Brown Bag Lunch Series on financial literacy offered in Staunton

The Staunton Creative Community Fund is partnering with United Way of Greater Augusta to offer financial literacy workshops.

The workshops will be a Brown Bag Lunch Series held at the United Way offices, 24 Idlewood Blvd #106 Staunton. Participants are encouraged to bring their own “brown bag” lunches for these workshops. All of the workshops are absolutely free and are open to anyone in the community, but do require advanced registration. Workshops will be held promptly at 12pm.

The Brown Bag Lunch Series will kick off the Friday before America Saves Week on February 20, 2015 covering Virginia Individual Development Account (VIDA).

VIDA is a matched-savings program for individuals of modest means that allows participants to save money and build a better future for themselves and their families. Participants earn $2 for every $1 they save (for a total of up to $6,000) that can be used for:

• Job-related classes and professional training
• Starting or expanding a business

After that, the series is broken down in to two cycles of workshops. These workshops count towards the financial literacy requirement of VIDA.

The first workshop covering Money Management will be held on Friday, February 27^th and Friday, March 27^th. Participants will learn how to manage money by preparing a personal spending plan and identifying ways to decrease spending and increase income.

The second workshop covering Food Budgeting will be held on Friday, March 6^th and Friday, April 3^rd.  In this workshop participants will learn how to budget their food spending by creating weekly menus, learning how to shop efficiently, and by discovering different way to use staple food items.

The third workshop covering Credit will be held on Friday, March 13th^st and Friday, April 10^th. Participants in this class will learn how to read a credit report and how to build and report their credit history.

Re-establishing Credit is the final class in the series. It will be held on Wednesday, March 18^th and Friday, April 3^rd. This class will cover building new credit habits, how to replace bad credit with good credit, and how to get started with new credit.

SCCF believes that everyone can and should be inspired to realize their dreams. Our financial literacy workshops and our VIDA program are one more way in which we can support entrepreneurship and community vitality in the central Shenandoah Valley.

Cynthia Pritchard, CEO of United Way of Greater Augusta, shares that “United Way of Greater Augusta is pleased to partner with Staunton Creative Community Fund and the VIDA program. United Way’s Financial Stability Partnership empowers low to moderate income hard working individuals and families develop financial stability and build savings to help realize their dreams and VIDA is a key part of the partnership. VIDA in communities nationwide has proved to be a vital outcome based program that helps people become economically self-sufficient through access to quality financial skills development, income enhancement and asset acquisition programs.”

Participants should register on the class registration page of the SCCF website, http://stauntonfund.com/class-registration/, or by contacting Courtney Cranor at [email protected] or 540-213-0333.