Portfolios with Purpose
Curriculum and custom-LMS build for a nonprofit teaching students to invest — with real charitable giving built in.
- Curriculum
- Custom LMS
- Video
01Who they are
Portfolios with Purpose is a nonprofit that teaches high school and college students how to trade stocks. Students build a simulated portfolio, and based on how it performs, real donations go to a charity the student chooses.
02The challenge
Turn a hands-on financial concept — and interviews with real professionals — into a structured curriculum students could actually learn from, delivered on the client’s own platform.
03What I did
Built the curriculum and the course itself. I owned the instructional design and build; the client handled interviewing the professionals. Delivered on a custom LMS.
04The outcome
A curriculum that pairs a live investing simulation with a giving mechanism — students learn to invest and the results fund real charities.
The work
One lesson as students experienced it — the client’s expert video paired with the written lesson and activity I built around it — plus the design document for the full course.
Lesson 1: “Why Invest?” — the client-provided expert video. I designed the lesson structure, activity, and written content around source videos like this one.
Lesson 1 · Why Invest?
Written lesson & activity
There are a lot of reasons why people invest in the stock market. Some want to put their money away for retirement while others want to use stocks as an alternative to a savings account. Before we get into the course, it’s important that you take some time to identify your goals for investing in the stock market.
Use the comments section to tell everyone what your stock-market investment goals are and why you chose those goals.
Wrap-Up
The best things in life are free. For everything else, you’ll need money. Many of life’s goals — taking a trip, buying a house, retiring — cost money.
In this lesson, we looked at how investing in the stock market is another way you can make money. When you make money working at a job, your income is limited by the number of hours you work. When you invest, your money does the work instead of you.
In the next lesson, we’ll look at different categories of investments and why you’ll want to mix and match them when investing.
Written lesson and activity I authored for the course — conversational, goal-oriented, and built to keep a student engaged and moving to the next lesson.
Portfolios with Purpose — High-Level Design Document
The full course blueprint: three modules, fifteen lessons, learning objectives, and the blended video/written/activity structure.