Citzens and YWCA Brooklyn's Fifth Successful Year of Partnership

Our corporate partners at YWCA Brooklyn help us to enhance our work through financial support and employee volunteerism. Citizens is one of our model partners, which has worked with us over the past five years to provide opportunities for the students in our YW Brooklyn LEAD program to learn about careers in the financial services industry and help them gain financial literacy. This year, we’ve expanded our partnership beyond our programming for girls and young women in YW Brooklyn LEAD to also provide financial literacy workshops for the women who live in our permanent affordable housing in Downtown Brooklyn.  

For our fifth annual Women’s History Month programming with Citizens, employees from a variety of different departments volunteered their time in March 2025 to participate in a virtual panel discussion about their college-to-career journeys and to serve as role models for our students. The following month, Citizens returned to our YW Brooklyn LEAD program to provide a financial literacy workshop for participants to learn about how investing helps meet financial goals and build wealth over time, how investments are regulated and how they can be impacted by economic and business cycles.  

We also launched a new component of our work together this year to provide workshops to the women who live in our permanent affordable housing, providing additional opportunities for our constituents to receive financial literacy education. In May and October 2025, Citizens offered two financial literacy workshops for our residents on tracking income and expenses, creating budgets, developing strategies to build savings, and managing and paying down debt.  

Citizens and YWCA Brooklyn’s partnership has been highly successful for another year in a row, improving our students understanding of the diverse range of careers available in the financial sector and both our students and residents’ understanding of managing their finances in the future. YWCA Brooklyn is grateful for the support Citizens has provided to our organization over the past five years and is proud of our work together to promote the economic empowerment of the women and girls we serve!