“Are you feeling lucky today?” Jennifer Scott, interim superintendent of the Clarke County School District, asked high school seniors in assemblies at the county’s three public high schools Thursday, Aug. 7.
Every one of them, more than 800 seniors across the district, was being given a $1,000 investment portfolio, she told them, with only a few strings attached—attending a series of investment and financial literacy lessons over the course of the school year, and completing some surveys. Then, when they turn 18, their investments will be theirs to handle however they wish.
Reaction at Cedar Shoals High School, the first to hear the news, seemed muted, with students perhaps skeptical before they heard the details, but by the time Scott and a team from Gifted Savings, the nonprofit behind the gifts, explained the details, they knew it was real. Clarke Central’s seniors were louder—word may have gotten out, though Scott asked the students to keep it secret until after all three announcements. The most enthusiastic reception was the final session at Clarke’s small alternative school, Classic City High, with just 11 seniors. There, a question-and-answer period turned into a lively conversation among students, the Gifted Savings team and the group’s founder, California tech entrepreneur and multimillionaire Farhad Mohit, who sat in the audience for each of the three announcements.
“Athens will be the first city in America where every [public school] student graduates as an investor,” Gifted Savings Executive Director Josh Landay told students. The Gifted Savings team hopes to see it grow to many more cities, however.
“I think you’re going to be an example for the rest of the country,” Mohit said at an Athens Area Chamber of Commerce breakfast Friday morning. A team of University of Georgia researchers will track the project to evaluate its effectiveness, he said.
The students’ identical portfolios are allocated in four pots, each with a different degree of risk: a certificate of deposit, a bond fund, a growth stock fund and a bitcoin account. There’s no guarantee the portfolio will grow over the course of the next year—it could decline in value, depending on market performance—but at a pilot project at Westbrook Academy, a small California charter school supported by NBA star Russell Westbrook, the portfolios grew to more than $1,600, said Gifted Savings Program Director Jennifer Inman.
All 50 of the Westbrook seniors completed the requirements to ensure the portfolios would be theirs, Inman said. “These kids are now thinking about planning for the future,” Mohit told chamber members Aug. 8 as he showed a video with testimonials from Westbrook students.
Students won’t be making investment decisions, but they’ll be able to track their investments to see what’s going up or down, learning and talking with each other about things that push markets in one direction or another. The idea is to give the seniors a little bit of luck and guidance on a path to future prosperity.
Left alone, at historical rates of return, a $1,000 investment portfolio could grow into $730,000 over 50 years, Mohit said. But the real gift will be what the students learn, he said. “The direct gifting of minimal investment knowledge is the simplest way back to the America we want,” he said.
Mohit, a member of the board of directors of Burning Man, made a fortune cofounding internet companies, some of which failed but some of which reached enormous success, like Flipagram, a video creation app that was one of the companies folded into what became TikTok, now one of the world’s largest social media platforms.
Clarke County is the launchpad for the Gifted Savings experiment in part because Athens has one of the country’s highest rates of intergenerational poverty, Landay said. The hope is that the investment education students get will show them a way out.
Another reason for choosing Clarke County is a connection between Mohit and Logan Smalley, a 2001 Clarke Central graduate who is the founder and executive director of TED-Ed, an outgrowth of the famous TED organization, which turns top lessons from teachers into videos watched by millions of students weekly. Smalley’s brother, Ben, also played a role in bringing Gifted Savings to Athens as the school district’s social studies coordinator.
The Smalley brothers gained local fame 20 years ago when they and others organized a cross-county trip to Los Angeles for a friend with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Darius Weems, and produced an award-winning documentary of the trip, Darius Goes West, directed by Logan Smalley.
Though most of the lucky Clarke County seniors should be able to satisfy the requirements to claim their investment portfolios, the visionary project faces another kind of community test.
Gifted Savings has pledged $1.2 million, enough to finance the first year of what they hope will continue for five years and beyond, and around half the second year’s cost. (The organization doesn’t cite Mohit as the money source, but says the money is from an anonymous donor.)
It’s up to Athens to come up with the funds to keep it going, but the project has strong backing from chamber President David Bradley and some local charities, including the Athens Area Community Foundation, whose president and CEO, Sarah McKinney, introduced Mohit at Friday’s breakfast.
“I truly feel like it’s an opportunity to provide liberation for every child, every family in our community,” Scott, the superintendent, told the chamber audience. “This isn’t just handing our students $1,000. It’s the knowledge that is going to change our community. That same knowledge can be spread among their family, their friends.”
“I love it. I feel like it’s a great idea,” said Classic City senior Ja’mia Hill, who already has an idea what she’ll do with her investments when they come to her: “I’m leaving it in.”
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