In Aberdeen, 24 young people aged 16 to 25 are about to get something many of them have never had: a real chance to understand their own finances. This autumn, CFINE—a community food initiative tackling poverty across northeast Scotland—is launching an employability programme that weaves financial literacy directly into job readiness training, made possible by a £3,500 grant from MHA's 1892 Foundation.
The partnership matters because financial confidence and employment go hand in hand. Young people who have grown up navigating food poverty and economic hardship often lack formal exposure to budgeting, banking, and financial planning—skills that employers assume are obvious, but which can feel impossibly abstract when you're struggling to cover rent. CFINE's approach dismantles that gap by embedding financial awareness into a programme that already builds vocational skills and job readiness.
The grant, made by MHA Aberdeen partner Alan Stewart and his firm, will fund four 12-week blocks of intensive one-to-one support. Each participant receives personalised coaching in confidence-building and vocational training, while also gaining accredited digital skills, online safety training, and crucially, financial awareness education. The funding covers both the accredited training itself and the delivery staff needed to make it happen—a holistic approach that recognises that teaching young people about money works best when it's embedded in real-world support.
"This grant will enable us to support young people in Aberdeen who are furthest from work," said Graeme Robbie, CFINE's depute chief executive. The framing is deliberate: these are young people whom standard employment programmes often miss, those facing the steepest barriers to stable work and financial independence.
The MHA 1892 Foundation represents a deliberate strategy to address what the accounting firm sees as a systemic gap. Launched as a pilot in North West England in 2023, the foundation expanded nationally across all MHA offices in late 2025, with a clear mandate: deliver accessible financial education to young people in communities where MHA actually operates. The Aberdeen grant is the second Scottish award from the foundation; an earlier grant supported finance and budgeting workshops through Edinburgh's Grassmarket Community Project.
What makes this model distinctive is its grassroots funding mechanism. Rather than corporate foundations working from a distance, MHA staff themselves generate funds through charitable initiatives, with partner firms providing matching donations. This creates genuine local investment—the people who work in Aberdeen are helping shape the financial futures of Aberdeen's young people. CFINE, meanwhile, reinvests income from its own trading activity back into frontline community support, ensuring that the ecosystem remains rooted in the communities it serves.
For young people in Aberdeen facing the intersection of food poverty and employment uncertainty, this programme offers something rare: recognition that financial literacy isn't a luxury for the already-privileged, but a fundamental skill for navigating adulthood. By connecting financial education to job readiness and vocational training, CFINE and MHA have created a pathway where learning about money becomes inseparable from learning to earn—and where a young person's background becomes less of a barrier to their future.