Lily Lapenna
Lily Lapenna was volunteering in Bangladesh four years ago when she hit upon the idea for her social enterprise. She was working with women who had managed to claw themselves out of extreme poverty via microfinance and her mind started thinking about the lack of financial education in the UK.
“I came back and saw how young people – my own friends included – were getting into so much debt,” says Lily. “There are so many financial services out there, like credit cards and loans, but we don’t get any education on them. I didn’t understand why we weren’t taught this as a life skill.”
Full of enthusiasm, Lily wanted to educate young people on money issues, but not in a traditional classroom setting. She had not been especially “academically engaged” herself at school, but had always loved running projects and fundraising, so she decided to find a way to give young people like her important financial skills in a non-formal way.
Bank-in-a-box
Her social enterprise Mybnk now does this by offering fun financial workshops and toolkits to schools, housing associations, and NGOs. One of the kits, known as MyBnk-in-a-Box, for instance, is a year-long programme for 11-18 year olds, enabling them to run their own, proper bank. It’s even approved by the Financial Services Authority, so it’s not just a game.
Lily launched Mybnk in 2007 when she was 27, and it now has 12 full-time staff. “We’re growing so rapidly,” she says. “We’ve pretty much doubled every year, and I feel like we’re really on the move now.”
Getting it off the ground in the first place was hard work, though. How do you start an enterprise from nothing, all by yourself? Lily decided she needed a group of experienced people supporting her, and she got them in a very simple and old-fashioned way: by writing letters.
“The first thing I did was write a letter to 10 people I knew, or didn’t know but who I wanted to be involved because I thought they could help,” she says. “I wrote and told them I had this crazy idea, and it’s going to help young people deal with money and be enterprising, and did they want to be involved? And they all wrote back and said yes.”
Those people became Lily’s advisory panel, and they saw her through her first year, giving her advice and contacts and access to other networks in the finance and education sectors. It wasn’t always easy, though.
“I felt very young and inexperienced,” says Lily, who is now part of the prestigious Ashoka Felloship. “I’m sure people were thinking ‘who is she? I’ve never heard of her’. But the good thing about this country is that young people do get encouragement to take that next step. You don’t have to be 40 before people will listen to you.”
Cashing in
At one point, Lily was working late nights in her bedroom, filling in funding applications and knowing she was close to running out of money. But her hard work paid off. She got some funding, and Mybnk soon got off the ground and was generating money by delivering its schemes. She has also registered Mybnk on Buzzbank, which uses a crowdsourcing model to allow lots of people to invest small amounts into an organisation.
It’s been hugely satisfying for Lily to see her idea turn into reality, especially when the young people she works with start their own enterprises.
“At the start they often feel totally disengaged from finance,” she says. “By the end, they have the confidence to deal with the financial services industry. They know how to open an account, and what questions to ask, and often go on to start a mini social enterprise.”
These are the outcomes that Lily loves: seeing young people take their new financial knowledge and run with it. I’m so inspired by the young people I work with. I want to see Mybnk all around the UK so we can connect more young people to money in a positive way.”