This year’s FEE (Financial Education and Entrepreneur) Summit was built around a deceptively simple idea: meet students where they are, then take them somewhere they’ve never been.
Day one of the Summit brought the programming directly into schools, with Wells Fargo volunteers leading hands-on financial literacy workshops for younger students. During day two Newark high school seniors were invited to MetLife Stadium for an immersive experience that paired facility tours with panel discussions featuring industry professionals spanning finance, tech, entrepreneurship, and PR.
“When you’re taking a student and saying, ‘We know you have to go to school today, but today we’re gonna pull you out because we want to take you to this space’ — nobody’s going to do that unless somebody, somewhere, cares,” says Paralee Knight says.
Paralee is a Vice President and Senior Social Impact & Sustainability Specialist at the Wells Fargo Foundation.
Long before Wells Fargo, Knight had another life: she was a songwriter. She managed artists, worked in artist development, and was a member of the Recording Academy’s Philadelphia chapter. She assumed that world and the corporate one would stay separate.
They didn’t.
“I didn’t really know, at the time, that there could be so much overlap,” she reflects. Around 2018, she helped the Grammy Music Education Coalition secure sponsorships to support music education programming. She connected artists she managed with corporate events. The two worlds kept finding each other.
“I think God works in certain ways that we just don’t always see.”
That convergence has sharpened her focus on what she calls the creative economy — the ecosystem of artists, musicians, entertainers, and entrepreneurs who generate real economic activity but often lack the financial tools to sustain it. “In music, people make money but don’t really know how to invest it or save it,” she notes. It’s a gap she’s determined to close — especially for young people before they ever enter that world
One of Knight’s core beliefs is that financial literacy can’t wait for adulthood — and that the conversation has to begin with something deeper than dollars and cents.
“If you don’t really understand that you’re valuable, then you’re not gonna really put as much importance into understanding how money is a tool,” she says. “It starts with self-worth.”
She’s also realistic about the range of knowledge students bring with them. Some know how to invest in the stock market. Others have never heard the word “budget.” The FEE Summit was designed to meet both — and everyone in between.
When the Summit wraps and the students file out, Knight has a clear measure of what matters most.
“If it was a couple hundred kids — that there are a couple hundred kids who know more than they did the day before,” she says simply. “That’s the first thing.”
But there’s a second thing, and it may be the more important one.
“It’s always important to know that somebody cares. If you think that somebody cares about you, then you’re more likely to care about yourself.”
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