What Black Cooperatives Can Teach All Credit Unions

In this age of multibillion-dollar credit unions, it can be easy to forget that most started with a small group of people looking to pool their resources.

Well, Jessica Gordon Nembhard is here to remind us. Professor of Community Justice & Social Economic Development in Africana Studies at John Jay College, CUNY and author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, she believes that wonderful things can happen when communities come together for mutual aid.

Among other things, we talk about the proliferation of Black cooperative responses during Covid, the importance of credit unions as community assets, opportunities for credit unions to play a more central role in supporting cooperative development and ecosystem building, and the challenges currently facing Black-owned credit unions, including potential strategies to better support these vital community institutions.

We also address this month’s BIG Question:

What role do Black cooperatives currently play in the ongoing fight for economic, racial, and social justice, and what potential is not being realized?

 

 

References & links:

• Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice
• Association of Cooperative Educators
• John Jay College of Criminal Justice Community Justice Program
• University of Saskatchewan Center on Cooperatives and study on the impact of credit unions
• Federation of Southern Cooperatives
• Inclusiv report on minority-owned credit unions
• Caja Laboral in Mondragon
• Ella Jo Baker

 

Key takeaways:

• Credit unions should think about how to lean more into their cooperative identities and better position themselves as community assets. They can start by asking themselves, “What are the impacts and benefits for a community of having a credit union in their area?” And they should also think about how to measure these impacts and how to communicate them in their marketing efforts.
• Instead of competing with alternative financial service providers, credit unions could consider partnering with them. A fascinating example is a credit union in the Bronx that worked with check cashers, which are widely considered predatory, to offer a valuable service to their members in underserved communities.
• It’s important to look critically at how mergers and acquisitions are impacting the credit union movement. Are there ways we can better support smaller credit unions, which tend to be the most valuable community assets, instead of simply shoehorning them into merging or getting acquired? Or is there a way they can maintain their unique local identity even if they legally merge? The credit union movement could benefit from asking more probing questions here and exploring alternative paths forward. 

 

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 co-owner here at PixelSpoke.

Kerala Taylor:
And I’m Kerala Taylor, also a co-owner at PixelSpoke and the director of marketing and impact. Today we are going to delve into our big question, which is, what role do Black cooperatives currently play in the ongoing fight for economic, racial, and social justice and what potential is not being realized? I’m so excited to introduce Jessica Gordon Nembhard. She’s the professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in Africana studies at John Jay College CUNY. And she has been widely published and the author of a book I stumbled across a couple years ago, Collective Courage, a History of African-American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Jessica is the recipient of many awards, but most notably the Association of Cooperative Educators Award for Outstanding Contribution to Cooperative Education and Training, which she won in 2021. And then in 2022 they renamed the award the Jessica Gordon Nembhard Award for Outstanding Contribution to Cooperative Education and Training. And she is a proud mother and grandmother. Jessica, thanks so much for joining us.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
Thanks for having me.

Kerala Taylor:
We’re so excited to talk to you today and I thought there’s a lot in your book, we’re not going to get into everything, but we’re going through some pretty interesting times right now, I would say, political, economic and social perspectives. How would you characterize the state of the Black cooperative movement today and what sort of factors are contributing to any trends we’re seeing now?

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
Right in the new millennium, but particularly by the 2020s with the Covid pandemic and the re-resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, we see a prolific period for Black mutual aid and Black cooperative responses. And what I mean by that is Black folks coming together to help each other to collaborate and cooperate, even if they’re not forming legal formal cooperatives, they’re doing all different kinds of economic cooperation both to survive these crises, whether they’re health crises or economic crises, but also because all these 21st century crises, including climate change, are reminding Black folks that the system we have isn’t protecting the things we really care about.

With the Covid pandemic people were realizing and noticing that Blacks were often the first responders. Our jobs were often the ones that you still had to work, you couldn’t work from home, you still had to work. And yet they were jobs that were the poorest paying and the least protective of our health and our safety. And people were realizing, I don’t have to stand for that, right? I don’t have to take a job that doesn’t care about my health and safety. I have options. I can do other things. Some of those things were just opting out of leaving their job and doing more mutual aid and collective things. We saw a proliferation of conversions of stock companies to worker co-ops because people realize worker co-ops are more resilient in times of trouble. And we saw Black folks realizing that if they didn’t pay attention to their own needs and take care of themselves, nobody would. And again, cooperative economics allows you to both take care of yourself and your family, but also in a way that’s looking for the common good and helping everybody else.

