AMHERST - Though not in the traditional sense, New Hampshire native Amy Wheeler Teas is a jack of all trades. A banker who's spent most of her career in community lending, she also founded a chapter of the Rotary Club and is chairman of the Souhegan Valley Chamber of Commerce.

Born in Nashua, the 33-year old Wheeler Teas has spent most of her life in Amherst and hopes never to leave the Granite State.

At 29, she became a vice president at the First Colebrook Bank. Banking wasn't new to the family. She said her mom is a banker, as is her aunt. “When I turned 16 and I wanted a part-time job after school, I applied as a teller and got that job,” she said.

Wheeler Teas - who received a bachelor's degree in business administration from UNH in 2000, and studied abroad in 1998 at Maastricht University in the Netherlands - is now a vice president at the bank, as well as commercial lending and marketing coordinator.

One of the biggest challenges facing the state is the scarcity of decent-paying jobs for young people, she believes, and getting these well-educated professionals to come to New Hampshire and stay here.

This is part of what brought her to the chairmanship of the Souhegan Valley Chamber of Commerce, a path that started when she joined the group in 2001 and included her election to the board in 2006.

“It's really a business-based organization,” she said. “Its goal is to help…. sustain (businesses) and make our economy thrive in this local area.”

In 2009, she went to the Philippines to participate in a Rotary Club service project. While there, she saw “they are a third world nation, they don't have a government like ours that supports the poor.”

She expressed amazement that the Rotarians there were providing services such as water and food, a vital effort considering the government there doesn't take care of the people, she said.

“Without the Rotary Club, people would starve and die of curable conditions.”

Upon returning from that trip to Southeast Asia, Wheeler Teas was asked to form her own club. Thus the Souhegan Valley Happy Hour Rotary Club, which meets every Monday, was born.

She considers one of her top challenges to be overcoming inaccurate and unfair negative public perception of banking and bankers.

Her activism — from painting the metal railing behind Nashua's Holman Stadium to serving poor folks in the third world — helps prove that not all bankers are predators.

If that wasn't enough, Wheeler Teas is also on the board of the Nashua Pastoral Care Center.

But of all the things in her life, she said the most important thing in her future is starting a family:

“My real goal is to be a mom,” she said. “Career-wise, I'm going to adjust to that accordingly.”