How Your Credit Union Can Reap the Rewards of Green Lending

Demand for clean energy products is on the rise, and not just from well-to-do Tesla owners. There is also widespread interest and demonstrated need in lower-income and disadvantaged communities. But how can credit unions meet that need?

Enter the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator program (CCIA), which is currently offering funding to credit unions and other community lenders to deliver green products, with a focus on the underserved. We’re joined by two leaders in the credit union movement, Cathie Mahon, President and CEO of Inclusiv, and Blake Jones, a founding board member of Clean Energy Credit Union.

Cathie and Blake share how credit unions can leverage new government funding opportunities and why they are so well positioned to deploy clean energy solutions in their communities. They also address this month’s BIG question:

Why should credit unions care about clean energy, and what do they stand to gain from helping low-income and disadvantaged communities deploy clean energy projects?

Key takeaways:

1. All credit unions should be thinking about clean energy and green lending. That can start with looking across all your current products and putting a “clean and green” lens on them. Considering current climate realities, green lending is the next frontier and with credit unions’ commitment to impact and deep community connections, they are perfectly positioned to enter the fray.
2. Things like solar panels and electric vehicles may have a reputation for being somewhat elitist, but there is widespread interest and need in lower-income and disadvantaged communities. The challenge and opportunity for credit unions is being intentional about designing products that meet that need.
3. In keeping with one of our PixelSpoke core values, clean energy products are truly an Everybody Wins solution to a formidable global challenge. We know they alone won’t solve climate change, but they’re a necessary step in the right direction, and in the process, they offer tangible benefits to credit unions, credit union members, and their broader communities.

References & links:

• Inclusiv
• Clean Energy Credit Union
• Namaste Solar
• Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund
• Clean Communities Investment Accelerator program (CCIA)
• Inclusiv Center for Resiliency and Clean Energy

 

Read the full transcript:

Katie Stone:
Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Credit Union podcast. We created our podcast to help credit union leaders think outside of the box about marketing, technology, and community impact. The Remarkable Credit Union is brought to you by PixelSpoke, a digital marketing agency that works with credit unions to create user-friendly, high-converting, award-winning websites. As a B Corp and an employee-owned cooperative, we believe that business can and should be a force for good. Each episode we bring on expert guests from the credit union and broader cooperative movement for conversations about the intersection of marketing and social impact.

Our goal is to challenge your preconceptions about business as usual, and provide you with actionable takeaways that you can use to grow your membership, improve the financial health of your cooperative and better serve your community. I’m Katie Stone, CEO, and a co-owner here at PixelSpoke.

Kerala Taylor:
And I’m Kerala Taylor, also a co-owner and PixelSpoke’s director of marketing and impact. Today’s big question is why should credit unions care about clean energy and what do they stand to gain from helping low-income and disadvantaged communities deploy clean energy projects? So to answer that question and a few others today, I’m very excited to welcome two accomplished folks in the industry, Cathie Mahon and Blake Jones. Cathie is the president and CEO of Inclusive, which is a nonprofit dedicated to helping low and moderate-income people and communities achieve financial independence through credit unions. And she’s had a long history in the financial industry. Previously has served as Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs. And there she started and led New York City’s Office of Financial Empowerment, OFE. And she also co-founded the Cities for Financial Empowerment Coalition and Fund and remains an active board member there.

Blake Jones is a founding board member of Clean Energy Credit Union, which is a PixelSpoke client and a co-founder of Namaste Solar. An employee-owned solar electric cooperative and certified B Corp, which is based in Colorado. And as a fun fact, Namaste was a huge inspiration for PixelSpoke when we decided to make the transition to become an employee-owned cooperative ourselves. Blake actually began his career in 1996 in a kind of different industry. He was a civil engineer for Halliburton in oil and gas. And then spent three years in Nepal implementing solar, wind, hydro, and electric vehicle technologies. Cathie and Blake, thanks so much for joining us.

Cathie Mahon:
Thank you for having us.

Blake Jones:
Good to be here.

