Kathy Griffin Biography

Kathy Griffin, entrepreneur, educator, and financial literacy advocate, is the founder of Griffin Enterprises, a Rockville, MD company whose signature product is MoneyU(R), a game-based online education course designed to build core financial skills and acumen in young adults.

As Kathy sees it, her entire work life has led to her current passion:  helping young adults to become financially literate and self-sufficient.  That journey began in high school, when her first job of teaching violin and viola sessions to young beginners paid for much of her college.

"I learned about learning from that job," she now says.  "Making learning fun makes the learning easier and more effective and motivates the students to excel.   You just have to make success accessible and lower the stakes for failure, so that practice can become discovery.  What's important for Americans today is that we ensure our children become financially literate, so they can succeed as self-sufficient adults."

Armed with a journalism degree, she moved to Washington D.C. where she found a job writing technical manuals for a military contractor.   However, it was not her dream job.

In 1979, she quit that job and founded a computer consulting company, Comsys.  She and her co-founder achieved early success, and the company took off.  Comsys achieved growth that put the company among in the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies for three years in a row. A key to COMSYS' enormous success was Kathy's commitment to online training and decision support for her employees. In 1994, the company was acquired by CoreStaff (MetaMor), and Kathy became a full-time mom.

About this time, she was asked to join the board of the Parent Encouragement Program (PEP), an education non-profit that provides parenting classes in the greater Washington area. It was at PEP that she became an advocate for financial literacy for students and led popular workshops for parents to teach their kids money management skills.  Wanting to reach a greater audience, she developed MoneyU(R), an online course to deliver her message.

She has also founded the Center for Financial Literacy, a non-profit whose mission is to bring financial literacy programs to underserved and at-risk youth.