Natalie Brown, the senior director of corporate citizenship at Ally Financial, takes pride in educating the community on money management. She was a panelist at the Earn Your Masters event held during SXSW on March 17, 2023. UnitedMasters, Earn Your Leisure, and Ally Financial partnered together to give artists and creators a dual experience of music and financial education.
As an alumna of North Carolina A&T, she also enjoys pouring into the futures of HBCU students, through Ally’s program, Moguls in the Making.
Brown opened up about her career journey, what Moguls in the Making means to her, and the impact she hopes Earn Your Masters will leave on the creative community.
What has your journey been like at Ally Financial?
Well, I’ll tell you it’s been a wonderful journey to be with Ally Financial. I started my career in supply chain procurement. I graduated from North Carolina A&T State University, shout-out to HBCUs. Then I moved into the banking industry years later and got into this work of corporate philanthropy, which I love. It’s certainly my purpose and God’s purpose for my life. I’m so excited to be really helping give back and mak[ing] an impact in the community.
Can you tell us more about the Moguls in the Making program and what it means to you personally?
For us here at Ally, moguls personally to me is something that I’m deeply committed to as an alum of an HBCU. I know how hard it is to get doors to open for you, and to create opportunities for students to really lean into entrepreneurship or into intrapreneurship. I think the value that our HBCUs bring to students is unmatched. The collaboration, the innovation, the family network, and that’s what we want to create with moguls, right? We’re a moguls family, we want to make sure that we’re not just preparing the students for where they’re gonna go, but that they stay connected, that we stay connected with them, be lifelong partners in their journey, and their career journey.
What do you hope artists and creators learn from this event?
Well, I think everything that UnitedMasters and Ally are doing with Earn Your Leisure is around financial empowerment and enrichment. So what I want folks to walk away with is an understanding of the importance of finance. These are things that we may not have learned in our homes. Growing up, I certainly didn’t learn a lot around financial education in my home but I think that folks are going to learn about how to run themselves and their business, they’re going to learn about how to budget, about credit, [and] how to look at business credit. So walking out of this conversation today and these activities today should really empower and educate them around financial education. So, I think it’s something that is important to the success, to generational wealth in our Black and Brown communities, and it’s something that we should not take for granted.