Kerala Taylor:
And before we dive in, just a side note, if you’ve been listening to the Remarkable Credit Union podcast for a while, Blake has joined previously as a guest. And this is our first time welcoming Cathie, but we’ve actually had quite a few guests from Inclusive before. We’re huge fans of their work. Most recently we had Jules Epstein-Hebert on, who’s the director of Membership Growth and Partnerships. So here at PixelSpoke, we are no strangers to the great work that Inclusive and Clean Energy Credit Union do. And today we’re excited to talk more specifically about grant opportunities that are becoming available to credit unions through the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. And more specifically, it’s Clean Communities Investment Accelerator program, which helps community lenders deliver energy efficiency and clean energy access to low-income and disadvantaged communities.

So let’s just start by learning a little bit more about this opportunity. Cathie, can you just provide a brief overview of the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator and how Inclusive is involved in it?

Cathie Mahon:
Absolutely. And some big shoes to fill with all of the former inclusive members and Clean Energy Credit Union members that have been on the show. So thank you for having me today. As a quick way of background on how this all came about, the Biden-Harris administration created the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. And really the goal of the fund is dedicated to investing in clean energy solutions that reduce carbon emissions, leverage private capital into projects that might not otherwise have been financed, and to put a particular focus on getting investment into climate-vulnerable communities. And so that is sort of the overall objective of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and they created three key programs within that. One was called the National Community Investment Fund, which creates permanent capital financing for clean energy projects. Another was Solar for All, which was a way of distributing some very targeted dollars to state and local government.

And the third is the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator or CCIA. And CCIA is really focused on building the capacity of on-the-ground community lenders, to be providing clean energy solutions in their communities appropriate to the needs and the opportunities locally. And to really kind of see that capital reverberate for years and generations to come. Inclusive was fortunate to be selected as one of five recipients of a CCIA or a Clean Communities Investment Accelerator Award, and that award was for a total of $1.87 billion, which sounds like a huge amount when you think of Inclusive as a single organization. But what it really is, is sort of, I like to sort of liken it as we’ve gotten a giant endowment with a very rapid spend down. So a large amount of capital is being administered by Inclusive. And our job over the next four to six years is to get that capital out in the form of capitalization grants, and technical assistance grants and infrastructure support for community-based lenders to be able to create products and services focused on clean energy solutions in their communities.

In the case of Inclusive, we were selected based on our proposal which was focused entirely on the credit union industry. So we are going to be taking this capital, we’re going to be putting together a robust but accessible grant program. I’m looking forward to sharing some more of the details of that in a minute.

Kerala Taylor:
Yeah, my next question was thinking about our listeners who might be considering, hey, maybe we should apply for a grant. What would make a credit union a particularly good fit for this program and what credit unions may not be a good fit for the program?

Cathie Mahon:
Well, across the board I would say, when I think about credit unions being a good fit, I think potentially every credit union could be a good fit for this program. We like to think of the Clean Energy Solutions as sort of thinking about as a lens across all of your credit union products and services already. So a credit union can be deciding to develop solutions to be investing in greening their local community by using everything from a small consumer loan that could help a low income household be able to purchase an energy efficient appliance, to electric vehicle investments, to retrofits of homes, to solar panels on homes, to solar panels and retrofits on commercial buildings and all the way up to some sort of larger scale project finance. So if you look at across the spectrum of what your credit union might offer, you can be putting a clean and green lens on all of those products.

We think when we zoom in and think of those who are really going to want to take advantage of this and raise their hand to apply, are going to be those credit unions that want to be designing and creating these opportunities in their communities. But also who have experience and focus on serving low income and disadvantaged communities, because one component of the Clean Community’s Investment Accelerator or CCIA, is that 100% of all of the capital that goes out must be devoted to reaching and serving low-income and disadvantaged communities. It doesn’t mean that has to be everything your credit union does, but everything you do with these dollars must be reaching low-income households.

Kerala Taylor:
Got it.

Katie Stone:
Yeah, I think that’s a really powerful part of this program. Blake, I know that Clean Energy Credit Union is known as being a leader in this space and it’s one of the first credit unions to fully lean into green lending. And as we are kind of touching on historically, the environmental movement has had a reputation for being a bit bourgeois, if you will. So have you seen interest in clean energy from less socioeconomically-advantaged prospective members, current members? And how are you reaching those low-income and disadvantaged communities?

