

The St. Louis Fed’s online Econ Lowdown program offers hundreds of free lessons about economics, personal finance, and money and banking, and about the Federal Reserve itself. Videos, online courses, podcasts and more are available for classrooms from pre-K through college, as well as for parents and other consumers. There were more than 1 million enrollments last year in the online teacher portal, econlowdown.org. Similar free resources are available to the general public at stlouisfed.org/education.