At first, the only person Brian Kushner had the chance to pitch was the person at the front desk. He had walked into a JPMorgan Chase branch in SoHo without an appointment, not to open an account or apply for a job, but to explain a nonprofit run by Brooklyn teenagers. He had a proposal: bring practical lessons about money to children who were still young enough to be learning the basics of fractions and percentages.
The front-desk pitch led to a meeting with a branch manager. That meeting opened the door to another: a conversation with Asshur Cunningham, a JPMorgan Chase vice president and community manager. Each introduction took the idea a little further. But the real test came afterward, when a promising conversation had to become an actual program. Following planning, outreach and back-and-forth coordination, students served by Intellectual Gain gained opportunities to attend Chase-hosted Money Skills workshops.
The unexpected bank visit is only one piece of a larger story. Across Brooklyn, a group of high school students has been recruiting volunteer tutors, working with families, scheduling virtual lessons, and bringing financial education to students in grades four through eight. Their organization, Intellectual Gain Inc., is a registered New York 501(c)(3) nonprofit built around an uncomplicated idea: useful educational help should not depend on whether a family can pay for it.
A Nonprofit With Homework Of Its Own
Intellectual Gain began in 2025 as a project shared by five Brooklyn teenagers who saw how easily the cost of private tutoring could put individualized help out of reach. Plenty of students need another explanation of a math concept or a patient reader to work through an assignment. Not every family can hire someone to provide it.
So the students designed their own alternative. They would recruit academically strong high school volunteers, match them with younger learners, and offer free one-on-one support. The model was simple to explain and considerably harder to operate. Someone had to find families, recruit and organize tutors, coordinate schedules, communicate when plans changed and make sure students received meaningful attention rather than another worksheet.
The founding team divided the work. Kushner, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer, directs strategy, programs, partnerships and expansion. Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Rachamim helps keep the organization’s daily work moving. Chief Financial Officer Daniel Barbakov handles its finance-related responsibilities. Graphic Design Director Ethan Zheleznak brings video and visual storytelling skills to the team, while Public Relations Director Eli Jakubowitz supports its public-facing work. All five are students themselves.
They have since been joined by other young volunteers and team leaders. Maya Rachamim and Doniyorbek Tolibov help manage social media; Mark Sorochkin works on outreach; and Dipam Das supports the tutoring program as an academic support specialist. Their responsibilities may sound like the structure of a professional nonprofit, but many of the meetings and messages happen around schoolwork, exams and extracurricular commitments.
That is part of the point. The organization is not powered by a large paid staff. It runs because teenagers are willing to take responsibility for other students’ learning, even while navigating their own.
The Work Happens One Student At A Time
Intellectual Gain offers virtual, personalized tutoring in mathematics, English and social studies. A student can work with a volunteer tutor online, share a screen and move through difficult material step by step. Sessions are adjusted to the learner’s pace rather than tied to a fixed, one-size-fits-all curriculum.
A student struggling with fractions, for example, may need more than the same explanation repeated louder. The tutor can try a different example, break the question into smaller parts or connect it to something familiar. An unfamiliar word in an English assignment might be addressed by reading the whole paragraph together instead of memorizing a definition. The subject changes, but the underlying approach does not: create room for a question that might go unasked in a crowded classroom.
That individual attention matters beyond the day’s homework. Students can come to believe that being stuck means they are simply not good at a subject. A patient tutor can interrupt that conclusion. The nonprofit’s objective is not only to help children complete assignments, but also to build the confidence to tackle the next difficult one.
The format removes some practical barriers, too. Families do not need to arrange a ride to a tutoring center, and volunteers can contribute from their homes. Services are free, with no hidden fees or subscription requirements, and intended for New York students in grades four through eight.
The numbers capture a rapidly expanding organization, not a finished one. As of October 2026, Intellectual Gain’s current totals were more than 25 volunteers, over 95 students served, and upwards of 500 hours of free tutoring. The team continues recruiting, reaching families and adding programs, so those figures are a snapshot of its work at the time of writing, not its ceiling. Behind each total are the less visible tasks that keep a volunteer service functioning: confirming appointments, answering families’ questions, checking in with tutors and making sure someone follows through.
Why Money Became Part Of The Lesson
As the tutoring network expanded, the founders noticed another educational gap they wanted to address. Students routinely encounter arithmetic, percentages and word problems in school, yet may learn far less about the everyday decisions that involve those same skills. They can calculate a percentage on paper without knowing what interest means for savings or borrowing. They may recognize a fraction without having tried to divide an allowance between spending and saving.
Financial literacy became a natural second part of the mission. For elementary and middle school students, the goal is not to teach professional trading strategies. It is to make ordinary money decisions understandable: the difference between needs and wants, why a budget helps, how savings accumulate and what happens when something costs more than expected.
The organization began connecting families with free financial-literacy workshops, often led in collaboration with groups that already teach these subjects. Its work with Leadership in Financial Education, known as LIFE, has included workshops on budgeting, the 50/30/20 framework, needs versus wants and saving habits. The Foundations of Finance Project has contributed sessions exploring investing, inflation, taxes and financial concepts in everyday language. The Financial Freedom Initiative has joined the team for additional workshops on managing money and beginning to invest.
