Community Ambassador Spotlight: Barbara Santner

If your job had you staring at financial documents every day, you’d be forgiven for choosing a volunteer activity that requires a little bit less attention to detail. But for Barbara Santner, Director of Mortgage Underwriting at Amplify Credit Union, her volunteer work at her grandkids’ school is just one in a long line of happy accidents. “I didn’t choose this profession,” Santner explains. “It chose me.”

Santner began her career in banking, moving from being a teller supervisor to lending, when her boss told her: “You are going to learn lending”. Using her talents to help others has always been at the heart of her work. Santner describes her favorite part of her job as “helping first-time homebuyers”, but it was only recently that she put another latent skill to good use.

You see, Santner teaches elementary through high school students how to sew.

For Santner, sewing is a lifelong passion. “When I was a kid, I loved clothes, but I didn’t grow up with parents that had money,” Santer explains. “So, my dad said, you have two choices. I can either give you a set number of dollars every year that you can spend on school clothes, or if you want your grandma to teach you to sew, I’ll buy you all the materials you need to sew.”

She chose fabric and has been sewing ever since.

And if Santner’s career in real estate chose her, so did her volunteer activities at Genesis Schools. One day, her grandchildren’s vice principal reached out to ask if Santner would teach a class on sewing. And with plenty of volunteer hours available through Amplify’s Community Care Hours program, her trial run soon turned into a major passion.

“It was the most rewarding thing,” Santner recalls with a smile. “These kids made aprons for their moms for Christmas, and they were so excited.”

One of the first things that Santner teaches her students to sew is a pillowcase; these are often simple projects with no designs and straightforward measurements. But if a student could see their pillowcase through, Santner would always make a point to embroider their name in the finished project. “Some of these kids were in foster situations, where they get moved from place to place and things tend to disappear,” she explains. “Things don’t disappear if they have their names on them.”

And the skills developed in these after-school sewing classes will continue to serve students even as they grow older. Santner recalls seeing mostly girls take her class at first, until a few boys would ask if they could learn how to hem their own pants. Soon, Santner’s classroom was filled with young people looking to be more hands on with their clothing, both when it comes to design and repair.

“If you know how to do something, even if it’s a small niche thing, there’s somebody who needs that.”

Looking back on her experience at Genesis Schools, Santner believes that her sewing classes are a great example of letting your talents make an impact on your community. “If you know how to do something, even if it’s a small niche thing, there’s somebody who needs that,” she concludes.

Barbara Santner has been recognized as a Community Ambassador at Amplify Credit Union for volunteering over 40 hours in the previous year. Santner hopes to continue her classes with Genesis Schools in 2026 and beyond.