Fuel to the Fire: Kaitlin LeMoine

When she walked into the Ed School's 2010 Fall Internship Expo, Kaitlin LeMoine, Ed.M.'11, never guessed that she'd be walking out with a new career direction. What the former teacher and student enrichment coordinator at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School in Somerville, Mass., found was inspiration in the form of Families United in Educational Leadership (FUEL), a Boston-area nonprofit. "I had just wrapped up a summer job developing and teaching a personal finance curriculum for high school students and was struck by the influence that financial knowledge had on youth," she says. "To work at FUEL was a unique chance to develop curriculum to promote further awareness of both financial literacy and higher education access among whole families, including their students." Working with low-income families in the Massachusetts cities of Boston, Chelsea, and Lynn who would like to send their children to college, FUEL uses incentivized savings programs — including matching parents' savings, offering seed money for parents' accounts, and providing additional access to scholarships opportunities — and college access workshops called Savings Circles. FUEL's programs actively promote budgeting and saving and encourage family motivation, what the organization sees as "one of the most important factors in educational attainment." Currently, in order for families to take advantage of the programs, they need to belong to the schools or organizations with which FUEL is partnered. How to reach more families, says LeMoine, is among the organization's challenges moving forward. One of LeMoine's own challenges, though, in her new role as director of education and research, is ensuring that FUEL is best serving the families they are already working with. To that end, LeMoine attends as many of the workshops as she can in order to get to know the families personally and observe how the content she has designed is being received. "I take a very hands-on approach," she says. "In my experience, curriculum design only becomes real when I can see how it is both implemented and reacted to by those learning from it. … One of my primary goals is to ensure that the material provided to families is meaningful and truly helps them guide their children down the pathway to higher education." And her efforts are paying off, as FUEL is seeing its families send their children on to successful college careers. FUEL even receives letters from former participants expressing their gratitude. "Learning how the FUEL program empowers families who may have otherwise found the pathway to college education almost impossible," says LeMoine, "serves as a potent reminder of just how powerful our work is."