Who are the Credit-Wise Cats and what do they do?
Credit-Wise Cats (named after The University of Arizona Wildcats) is a program that provides personal financial education to K-12 students, college students, non-profit agencies, and the greater Tucson community through workshops.
Credit-Wise Cats began in 2000 with just 5 student credit counselors educating students on campus. This year alone they have taught over 1,600 youth and adults in the Tucson community through 122 workshops, increasing audience members’ knowledge of personal finance by 30%.
To date, they have extended their educational outreach efforts to directly impact over 9,000 college students, local youth, and community members. Our program has developed “Credit-Wise” teams on other University campuses and provided case study competition opportunities to over 100 SIFE teams around the country.
Credit-Wise Cats are trained to facilitate workshops that cover four key areas in personal finance. Each member of the Credit-Wise Cats team receives over 50 hours of training and ongoing development to ensure workshops are presented in an effective and informative manner. We have reformatted and developed new workshop presentation topics to meet the needs of audience members on our campus and community events. The four presentation topics are:
- Introduction to creating a personal budget
- Responsible use of credit cards
- Beginning steps to creating a spending plan
- Introduction to Credit Reports
