Contact Information Melinda Burke 520-621-1295 Credit Counselors of America, Inc. 602-734-0100

PHOENIX--Credit Counselors of America, Inc. (CCOA) has made a gift of $61,779 to the University of Arizona Southwest Retail Center for Education and Research. The gift will support educational programs in personal finance for students attending the UA and Tucson-area high schools.

Melinda Burke, assistant director of the Retail Center, located in the School of Family and Consumer Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, will oversee the development of the new educational program. Its aim is to help students achieve an understanding of budgeting, savings and personal financial management.

Under the terms of the CCOA gift, a portion of the funds will help support the University of Arizona's Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) Team. This student-run organization manages an award-winning personal finance program known as Credit Wise Cats. Working through Cats, the SIFE organization will train students to teach other students the principles of personal finance, especially personal budgeting and debt management techniques. Concurrently, the Economics Institute of the Tucson Unified School District will develop workshops to provide financial literacy training for high school teachers who, in turn, will pass this useful information on to their students.

Michael A. Hall, president of CCOA, notes that "many more students today have access to credit and some have taken on thousands of dollars of debt, often to support their education. Some students become so overwhelmed with debt that they must drop out of school."

CCOA, based in Phoenix, is one of the nation's largest independent credit counseling agencies and supports a variety of educational programs to inform the public about the importance of budgeting, savings and managing debt. CCOA educational programs are supervised by Hall and by Robert Fellenz, professor emeritus, Montana State University, and Peter Rose, professor emeritus, Texas A&M University. The grant extended to the UA Southwest Retail Center is the second major grant CCOA has made to a U.S. university this year.