Blake Jones:
Yeah, fortunately we have seen a lot of interest. So Clean Energy Credit Union is now seven years old. And after our first few years of operating, we were pleasantly surprised that the NCUA came to us and said, “Hey, congratulations, you qualify as a low-income credit union.” Because more than our half of our members were low-income. We were surprised because as you alluded to, that prevailing perception is that clean energy projects are primarily for well-to-do folks. But we were getting so many low-income borrowers and that happened organically. We didn’t have any proactive effort that was causing that. So that was really good to see. Later, we wanted to become more proactive in this regard. So we launched a new program which we call The Clean Energy for All, and it has two parts. One part, it offers loan rate discounts, so better loan terms to low-income borrowers. And then the other part of it offers the same loan rate discounts to borrowers who self-identify as BIPOC as Black, Indigenous or other people of color.

And we do that through what’s called a Special Purpose Credit Program. And if you’re unfamiliar or if listeners are unfamiliar with a Special Purpose Credit Program like we were, I didn’t know what it was, we highly recommend that you research them. And even the NCUA sent out a letter in 2022, to all federally-chartered credit unions encouraging them to learn about special purpose credit programs and consider offering them to their members. But it’s basically it’s enshrined in federal statute that you can offer special loan programs with special loan terms to disadvantaged groups even if they’re a protected class. So I know that there’s talk out there of reverse discrimination. There’s been some lawsuits about providing something like, this special loan terms to someone who self-identifies as BIPOC. But a special purpose credit card program does help ensure that you’re able to do so. The initial results of these two programs has been really good. They’ve been only going for about a year and a half, but we’re really excited to expand upon them and scale them up.
And that is definitely part of what I think everything that Cathie’s talking about. And the Inflation Reduction Act to 2022 and the Greenhouse Gas Reduction funds, really helping to make sure that disadvantaged communities don’t get left behind in the clean energy movement.

Katie Stone:
Great. Cathie, going back over to you, are there other inclusive who are already doing great work in this space or do you have any examples of innovative projects or products that are making a difference in less advantaged communities?

Cathie Mahon:
Yes, absolutely. And I do have to first say, Clean Energy Credit Union has been a tremendous leader in our movement in this space. And not only in what they’ve been able to develop through their credit union, but also in just how incredibly generous they’ve been in sharing their experiences, knowledge, expertise, ups and downs all throughout the process. About five years ago, Inclusive created something. We launched our center for Resiliency and Clean Energy, and through that center we established a training program that helps credit unions and other community lenders to design solutions in their communities. And since that time, I think we’ve trained about 700 people from about 350 organizations, the majority of which are credit unions. And we’ve seen incredible creativity that has come about from… We do a cohort based learning, so you learn through a six to eight week course and we have a consumer course and a commercial course.

And so through the course of those six to eight weeks, the credit unions are designing their products in a way that’s very specific to their local needs and communities. And so we’ve had some fabulous work that’s come out around energy efficiency, lending, helping low income homeowners kind of retrofit their homes, investing in heat pumps to switch off from HVAC systems heating and air conditioning and sort of making that more energy efficient. There’s been some amazing work in the Southwest from Guadalupe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and from Marisol in Phoenix, Arizona around really investing in heat pump technology that helps particularly in places where there’s a tremendous challenge around getting efficient and affordable cooling systems in place. And Phoenix just having hit like 100 days of over 100 degree weather, that is more and more important. It’s such a dent in the household budget for people to be trying to figure out ways to be figuring out how much they can afford to cool their homes.

And so helping those homeowners and landlords to be able to transition into more efficient heating and cooling systems has really been critical. And I’ll just say another great example is also out of Arizona in Tucson, Tucson Old Pueblo Federal Credit Union quickly started doing solar lending, learning a lot from the example of Clean Energy and other of their peers. And I believe now they became the number one solar lender in Tucson. And what they’ve been doing is really just working with contractors that have cultural competencies, serving Latino communities, immigrant communities, and folks who might not otherwise have been able to get good financing. And they’ve been getting them into really affordable loans to be able to put solar panels on their homes. And so there’s been really some just tremendously exciting energy in this space.

Kerala Taylor:
Yeah, before this podcast we were talking about how it’s supposed to be over 100 in Portland Oregon today where Katie and I both live. And how historically that’s so unusual for the Pacific Northwest but is getting more and more common. So definitely rethinking my own non-existent cooling system in my house. Cathie, I assume there is information about the training program you mentioned on your website.