Katie Stone:
So speaking of credit unions, that’s one type of cooperative that’s obviously very near and dear to our hearts, and you’ve been a co-investigator for a project on measuring the impact of credit unions, I’d love it if you could tell us a little bit about that project and some of your key findings, particularly as they relate to economic justice for Black and other underserved communities.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
So the measuring the impact of credit unions was specifically a project of the University of Saskatchewan Center on Cooperatives. That project was because of an earlier project I’d been trying to do on how to understand wealth creation and asset development from co-ops. And in talking to my colleague, Lou Hammond Ketilson at the University of Saskatchewan, we realized that credit unions had some of the best data and also obviously working in finance capital had numbers about finance savings, homeownership, that kind of thing for their members.

So we decided to hone in our first look at how to understand wealth creation in co-ops by trying to understand wealth creation in credit unions. And as we started to look at that project, we realized that wealth creation wasn’t just the narrow understanding of wealth that economists use of assets, less liabilities, but it was really about benefits’ impacts generally and creating healthy communities.

So we started looking at credit unions as community assets and try to look at and how do you measure that beyond those initial things we were trying to measure like how much homeownership did a credit union help people to get? How much savings did people have in credit unions, that kind of thing. So we ended up working with the regional credit union association to add some questions to their annual survey of their members about what they’re doing. But we also created a whole, what we call the template of the kinds of detailed economic and non-economic market, non-market kinds of questions anybody could ask, but starting with credit unions to ask about how you’re a community asset and what are the impacts and benefits of a community having a credit union in their area. So looking at not just the products and services and how different they might be from commercial banks, but also looking at how credit unions conduct themselves in communities and how they react with multi-stakeholders.

What we did find was people trusted their credit union more. Credit unions allowed low-income people more opportunities for savings, and often were able to give higher interest rates on savings. And I also ended up doing some credit union interviews in the US, especially Black credit unions, which I’ll talk a little bit about at the end. But anyway, some of this I found in my interviews in the US, some we found in the interviews in Canada, but we found that almost every credit union we talked to treated their employees better than banks and better than regular for-profit companies. They also gave their employees time to volunteer in the community. So communities felt the presence of co-ops because their staff were working in communities sometimes doing things. All the credit unions we interviewed gave donations to communities. A lot of them participated in community events or sponsored a baseball team, a summer camp or something. So there was a lot of activity and connection with their community.

But also even in their business, their business of finance, they were operating differently, particularly in terms of loan readiness. Didn’t mean just looking at somebody’s credit score and checking things off on a regional or national checklists of whether you were loan ready or not. They literally had meetings with the people they were going to lend either college fund or home mortgage or whatever, and provided training. First assess whether they were ready yet or what kind of training they needed, provided that training, worked with people. If they didn’t think they were loan ready, worked with them to get loan ready, and was very honest with them about this is what the loan is going to mean. These are what your obligations. Are you ready for that?

They often use what they knew about them in the community if they had local loan funds, like were you regularly employed even if you didn’t have a huge salary, did you have a regular salary and everybody knew that you were stable. So they used different kinds of criteria. Of course, different credit unions did this to different extents, but they all had at least these intentions to help people become loan ready if they weren’t, and to do lending a little bit differently. And then of course, some credit unions were better and more interested in getting members to participate on the board and things like that. So there was also different degrees of that. But again, the idea that once you put your first $5 into the credit union, you’re a member. And that comes with privileges as well as responsibilities.

When I studied the US, the Black credit unions, I was mostly looking at the community development credit unions that were members of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. And again, I was looking back toward wealth creation and asset building through these credit unions. And so I actually found two important trends, I guess. The first trend was that these community development credit unions were actually helping low income working class Black folks to secure and protect their assets. So again, they weren’t predatory. Actually, some of them had alternate payday loan options and stuff like that to stop their members from using payday loans.

There was an interesting CDCU actually in the Bronx, so not part of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, but I also found a study about that one. Bethex, unfortunately, they did have to merge, but for a while they were doing this really interesting thing, which was they had a contract with the check cashing branches in the Bronx that anybody who was a member of their credit union, if they went to the check cashing place and showed the credit union membership card, they could get their checks cashed for free because Bethex didn’t have enough branches. They wanted their members to have more access to their services. So they actually paid these check cashing predatory people.

