10 Tips for Managing Your Money, Brought to you by ARISE Life Skills & Training

With the world’s financial markets in turmoil, advice on money management is needed now more than ever. Here are ten simple steps to handling your finances and keeping your nest egg from being scrambled in an economic crisis.

1. Avoid impulse buying. Before you spend money on any purchase, go home and sleep on it. List the reasons why you need the item. Many times, you will discover it isn’t something you really need.
2. “Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.” – Benjamin Franklin
3. Identify the things you buy for yourself. Seperate the items that last a few days (magazines) from those that disappear right away (pizza, coffee). Price how much your spend each month for these items. You may find a good portion of your income goes toward things that don’t last. Before you spend, consider the object’s long term value.
4. “Never spend your money before you have it.” – Thomas Jefferson
5. Look for banks that offer a high return on your investment. Don’t settle for a low-interest savings account. Research online and find a bank that gives you the most return for your investment. Try a money market or a CD.

10 Tips for Improving Your Memory, brought to you by ARISE Life Skills & Training

Texting. Email. TV. Internet. Cell Phones. We live in a world flooded with information.  With so much data coming at you, how do you remember the important things?

Here are 10 quick Tips for Improving your Memory and Study Skills, borrowed from the fantastic Brain Food Series.

1. Create a concept map when studying confusing topics. Being with the main ideas and then expand into supporting facts or ideas.
2. Remember to look a person in the face when you meet them for the first time and notice features: dimples, freckles, eye color, hair style or glasses. Link those features to the person’s name.  During an introduction, make eye contact and repeat the person’s name, “Hello, Mary. How are you?” When it’s time to part, look the person in the eye and repeat their name: “It was nice to meet you, Mary.”
3. Challenge your memory. Look at a group of numbers for 10 seconds. Cover them up and try to recall as many as you can. Your brain is a muscle. It needs a workout to stay in shape.
4. Make up rhymes or songs to remember facts.
5. Rely on all your senses to recall things. Picture the information, speak it, hear it…remember it.

ARISE Foundation Reaches Milestone in their Mission to Help At-Risk Youth By Surpassing Four Million Hours of Life Skills Training.

North Palm Beach, FL – ARISE Foundation announced today that it has surpassed four million hours of ARISE life skills training around the country. ARISE provides evidence based curricula and staff training to organizations working with at risk youth.

The ARISE Life Management Skills Training prepares staff, working with at-risk youth, by teaching them the tools and knowledge needed to conduct effective and interactive like skills lessons to the youth in their care. The goal of the ARISE Program is to provide at-risk youth who receive their program with the tools they need to survive, succeed and become productive members of society.

Youth who go through the ARISE program have shown improvement in their overall behavior and decision-making skills. A five year evaluation from the University of Miami’s Department of Sociology concluded that there was significant improvement in student knowledge of issues included in the ARISE Life-Skills Program, such as anger management and violence reduction. The evaluation data also indicated that test scores improved significantly among learners of all ethnic groups (for the complete report visit www.ariselife-skills.org).

 

“When youth first arrive at our facility, they feel they have no alternative but to commit criminal or violent acts during certain situations. Our job is to make them see that crime and violence is not the answer,” explains Calvetti Pate, Assistant Facility Administrator, Cypress Creek Juvenile Offender Correctional Center. “The ARISE program helps them learn other alternatives to violence, and ultimately helps them make better choices. I know they will be more successful when they get out because of what they learned in the ARISE Life-Management Skills program.”

 

For over 20 years, ARISE has operated as a developer and publisher of Life Management Skills curricula and staff training programs. Designed originally to reach at-risk, incarcerated youth in detention centers and secure facilities, ARISE is also utilized as a powerful prevention tool for teenagers and young adults. ARISE is particularly appropriate for youth with special requirements, limited reading and/or writing ability. It has been successfully used for over 20 years in the Miami-Dade Florida School System, and in over 100 Washington DC schools, organizations and secure facilities.

 

Since ARISE was established over two decades ago, they have trained and certified over 5,000 instructors who have taught over 4,000,000 documented hours of ARISE life skills lessons. ARISE is also being used in Canada, Jamaica, England, Australia, Bahamas, Bermuda, New Zealand, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Bosnia, Kazakhstan, The Kingdom of Bahrain, and Central Asia. The ARISE curricula is presently being translated into Kazakh and Russian for use with orphans.

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A Prayer for Troubled Youth Brought to you by ARISE Life Skills & Training

If you work with at-risk and troubled youth and teens, chances are that your days are long and difficult and you often find yourself reaching out to a higher power for the patience to make it through.  No matter what religion or denomination you are, a thoughtful prayer can help soothe your mind and give you that extra push you need to fix what is broken and treat others the way you want to be treated.

ARISE is not a religious organization, but the ARISE Founders, Susan and Edmund Benson, created a special prayer specifically for those commited, courageous men and women who work with some of the toughest, most needy kids and teens in the country.  It is called “A Prayer for Troubled Youth.”

And here it is:

Here this humble prayer, O God, for our

troubled children, for at-risk youth that

are abused, misguided and vulnerable;

for children who yearn for nothing more

than encouraging words and a loving

touch; for any that have broken society’s

laws and are lost and frightened.

We entreat for them Thy mercy, grace

and forgiveness, and for those responsible

for their care we ask hearts of compassion,

gentle hands and kind words.

Make us, ourselves, to be true friends to

these young men and women, and so to

share the blessings of the merciful.

Amen.

 

For more life skills curricula, free downloads and fresh ideas, visit www.ariselife-skills.org.