GREEN BAY – Whether it was taking notes, adding and subtracting, or using imagined or real budgets, participants in a recent financial literacy class were putting their new knowledge into practice right away.
“Everything that I learned here is going to travel beyond this room,” said Amanda Garcia, one of the participants that attended the two-day session.
Garcia, who works at CollegeReady, a nonprofit, said the course was helpful both at a personal level and for her work with high school students, many of whom will be the first in their families to go to college.
“We talk a lot of how to prepare for college costs,” she said.
It was the first workshop of its kind ever hosted by Casa ALBA Melanie, a Hispanic nonprofit serving the Green Bay area.
Another participant, Juan Campos, moved to Green Bay with his wife 22 years ago and owns a small landscaping company called Scareweeds LLC. He is 55 now and attended the course to refresh his knowledge on credit and borrowing.
“It is a very important subject (financial education) especially for us that come from other countries; because we don’t have the same credit culture,” he said. “Credit is a tool, and it is very important to know how to use it.”
The course — taught in Spanish — helped people from the Latino community gain a better understanding of personal finance, credit and financial planning. The speakers, José Villa, a loan officer at Fox Communities Credit Union, and Christian Mendez, a diversity manager at Nicolet Bank, also discovered new subjects and lessons that could be addressed in the future.
“We hit the general terminology, so when you start jumping into other topics, they have a better understanding,” said Villa. “Going forward there are a lot of topics they want us to talk about. They want to know about investments, they want to know about life insurance and other aspects of their financial life.”
The other speaker, Christian Mendez said 10 people attended the first day, while seven came to the second.
“The idea of this is to actually continue the courses, get a couple more in; help the Latino and Hispanic community. I think we had a really good response; a lot of our surveys were filled out … so, it’s something that gave us material to work on our next sessions,” Mendez said.
The two-day course was held Feb. 10 and 11, with one session in the afternoon and the other during the business day.
As of this week, there is no date set for the future courses, but any information will be published at Casa Alba Melanie’s website, casaalba.org and on its Facebook page.
Ariel Perez is a business reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette. You can reach him at APerez1@gannett.com or view his Twitter profile at @Ariel_Perez85
