CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio — More than 400 students from 13 schools across Northeast Ohio flocked to Cleveland Height's Cedar Lee Theater Wednesday to learn financial planning from the film "The Banker."
"You can hear the conversations, people are very attentive you can hear a pin drop," said the event's organizer LaRese Purnell.
The movie is based on a true story of two black men in the 1960s who hired a white guy to pose as their boss, while they ran their banking company themselves.
Meanwhile, they lent money to other black people who started businesses and bought homes, something unheard of during that time.
"You can remember one speaker that came and spoke to you when you were in high school, throughout college and that stuck with you and that gave you some nugget that really resonated with you," said Purnell.
Purnell says he wants to inspire our youth to think about finances and money at an early age.
"If they take one thing about their credit, they take one things about savings, take one thing about being an entrepreneur or home ownership, then we've done our jobs," Purnell said.
But this day was about much more than just a movie.
After the film more than a dozen folks from the community including several NFL players reinforced the lessons of good credit, investing and saving. And that's not all: Each student got a copy of a financial foundation book. They have a month to read it and write a couple pages about it.
Four winners will be chosen and the prize is a savings account with $3,500 in it. All of the money was donated on the spot from folks on the panel.
"This is the power of us coming together," said Purnell.
