Editor's Note: This is the second in a series being featured as part of Innovation Week, a collaboration between CUToday.info and the Filene Research Institute.
FISHERS, Ind.—CU members often don’t know the difference between banks and credit unions, and even less about cooperatives of all types.
One project that’s part of the Filene Research Institute’s i3 program seeks to do something about both of those challenges.
Called the “Sustainable Cooperative Fund,” its creators have two goals. First, to act as a repository for participating credit unions to report the areas in which they invest their time, dollars, outreach efforts. That information will than be aggregated and incorporated into a heat-map showing how and where credit unions contribute to society, information that can be shared with legislators, trade groups and members. The second goal is to create a fund to permit the members of participating credit unions to identify cooperatives that should be the recipients of grant money.
The Sustainable Cooperative Fund project is being featured here as part of Innovation Week, a collaboration between CUToday.info and Filene. Project team members include Andrew Spirrison of FORUM Credit Union, Brad Barnes of Air Academy FCU, and Douglas Ebner of First West Credit Union.
How Project Came About
The project idea came about, according to Spirrison, as the team members realized that while all came from different parts of North America—Indiana, Colorado and British Columbia, respectively—they shared a common passion of what it is credit unions do and the impact CUs have.
“We realized we were all putting dollars and hours toward projects, but collectively as a whole we didn’t know what we were doing,” said Spirrison.
He said the group felt this information was particularly important because it could serve as an effective “connection point” with prospective members, especially Millennials, for whom social consciousness really resonates.
“Being socially responsible is an opportunity to have them switch brands and come to a credit union due to the good things that are being done,” Spirrison said.
Those “good things” can be generally categorized into broad areas where credit unions are heavily involved: financial literacy, disaster relief efforts, fundraising for medical research, fighting poverty, etc.
“This all started with us discussing what we do to give back to our communities,” said Spirrison. “How could we make this more powerful; how could we commit to more significant change.”
How Program Would Work
Under the proposal for Sustainable Cooperative Fund, members of credit unions will be able to rank their overall favorite on a 1st, 2nd, 3rd place basis. Based on the rankings, funds would then go to the appropriate cooperative.
But where would the funds come from? The i3 team has set an audacious goal.
“There are approximately 100-million credit union members in the United States and Canada,” the team noted in its proposal. “If these credit unions made a one-time contribution of $1 per member to the Fund, we could create $1 million each year assuming only a 1% rate of return. This sustainable endowment fund could be used to help build numerous cooperatives that simply need help getting started.”
The team developed a website that included all the key functionality: participant registration process, contribution entry portal, geographic credit union heat map spanning the United States and Canada, and aggregation of data entered. Additional features of the website included project categorization, the voting process, project fund accumulation, and recipient allocation.
As the second phase of its project, the team sent out a call to action to a number of credit unions and applicable organizations. After five weeks 52 contributions had been submitted, 28 credit unions in the U.S. and Canada had signed on, $1.435 million had been raised, and 1,854 hours had been contributed.
Spirrison said that when the team presented the concept at Filene’s Big. Bright. Minds conference it received the second highest number of thumbs up, and many people indicated interest in hearing more about it.
The project is now at what it calls phase three of the prototype, which is to take the website that was developed and make it functional. Additional steps include developing a process for accumulating dollars contributed into a centralized location, voting on projects, managing the distribution of dollars to be deployed accordingly, assigning a firm to assist with website support and development, and appointing a board of directors to oversee the entire process.
Not a 'One and Done'
From its embryonic stage Spirrison said the team’s goal has been to ensure the concept is “not a one and done. Our slogan is ‘Turning dollars into change.’ We want to commit here to the various efforts, and want this to be sustainable commitment.”
That is the reason for its name: Sustainable Cooperative Fund, he added.
Spirrison is now an i3 alumni, but the experience is one that remains with him he said. He praised i3 and Filene for the access it provided to people with varying backgrounds and experience.
“The big thing is to take a step back out of my day job and think outside the box, to be able to look at processes with members and look at how we can do better,” said Spirrison. “We can plan a map of innovation. We’re now looking at two or three different ideas as a result.”