I believe in servant leadership,” says Marcy Reyes, MS’14, with a passion so fervent that it can be felt through the phone. “Living in my authenticity is supporting my students however I can. I want to guide them and encourage them more than anything. I want them to come out with a ton of expertise and knowledge that peers in their field aren’t going to have. As they say, the juice is worth the squeeze.”
Reyes has always been the type of person who strives for what she wants in life. After a successful undergraduate career where she thrived academically and found her passion for finance, she set her sights on one of the country’s most prestigious M.S. in Finance programs at Northeastern University.
While earning her degree, Reyes was able to combine her professional interest in finance with her selfless worldview by learning teaching techniques for financial strategy. She took her first plunge into the world of education after graduation through a Northeastern alumni mentorship program. “I mentored a handful of Northeastern undergraduate students,” she explains. “I believe in giving back. It was important to me to stay involved and help some of the students after concluding my master’s program.”
Reyes makes it very clear that her career goals are rooted in servant-based leadership—an approach to leadership that focuses on serving others and empowering them to achieve their own success. She credits Northeastern with providing the tools that helped her shape these goals. “Northeastern played a really important role in my servant leadership style,” she says. “It had a huge impact. It gave me the confidence to embrace very complicated concepts, pull them apart, and build from there.”
Upon graduation, she entered the workforce and climbed the ladder at Commonwealth Care Alliance, ascending to a senior director position. Additionally, she has held adjunct professor positions at both Rhode Island College and Providence College, teaching personal finance, financial analysis, and financial concepts to undergraduate students. However, her true passion for teaching shines at Financial Literacy Youth Initiative—colloquially known as FLY—a nonprofit she founded to teach financial strategies and empower youths in underserved communities.
“My education at Northeastern led me to teaching undergraduates. Through those experiences, I began to identify gaps in access to financial literacy, which is where FLY came from,” she says. “I don’t think it’s fair that because I could afford it, I could embrace the big opportunities.”
Founded in 2017, FLY has now expanded from 300 students per year to an average of 2,500—with as many as 7,500 participating at any given time, and programming becoming available across the Northeast. Despite these large numbers, FLY still curates financial literacy curricula to reflect individuals’ personal life experiences, whether in financial planning, investing, insurance, or other related areas.
It’s very clear that Reyes is on a trajectory that will not only make a positive impact on her professional career, but also on the lives of thousands of people—and she’s only just beginning. “My confidence came from Northeastern,” she says. “It played a very important role in where FLY is today and what it is going to be. Without my education there, I don’t know if I would have been able to set up a nonprofit on my own or get it to where it is now.”