Cathie Mahon:
Absolutely. Inclusive.org. And a major button right on the home site that gets you to our clean energy page, which has opportunity to sign up for that. We were able to put the training together with a grant from the Department of Energy, and we will be continuing it with CCIA dollars. So it’s free of charge, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get signed up and get enrolled as soon as you can.

Kerala Taylor:
That sounds awesome. We’ll definitely include a link to that in the show notes as well when we release this podcast. So Blake, so Clean Energy Credit Union, definitely a leader in the green lending space. You’re also by credit union standards very new and there’s not a lot of startup credit unions. So seven years is not a long time in credit union land. I’m curious if there are any potential gotchas for credit unions who are considering venturing into green lending or if there are any lessons that you’ve learned the hard way.

Blake Jones:
Yeah, I think the biggest gotcha might be thinking that clean energy loans are riskier than they actually are, and then creating loan products that don’t meet your members’ needs or that aren’t competitive in the market. And some credit unions do that, then they say, “Well, we created this clean energy loan product but nobody wants it or not many people want it.” And I think, for example, a lot of credit unions think they can offer terms that are similar to unsecured loans or signature loans which have much higher interest rates and shorter terms, shorter tenors, and they don’t generate much demand. So I’d research the market and look at how other credit unions like Old Tucson Pueblo Credit Union and Vermont State Employees Credit Union and Clean Energy Credit are doing it. And how and why their clean loan products are doing well for fun over the last seven years. And yet that’s not very long, although it seems like a long time to us. So much has happened in the last seven years.

But Clean Energy Credit Union in that short period of time, we’ve originated over almost 13,000 clean energy loans and totaling almost 250 million, and we only have one to two dozen defaults. And again, half of these are low income borrowers, so really low delinquency and default rates. And I think if you look at the clean energy loan portfolios of other clean energy lenders, you’ll find similarly very extraordinarily low delinquency and default rates. But one of the reasons why they’re less risky is because, as an example, like Cathie was talking about, if you do green home improvement, like putting insulation in your attic or getting a heat pump or solar panels on your roof, it reduces people’s utility bills. And if the loan is amortized over a 10 or 20 year period, then the monthly savings will typically exceed the loan payment amount. In other words, they’re cashflow positive. So that really helps the member of course, and it helps ensure a lower delinquency and default rate. So I’d say yeah, that gotcha is just do some market research and look before you leap.

And one suggestion I have for a credit union that doesn’t have any experience with clean energy lending and maybe hasn’t started to do any market research, would be to buy loan participations from fellow credit unions that are veterans in this space. Getting some clean energy loans on your books, seeing how wide they perform, getting your CFO and your board comfortable with them is a great first step. You’re going to learn a lot in the process and it’s going to help you set the stage for creating your own clean energy loan products to offer to your own members.

Kerala Taylor:
That’s great advice. And it kind of ties into my next question. You touched on some metrics like default rates and metrics credit unions would want to be looking at. But I’m curious how you measure impact as far as maybe cost savings for members or just how these loans are actually having a positive impact on the environment. So what are some key metrics that Clean Energy Credit Union looks at?

Blake Jones:
We keep it simple, and I think some of this is because we’ve already drunk the Kool-Aid. We’re already clean energy nerds that know the impacts of green home improvements and electric vehicles and electric bicycles and all those things. So we kind of keep it simple and primarily look at the volume and the type of clean energy loans that we make. Solar loans, they’re some of the most sexy and the most abundant but we also want to be providing as many loans for other different types of green home improvements as we can. And electric bicycles, which I think are fantastic, have lots of benefits and they can be quite lot more expensive than regular bicycle. So providing financing for those is important too. Looking at those, we also look at diversity metrics in our asset portfolio, our membership, our staff, our board or supervisory committee. And then last but not least, I love how PixelSpoke is a certified B Corp. But I love the nonprofit B Lab and they run the certification program for B Corporations, but they have an impact assessment tool that is free for anyone to use.

And we would love to see more credit unions using that assessment tool. Not only does it tell you how you’re doing, but it also gives you lots of ideas for what you can do better and what you can do next. And hopefully someday soon, maybe very soon, we would love to see credit unions maybe be eligible for B Corp certification, which historically they haven’t because nonprofits can’t be certified B Corps. But federally chartered credit unions is kind of an interesting model that’s somewhere in the space in between, and hopefully we’ll see that soon. But we’re a big fan the B impact assessment tool.