They made a contract with them to pay a fee for them to then allow their members to use their services for free instead of having get to their one branch. So it was a really interesting use of a horrible alternative, but their members didn’t actually have to pay the price for…
So those kinds of innovative kind of things. What do we need? What are our constraints? How do we get around those constraints in a way that still honors our values and principles and that kind of thing. I actually moved on from that research and haven’t followed up on it, but it’s still lovely to talk about because it’s such great outcomes understandings that we got from those studies.

Katie Stone:
Yeah, it’s really impressive the amount of ground you all covered with this project and the breadth of stories you heard. And I’m just super appreciative that we were able to, or you were able to bring some of these stories to light because there’s just so much inspiring work being done in the credit union industry and it’s so member focused and community focused. It’s why we love doing business with credit unions.

Well, in 2019, Inclusiv reported that “minority owned credit unions are closing at the staggering rate of roughly one per week. And African-American credit unions, which make up 50% of all minority owned credit unions, are among the fastest to decline.” Certainly a sobering fact, and we’d just love to hear your take on why you think this is happening and what the credit union movement can do to help reverse this trend.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
So it’s a horrible trend. I did note it a little bit in that study of the federation’s co-ops because I started, I can’t remember what years I had data from, but when I started I had about 16 CDCUs that I was studying. By the time I finished the research, and I think it was only over a five-year period, were only 11. So the rate wasn’t quite as bad as it was by 2019, but you could see the trends happening.

I’ll start with the good news and then I’ll go back to the bad news. The good news was the credit unions that were still in business were actually getting more members who were saving more. So that was the good news, at least when I was doing the study, which was before 2015, I believe. So that was the good news. Even though we were losing credit unions, we weren’t losing people being able to use credit unions and save in the credit union.

So some of the mergers, I guess in some cases were working. So that’s the first answer in terms of the bad news. So part of the answer is mergers, and I mentioned it was happening in Canada as well. Some of it is kind of yes, standard business practice, you merge when it’s hard for a smaller organization to keep up with the latest technologies and trends and to provide the kinds of services that members or customers want. So yes, late 20th century, early 21st century, there’s a lot of new technology and stuff happening in finance, and if you’re too small, it’s hard for you to provide that access to your members. So you could sort of see. But when I was looking at what was happening, it was the regulators who were forcing these smaller credit unions to merge, and that’s it what looks like.

I know the data I had about new credit unions in the south, there were no new ones. So they were making the small ones merge and not approving new ones. And people of color credit unions, especially Black credit unions, tend to be very small. A lot of them don’t even have more than one or two employees. Many of them are church-based or organization-based. And so on a tiny, if you just want to kind of look on the business effort side, you could sort of understand why the feds might say, oh, you’re too small, too small to succeed, instead of too far large to fail, the too small to succeed. If you look more closely though, it’s because they’ve got the wrong values, right? Because again, if you look at all the data I did and other people, there’s lots more better credit union data than I have. I just did those small quick studies, but we know what credit unions accomplish, especially community development credit unions with low income, low wealth, low resource people.

The issue that I think should have been on the table was how do you support those small credit unions? What kinds of ways can you do partnerships federations, connect them to community development financial institutions, things like that to make sure they survive instead of either closing them down or not allowing another one. So we have the wrong values because we should value these small credit unions because of all this stuff. They’re real community assets and they can be better community assets if they stay small, unless you’re going to do a merge system where you allow the smallness to still have some play. So have a structure where maybe they merge, but you still are able to keep a lot of the localness and local aspects.

But that means we have to really think carefully about it. Not just say, “Oh, they’re too small, they can’t make it. We don’t want to worry about them. Shut them down. Make them merge,” whatever. So that to me is the first issue that yes, this trend is happening. It’s very distressing for those of us who believe in and love credit unions. And it’s also a shame because really what we should have is some kind of national task force to talk about the fact that we value small local credit unions and how do we support them? How do we make sure they succeed?

Kerala Taylor:
Absolutely. I do feel like the gospel of growth, so to speak, has somewhat infected the credit union movement. And just something I see when I’m on the road at conferences, is everyone introducing themselves by their credit union’s asset size with the assumption being, oh, if you’re from a big credit union, it’s automatically better.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
Not really necessarily. It depends what your values are, right?

