Availa Bank - Education Outreach Platform

Availa Bank launched a bank-wide financial education outreach platform in 2022. It was designed to complement our mission statement: Empower our team to inspire and enable our clients and the communities we serve to achieve financial success. Through this program, each of our 15 branches is required to get out into their branch community with some kind of financial education at least once per quarter. Our platform encompasses a Youth-2- Older Adult (Y-2-O approach) education plan. We've built an extensive resource library so our branches can decide what they're doing, tweak a presentation and be out the door in little time! We use many of the ABA's education resources for our education efforts. Our overall educational outreach efforts have reached almost 5,000 people since its start. All of our branch communities have been positively impacted with our financial education outreach and we have impacted those communities with education at every age group. We established education events in our branch communities by creating and hosting events featuring the following:

• FinEd 4 Kids– We have reached over 2300 children in 2023 with financial education.
• BizU (Formerly Innovate U) — A competition focused on teaching the aspects of how to run your own business with high school students.
• Kickoff to College Night — This event helps families to clear up the confusing things about starting college such as filing the FAFSA, RAI, Scholarships, EFT, etc.
• We host the event in six of our communities annually. We also have seven FAFSA certified employees to help facilitate these events.
• Senior fraud education — We have put an emphasis on addressing senior fraud and our efforts have reached over 1400 people since our launch.