Kerala Taylor:
That’s great. That would be so exciting if credit unions could be eligible for B Corp status. It’s certainly like you said, just that recertification process can be onerous as Katie knows, who’s done it multiple times. But it really gives you a lot of good intel about areas for improvement and just ways to deepen impact.

Katie Stone:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that every year we do it, we use it as our roadmap for what’s our plan for the next three years in terms of how can we improve and continue to get better. So Cathie, taking a step back, I’m curious if you have a sense yet of the potential impact of the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. So if you successfully deploy all of the funds and the credit union recipients successfully start making green loans, are there any projections about how much their communities will be able to move the needle when it comes to clean energy?

Cathie Mahon:
In the pretty rigorous application process and in our sort of post-selection negotiation process with EPA, we’ve sort of drilled down onto some big metrics. And I think the key thing within… I guess to build on Blake’s point about trying to keep it simple and focused, we feel like at Inclusive our job is to set up the credit unions for success in getting to volume. And that we then take what they report back to us in terms of the lending that they’re generating. And we in the sort of the back office can sort of track what kinds of impact we see being made. And so there’s a couple of big metrics that we’re going to be pointing everybody towards. For every dollar we put out, we have a goal to leverage at least two dollars of private capital.

Now that could be in the case of a credit union, by these dollars going into your net worth it enables you to raise deposits and be able to leverage at a two to one ratio. Of new deposits to that dollar of equity we’ll be dispersing for a total of three dollars to go out in lending. So just to round out the numbers, if you take $1.5 billion going out in capital funding, that leverages three billion dollars worth of total deposits for a total of four and a half billion across the system to get out in new loans made. And I think we had some metrics around reaching a total of 830,000 residential and small commercial property owners to be able to do energy efficiency and electrification and decarbonization. And like I said, the goal for us is really we want to get the capital out and say, “Go, these are the ways, these are the products we want to set you up to be successfully lending on.”

And as you’re making those loans focused on low income and disadvantaged communities, you could be reporting those loan files back to us and we could be making sure that that capital is sort of being attributed to the right set of metrics. And so that’s sort of the real tangibles that we’re hoping to get to. And knowing credit unions as we do, we were pretty modest in our calculations around leverage. We know that credit unions once they’re going are going to keep going and we want to kind of keep those engines rolling and supporting as we go. So I think when we think about from a big picture impact point of view, we certainly want to hit the goals we set out for. And I think we feel pretty strongly they’re very achievable and ambitious goals for EPA. But we really see this as the opportunity to create some bigger and deeper culture change.

And I think Blake spoke about it at the beginning of the podcast, which is really like we’ve come a long way from the period of time in which people sort of thought of solar or clean energy loans as sort of a boutique product for high wealth people. And we’ve gotten to a point where it’s acknowledged that this is a product and a series of interventions that can be available to low income people in communities. But I think this’ll give us that next level of injection that with the energy and the capital and the marketing and promotion in the local communities, we want to really change the culture to help people say, not only is this available to me. But this is essential for me to be able to take a look at all of the costs in my household budget that are going to energy consumption.

And thinking about the ways that the credit union’s going to help me reduce those costs and get my home to be more efficient, get my means of transportation to go further for less. And to help set me up for not only being successfully reducing carbon emissions, but to be successfully reducing the portion of my earnings that’s going to energy consumption. And so I think we have this really great opportunity at a bigger impact level to really change the equation that people can see this as something for them and necessary for them. And the fact that the capital goes out as capitalization grants and technical assistance grants, those capital grants go into the permanent capital of a credit union. And what we know is that for EPA, we have metrics we have to hit for the next six years but that capital is going to live on forever in those institutions. And so we believe that the culture change that we’re going to be really effectuating is going to keep building and creating exponential change and opportunity for the decades to come, so we can’t wait.

Katie Stone:
Wow. Yeah, one of our core values here at PixelSpoke is everybody wins. And what you just described really truly feels like everybody wins. So that’s just really exciting to hear. Okay, well, I have some rapid fire questions for you two. These are just a little bit of fun questions to get to know you better personally. So my first one is, what is your favorite meal? Cathie, if you want to go first.

Cathie Mahon:
I’m going to say I just sent my son off to college and I gave him our collective favorite meal before I send him on, it was lasagna.

Katie Stone:
Nice. How about you, Blake?

