Jada Hogg has spent more than 20 years helping students and adults navigate education, opportunity, and life after school. Through years of teaching, advising high school students in TRIO Upward Bound summer programs, and helping adults return to explore both postsecondary education and alternative pathways to careers through the TRIO Educational Opportunity Center, Jada discovered a common passion: helping people prepare for the next step in life. But it was during graduate school that all her experience developed into a true business idea and Enlightenment Enterprises began to take shape.

While researching student loan debt and financial outcomes for students five years after leaving school, Jada noticed a troubling pattern. Many young adults, whether they had attended college or not, were making major financial decisions without truly understanding how money worked or how their own behaviors shaped those decisions. When she returned to higher education at the University of Southern Indiana (USI), she saw the same issue firsthand among her students.

What she also noticed was that most financial literacy programs simply weren’t built for them.

“Everything felt focused on budgeting or wealth-building for people who already had money,” Jada explained. “My students needed something different since most were starting from zero.”

That realization led to the creation of Enlightenment Enterprises, a business focused not just on financial literacy, but on money psychology - helping young adults understand why they make financial decisions, how to build better systems, and how to develop healthier relationships with money.

Jada officially formed her LLC in May 2023. Early on, she connected with SCORE mentors both in St. Louis and Evansville, but it wasn’t until she connected with the Southwest Indiana Small Business Development Center (SBDC) that her business truly began to accelerate. After hearing about the SBDC through community partnerships and workshops and from her brother’s experience opening a business, she began working with Business Advisor Pam Jordan in December 2024.

Jada attended the SBDC’s Launching Your Own Business class and quickly immersed herself in every resource available. Pam connected her with opportunities such as INTAP funding, the Applied Research Institute (ARI) Innovation Voucher, SBIR information sessions, and networking events. Through those introductions, Jada met business leaders including Logan Jenkins with Circular Venture Lab and Matt Burkett with the Applied Research Institute (ARI).

Those meetings helped her begin translating her vision into the language of business and innovation.

“Matt and his team helped me understand how to pitch my idea in a way business people could immediately understand,” Jada said.

Pam also encouraged Jada to apply for the gener8tor gBeta program. Jada was accepted to the summer program, and even though it was based in Indianapolis, Jada knew the opportunity was too valuable to pass up. Through gBeta, she learned critical business vocabulary, practiced investor-style pitches during lunch-and-learn sessions, and received direct feedback from entrepreneurs and business leaders in their weekly “Lunch & Learns.” One of the most impactful outcomes was making connections that helped move her focus from a card game toward the expansion of her classroom curriculum into a much larger educational platform. That platform is now evolving into an interactive financial simulation experience for students.

Upon the conclusion of the gBeta program, Jada participated in pitch competitions and reapplied for ARI funding. With support from Stephanie Roland, Senior Vice President/Community Development Director, and Ben Joergens, Director of Financial Empowerment, at Old National Bank, Jada launched her first experience of community engagements in late fall of 2025. In December 2025, she received an ARI grant that allowed her to partner with the University of Southern Indiana to begin building a technical prototype.

Working alongside Steven Stump and computer science students at USI, Jada developed an online simulation tool where students use their phones to interact with real-life financial scenarios displayed on screen. Instead of learning through lectures, students are placed into realistic situations involving income, rent, transportation costs, bills, and everyday financial pressure.

“Most students can’t relate to traditional budgeting exercises because they don’t yet have income or real expenses,” Jada explained. “This puts them into the experience, so they actually feel the stress and tension of making financial decisions.”

That emotional connection is exactly the point.

Rather than memorizing terms like “mortgage rates” or “interest,” students experience the consequences of decisions in real time. Jada believes those experiences stay with them far longer than a classroom lecture ever could.

The prototype was completed in spring 2026, and now in the fall, the team will begin developing a companion mobile app that will launch alongside the program. One of the unique strengths of the platform is that educators themselves do not need to be financial experts to facilitate the experience.

“Everyone has experience with money,” she said. “That makes the conversations real.”

Jada’s vision continues to grow. Future plans include a full classroom curriculum, workshops, expanded digital tools, a companion card game, and even virtual reality experiences inspired by concepts she encountered during the gener8tor program. Her target audience is high school, college students, and pre-professionals who are navigating adulthood for the first time.

She also sees a growing market need. With many states now requiring financial literacy education in high schools, Jada believes her experiential learning approach can fill an important gap left by traditional programs.

Her passion for the work is deeply personal.

Jada openly shares that she bought a house, purchased a car, and returned to graduate school all within an 18-month period of finishing college, decisions that took years to recover from financially. That experience drives her mission to help others avoid the same mistakes and better understand themselves before making life-changing financial choices.

Today, Enlightenment Enterprises is still in its early stages, but momentum is building quickly. Jada recently secured INTAP funding to help trademark and protect her idea, and attorney Josh Claybourn has helped guide her through the legal and intellectual property side of entrepreneurship.

When asked what advice she would give to aspiring entrepreneurs, she says, “Know your audience. Know your numbers. Put it on paper. If someone handed you a check to start your business today, would you be ready?”

Jada’s entrepreneurial journey is only beginning, but she is already proving what can happen when passion, lived experience, and the right support systems come together. By taking advantage of the resources available and building something that addresses a real gap in the marketplace, she is creating a tool that could change the way young adults learn about money for years to come.