About The FIVE MILLION KIDS Initiative

John Hope Bryant, the founder, chairman and CEO of Operation HOPE (HOPE), and the vice chairman of the U.S. President’s Advisory Council on Financial Literacy, believes that children are dropping out of high school because they don’t see education as relevant to their future. He also believes that the best way to make education “relevant” to their future is to show children how to get rich, legally through financial literacy; the language of money, free enterprise capitalism, and ownership. For children with an unfortunate public record, no matter how smart they are may find it difficult in the short term to pass a standard background check at a major corporation. In such instances, the viable option for them may be “entrepreneurship”.

Additionally, in under-served communities often times a child’s choices are molded and influenced by his or her parent’s reality; from parents who have never attended college, to parents who lack a bank account or basic financial stability.

At Operation HOPE we believe that financial literacy is America’s first “silver right,” and an essential component in any effort to promote personal self-sufficiency and empowerment in an economic age.

Accordingly, John Hope Bryant and Operation HOPE, working with leaders from government, community and the private sector, will launch the 5 MILLION KIDS FINANCIAL LITERACY “SILVER RIGHTS” INITIATIVE in the last half of 2008. The initiative will focus its resources around a massive, coordinated national Initiative to invest in America’s human capital – our youth and our families in low-wealth communities – or a Partnership of HOPE for the 21st Century; from youth, to their parents and families, to the very culture that our youth grow up within.

No one wants a mortgage: they want to become a homeowner…
No one wants a car note: they want a cool car…
America must reconnect the merits of education with the desire for one’s life aspiration…

Operation HOPE believes the best way to break the high-school drop-out epidemic is to tie education to aspiration in life, showing young people how they can get rich, or simply how to do well in life, legally. That’s financial literacy, the language of money, that’s teaching them “silver rights” and the rules of free enterprise and capitalism, and how to become entrepreneurs and self-employment projects too.