Reflecting on one year of our partnership with Comparethemarket
Naomi Darling, MyBnk
This week is Global Money Week. The annual global awareness-raising campaign highlights the importance of financial capability and skills from an early age. This year’s theme is “Plan your money, plant your future”, focusing on sustainability and money.
Throughout the week, MyBnk will deliver expert-led financial education to approximately 1,600 young people across the UK. We’ve also created some new free resources for primary and secondary age. These can be used by parents or teachers.
This Global Money Week, we’re also celebrating one year of our partnership with CompareTheMarket. The partnership is helping more young people get better access to high-quality financial education, removing financial stress and equipping them with the skills and services they need to manage money in a cost-effective way. Over three years, we aim to help over 70,000 young people directly.
Since launching last year, MyBnk and CompareTheMarket have reached over 13,000 young people across the UK, with both young adult and school-age programmes. This is now more important than ever, with recent research undertaken by CompareTheMarket in partnership with MyBnk, revealing that just over two in five (41%) young adults are worried about their ability to pay household bills over the coming months.
CompareTheMarket colleagues are really involved and have supported MyBnk through volunteering, fundraising and engagement activity. They’ve also volunteered in our Money Houses, created a bespoke Meerkat Money School programme for colleagues’ children and engaged with us through internal activity, such as their Purpose Week, StratFest (their annual off-site strategy event) and have run our Work Dosh programme for employees at the start of their careers.
Individual colleagues have also risen to the challenge and set about raising vital funds for financial education by taking part in things like the London Landmarks Half Marathon and the London Marathon, as well as a 24-hour game-a-thon. And with generous match funding from CompareTheMarket, these active challenge volunteers have raised an amazing £5481 since our partnership began. And then there was the big one. Collectively, a team of CompareTheMarket colleagues fundraised an incredible £42,000 from 570 donors by taking part in The Big Sleep Out challenge which involved spending a night in their Peterborough office car park to raise awareness of youth homelessness.
And we’re only a year into our partnership. We’ve got lots more exciting things planned together in the coming months, including research on the depth of financial education in schools, a video focused on the importance of talking about the rising cost-of-living with young people, and our next Meerkat Money School in April.
It’s been a fantastic first year and we can’t wait to see what else we can achieve together as part of this relationship.
About MyBnk
MyBnk is a charity that delivers expert-led financial education programmes to 5–25 year olds in UK schools and youth organisations — directly, virtually and online. Together with young people, they have created innovative, high impact and high energy workshops that bring money to life.
MyBnk cover topics such as saving, budgeting, debt, independent living and public and student finance. They also design projects and training programmes for others. Since 2007 they’ve helped almost 315,000 young people learn how to manage their money and two thirds of their work is now with young adults in vulnerable circumstances, such as those leaving the UK care system, focusing on ‘survival’ money skills for independent living.
