Three teens, one money class, and a chapter in nearly every corner of the country
Building Financial Futures started in 2025 with two North Carolina high schools. It now has more than 80 student-led chapters.
Most teenagers learn about compound interest the way they learn about taxes: eventually, and from someone who is already stressed about it. Toby Qin, Liam Griffin and Vrund Gurjar decided to move the lesson up a few years.
The three founded Building Financial Futures of America in 2025. Qin and Griffin attend East Chapel Hill High School, and Gurjar attends Marvin Ridge High School in Waxhaw, North Carolina. According to The Daily Tar Heel, the founders come from immigrant families with limited financial resources, and that shaped what they wanted to build. “It inspired us to try to develop this student organization that we knew that we could power,” Griffin told the paper.
The group’s first district partner was Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, and Griffin has said that work close to home is what makes him proudest. From there it spread the way good ideas do among teenagers, which is to say through other teenagers. The Daily Tar Heel reports courses delivered at more than 100 schools and more than 80 student-led chapters nationwide.
The curriculum travels with them. BFF Classroom is an app holding lessons tailored to each K-12 grade, so a high school chapter can show up at an elementary school with something better than improvisation. A Financial Freedom Kits drive has collected about 25,000 items.
In Utah, five high school officers who run a chapter wrote in The Salt Lake Tribune that BFF offers a free four-week program called BFF Academy, covering budgeting, saving, credit and investing. (They run the chapter, so treat that as the organization describing itself.)
The group is also playing a longer game. Its chapters are working on legislation to make sure state education standards include financial literacy. In North Carolina, the stated goal is an introduction to financial literacy in middle school social studies. Griffin told the paper he expects chapters in all 50 states by the end of the year and hopes to see a bill proposed in every state.
That is a big promise for a nonprofit that is barely a year old, and the numbers come largely from the founders. But the structure is smart. Peer teaching is cheap to scale, a school visit needs no budget beyond a volunteer’s afternoon, and a 16-year-old explaining a savings account is hard to tune out.