Those relationships are significant because they bring outside educators and professionals into a student-run program. Instead of asking volunteer teenagers to pretend they know everything about taxes, investing or financial services, Intellectual Gain can introduce students to people and organizations with relevant experience. The nonprofit supplies a pathway to learners, organizes participation and helps make the material approachable.
Across its financial-literacy programming, Intellectual Gain’s current figures as of October 2026 are more than 10 workshops and over 275 total attendances by students and families, with more sessions being planned. The attendance total counts visits across events, not 275 separate individuals. Even with that distinction, it shows how far a new offering has spread and how quickly interest in practical money lessons is developing.
The Day A Bank Became A Classroom
The Chase story was not one dramatic meeting that magically solved everything. It was a sequence of increasingly serious conversations. Kushner, Intellectual Gain’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer, first pitched the organization’s mission to the front desk of a SoHo branch. That introduction secured a meeting with the branch manager, where he could explain the tutoring program, the children it served and his proposal to bring financial education beyond the usual classroom. The manager, in turn, arranged a meeting with Asshur Cunningham, a Chase vice president and community manager. What began as a teenager asking to be heard at the front desk had reached a senior bank professional.
That was a breakthrough, but it was not the end of the work. Meetings had to be followed by more communication. A promising idea needed practical details: how students would hear about a workshop, how families would receive information, how participation would be coordinated and how to turn professional goodwill into a useful learning experience. The volunteers’ usual responsibilities, keeping up with students and families while balancing their own school schedules, did not disappear just because a major bank was involved. Eventually, participating students were able to attend Chase-hosted Money Skills sessions inside actual branches. The setting made the material less abstract: children could hear about money from people who work in financial services every day.
It is important to describe that relationship precisely. Intellectual Gain facilitates students’ participation in workshops hosted by JPMorgan Chase; the arrangement should not be confused with a corporate donation or a blanket sponsorship of the nonprofit. Its value lies in the educational experience and the access it gives young learners.
For the broader volunteer team, the episode became a useful example of how hard it can be to build something that looks simple from the outside. An introduction opens a door; an organized team makes the opportunity worth walking through. The same persistence behind the bank meetings also powers the less visible work: recruiting tutors, following up with families, preparing workshops and making sure someone takes responsibility for the next step. The story is less about a teenager impressing a vice president than about a group of teenagers doing the unglamorous work required to make an idea useful to children.
A Network Built By Students, For Students
Other organizations have helped Intellectual Gain deepen that work. LIFE, which offers financial-education programming through workshops held at Sidley Austin’s Manhattan office, has provided a pathway for students to learn from experienced professionals. Kushner also serves on LIFE’s inaugural Student Advisory Junior Board, a group of nine students that helps its leaders understand what younger participants need. He has contributed to student recruitment and educational modules, experience that informs Intellectual Gain’s outreach and workshop planning.
Within Intellectual Gain, the learning moves in both directions. The younger students receive free tutoring and financial lessons. The older students learn to communicate clearly, take responsibility for a schedule, work with an unfamiliar family and explain ideas without relying on complicated language. For volunteers interested in education, finance, public service or simply helping someone else, those are practical experiences of their own.
The nonprofit’s growth has also meant building public-facing materials, outreach systems and a recognizable presence so that families can find it. Graphic design, social media, volunteer recruitment and academic support are not side tasks. A tutoring program cannot help a student who never hears that the program exists.
For the young people running the organization, the result is a kind of second education taking place outside their own classrooms. They have to solve ordinary nonprofit problems in real time, make decisions with limited resources and occasionally send more follow-up messages than they expected anyone could need. The work is serious, but it is also recognizably the work of a team learning as it goes.
What Comes Next
Intellectual Gain is still growing, and its leaders want the next snapshot of the organization to be much larger than the current one. They plan to recruit more volunteers, reach more New York families and develop additional opportunities with schools, community groups and financial-education partners. Its virtual model means participation is not limited to families who can travel to a particular building. Eligible students elsewhere in New York, including the Bronx, can explore the organization’s free offerings from home.
For all the attention that meetings with major institutions might attract, the core of the organization remains much smaller and more ordinary: a student logs onto a call, asks a question, and gets the time needed to work through it. The tutoring hours, workshop registrations and outreach emails are all in service of that moment.
A teenager going from a bank’s front desk to a meeting with a vice president may be the most surprising scene in Intellectual Gain’s story. The more consequential achievement is the work surrounding it: students building a dependable volunteer organization, professionals sharing expertise and families receiving support without a bill attached.
For a team still attending high school, that is a considerable amount to have put together. And for the younger students the nonprofit serves, the opportunity can be as simple as one more chance to understand.
About Intellectual Gain
Intellectual Gain, Inc. is a Brooklyn-founded, student-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit providing free virtual tutoring and financial-literacy workshops to New York students in grades 4–8.
Learn more or inquire about volunteering, tutoring or educational partnerships at intellectualgain.org.
Featured image credit: DepositPhotos.com