Blake Jones:
Omelet and a stack of pancakes.

Katie Stone:
Ooh, breakfast, all right. Blake, you’re first this time. What is the best advice you have ever received?

Blake Jones:
Take a deep breath.

Katie Stone:
Oh, okay. How about you, Cathie?

Cathie Mahon:
I’m going to go with the perfect is the enemy of the good. We need to get started, we need to drive forward, we need to experiment. We’re going to make mistakes. We can’t always get it buttoned up 100%, but we got to go forward.

Katie Stone:
Yep. So important and yet so challenging. All right, what’s a place you’d like to visit that you’ve never visited? How about you Cathie?

Cathie Mahon:
So I’m going to say I’ve never had an opportunity to visit the continent of Africa, and I am fortunate enough to have been invited to join the AACC delegation, going to Kenya next month for the [inaudible 00:28:20] Congress. So I’m going to get to live that.

Katie Stone:
What an amazing trip, great. How about you, Blake?

Blake Jones:
I’d like to go to Greece, see some of those beautiful islands.

Katie Stone:
Yeah, that’s on my list. All right, last question. What’s a song you were most embarrassed to admit you like? Blake, you’re on the hot seat first.

Blake Jones:
The entire soundtrack of the Disney movie Moana, it is fantastic. I watched that with my daughter and I was like, the music is fantastic. Wow.

Katie Stone:
That’s a great answer. How about you Cathie?

Cathie Mahon:
I’m going to go with holiday by Madonna.

Katie Stone:
Oh, classic. No embarrassment.

Cathie Mahon:
No embarrassment there. We all can come to that. We love holiday.

Kerala Taylor:
Love it. All right, well, let’s do our final take. Just as a reminder, our big question today was why should credit unions care about clean energy, and what do they stand to gain from helping low income and disadvantaged communities deploy clean energy projects? So in just a sentence or two, I know that’s a challenge, can each of you summarize your thoughts on that question? And Cathie, we’ll start with you.

Cathie Mahon:
Yeah, I’m just going to say this is the world we’re living in and this is what credit unions have been made for and built to do. We are deep lenders, we are committed and connected to our communities, and we deliver the kinds of products and services that people need to improve their lives. And this is our next frontier.

Kerala Taylor:
Love it. And how about you, Blake?

Blake Jones:
Wow, that was well said. I’d say clean energy continues to grow in popularity and market size. And offering clean energy loans it represents a new asset class, so it’s a great opportunity for both growth and diversification. And lastly, clean energy products help people reduce their expenses. So it’s a great vehicle for community wealth building, particularly in low-income and disadvantaged communities. So it’s good for your members.

Kerala Taylor:
Great. Well, I know I just learned a whole lot, so thank you guys so much for coming and offering your expertise. We really enjoyed having you on the show today.

Katie Stone:
Thank you so much.

Blake Jones:
Thanks for having us.

Cathie Mahon:
Thank you.

Kerala Taylor:
All right, well, it’s time for our three key takeaways. And first, I just wanted to reiterate that all credit unions should be thinking about clean energy and green lending. I really loved what Cathie said about looking across all your current products and putting a clean and green lens on them. Clean and green, that sounds so refreshing. As she mentioned, in considering our current climate realities, green lending is the next frontier. And with credit unions commitment to impact and deep community connections, they’re really perfectly positioned to enter the fray.

And secondly, we all know that things like solar panels and electric vehicles may have a reputation for being somewhat elitist, but there’s actually widespread interest in need in lower-income and disadvantaged communities. As Blake mentioned, the challenge and opportunity for credit unions is being intentional about designing products that meet that need. And lastly, in keeping with one of our PixelSpoke core values, clean energy products are truly an everybody win solution to a huge global challenge. We know that they alone won’t solve climate change, but they’re a necessary step in the right direction. And in the process, they offer tangible benefits to credit unions, to their members and to their broader communities.

Well, thanks for joining us today for another great episode. The Remarkable Credit Union is brought to you by PixelSpoke, a digital marketing agency that works with credit unions to create user-friendly, high converting award-winning websites. As a B-corp and worker-owned cooperative, we believe that business can and should be a force for good. You can learn more and check out our work @pixelspoke.coop. @pixelspoke, all one word, dot C-O-O-P. Until the next time, I wish you the best of luck in making your credit union remarkable.