Jan. 21, 2014

The Student Money Management Center at Amarillo College will host an Open House from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 30 to familiarize the College community with what it has to offer as a champion of financial literacy at AC.

The Student Money Management Center is housed on the first floor of Lynn Library on the Washington Street Campus.

AC President Paul Matney will welcome visitors at 9 a.m., and light refreshments will be offered along with a peek inside. The Center was launched at AC last October as a working component within AC’s Career and Employment Center.

It was created on the strength of a $154,000 grant from TG, a Texas public, non-profit corporation that promotes college enrollment and completion, and representatives of TG are expected to attend the Open House.

“The Center was established as a student-success initiative and its role is to help AC students acquire as much information about how to manage their financial resources as possible,” said Lisa Bentley, coordinator of theStudent Money Management Center.

“Since getting this office off the ground back in October, we’ve connected with 250 people,” she said. “But since we opened in the middle of the previous semester, we decided to have an Open House at the start of this new semester to properly introduce everyone to what the Center has to offer.”

While drop-ins are welcome at the Student Money Management Center, it is designed to be much more than a one-on-one resource for financial advice.

Bentley is charged with helping bolster the financial component contained in the First-Year Seminar, a course for freshman and other AC newcomers. Learning objectives include student loans, budgeting, credit, banking, debt management, saving and investing, and smart consumerism.

She also pursues guest speakers and schedules financial seminars, collaborates with the Financial Aid Office to provide counseling for students about the optimal use of their aid and repayment of loans, and she develops relationships with local financial institutions willing to help promote financial literacy.

Bentley can be reached at 371-5147.