Soon after Amber completed a degree in Business Management at the University of Michigan, she realized that her true calling was in using her accounting and finance knowledge to help others. To that end, she worked for several years leading the Junior Achievement office serving Genesee, Lapeer and Shiawassee Counties, bringing basic financial education to over 300 K-12 classrooms per year. Amber also spent several years in the fund development field at Kettering University, formerly GMI, in order to develop the skill of sustaining beneficial programs in addition to managing them. Amber was later called to lead the Asset Independence Coalition, overseeing free income tax preparation sites.In 2013, Amber was hired to lead the City of Lansing’s newly established Office of Financial Empowerment, and to oversee Michigan’s first Financial Empowerment Center. In its first five years, the Lansing Financial Empowerment Center has delivered FREE one-on-one financial counseling to over 4,100 clients, who reduced their cumulative debt by more than $7.8 million and increased their cumulative savings by over $650,000. In 2016 and 2017, Amber was the elected co-chair of the Cities for Financial Empowerment Coalition, which brings together pioneering municipal governments from across the country that have begun to use their power and positions to advance innovative financial empowerment initiatives.
The City of Lansing Office of Financial Empowerment Center now offers four programs: the Financial Empowerment Center, Lansing SAVE (a children’s savings account for post-secondary education), Offender Success (wrap-around programming for reentry citizens) and Bank On (safe, affordable banking products and services for the unbanked and under-banked). In January 2018, the office became part of the new Department of Neighborhoods & Citizen Engagement.