Kerala Taylor:
Yeah, exactly. And I think there are very values driven larger credit unions, so I’m not automatically against larger credit unions, but the idea that you’re better simply by virtue of a larger asset size, I think is flawed, or the strategy to pursue growth just for growth’s sake without a why behind it, it’s definitely problematic.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
I still also think that more and better education would help. I mean, I do think we have to change the regulators because ultimately they’re the ones who say yes and no. And I know there’s still Black co-ops, credit union proposals right now that haven’t gotten federal approval or support yet. But the other thing is that more education sometimes help in terms of not just educating the regulators, but also more education in communities for how and why to start a financial co-op, a credit union, what you can get from that. And I do have a great example from the 1930s and ’40s that I just want to mention.

In North Carolina, the state of North Carolina, there was a coalition, the North Carolina Coalition of Credit Unions and Cooperatives was a Black organization. And what they decided was that they needed to create manuals and have workshops to help people learn how to start a credit union, how to start a cooperative. They were able to get a partnership with their state agriculture department and a grant. And they created manuals. They did the workshops.

In 1936 when they first started their program, once the workshops were started, there were three Black credit unions in the state. By 1948, so 12 years later, there were 98 Black credit unions in the state. So I mean, part of it is that the state was willing to incorporate all those credit unions, but obviously something has to be said about the program they had of using the manuals and the workshops to let people know how to do this and that kind of thing. They also were able to create about 46 new co-ops, but 98 credit unions is huge in just one state. It’s a huge accomplishment. And that again, first of all, it’s a coalition. Second of all, it was a partnership. And third of all, they had an extensive plan for doing workshops and using their manuals in a way that would lead to actual concrete outcomes.

Katie Stone:
Education is so important, and I think you touched on this in your book about how Black colleges and universities were among the first to incorporate cooperative economics in their curriculum. And just speaking from personal experience, I completed my MBA program back in 2019, and one of the great disservices I think was that we never talked about cooperatives as a potential business model. And I just think that education is so important in spreading the word and one of things that we’re trying hard to do here at PixelSpoke.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
Absolutely. And a podcast is a great way to do that.

Kerala Taylor:
All right, so we’re talking about the broader cooperative model beyond credit unions a bit. Of course, credit unions are one type of co-op, but there’s other types. And PixelSpoke is an employee-owned co-op. And it seems to me that historically co-ops thrive best kind of what you were just speaking to, and they’re part of a broader cooperative system. You’ve mentioned the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, really impressive organization, been around since 1967, still seems to be thriving today, serving Black farmers landowners and co-ops in the southern region. So I’m curious if you think credit unions could do more to support that broader cooperative ecosystem and what would that look like?

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
I absolutely do. I actually see credit unions as one of the center spokes in some of these intertwined network of co-ops. I had a year or so where I talked to a few different credit union associations, and my message was that yes, credit unions should actually be the center of support and co-op development in their communities, because we know they’re community assets, but they could also be co-op assets. They should be an integral part of the ecosystem.

We know that they are in other places, again, like the Mondragon, I think it’s called Caja Laboral, it’s the workers credit union, which is their major financial institution. I think it’s now the seventh-largest bank in Spain or something. But that credit union is not just what we normally think of as a credit union, but it’s also a co-op development organization. It provides startup funds for new co-ops, it sponsors research and development to guide co-op development, it provides capital for expanding existing co-ops as well as for startups in addition to their full banking and financial services.

So in that case, they saw the credit union as the place where co-operators could pool their money, not just save and service their money and do their financial services, but pool their money that then could be used to internally finance co-op development. So not have outsiders, not be beholden to foundations and grant money, but to have our own money used to invest in new co-op development, but particularly research and development. So not just, okay, we’ll give you grant or we’ll give you the initial funding, or we’ll give you a loan or a line of credit for your co-op, but also that we’re spending money on what’s the cutting edge stuff here? Where is the best next co-op, what’s the best next industry? What’s the cutting edge thing? So being a part of that whole thing.

Now I know in the US, because when I started talking about these things, I know US, both federal and state credit union law doesn’t allow credit unions to do that much commercially, right there’s limits and all that kind of stuff. I understand their regulatory limits to what credit unions can do now, but I don’t think that should stop us from dreaming about an ecosystem where credit unions are much more centrally figured in supporting co-op development and even co-op education. I also think even without changing too much of the laws for what credit unions can do now, especially CDCUs can do more to help be like the mortgage holder for housing co-ops and to help with more affordable housing funding, affordable housing and other community development initiatives. They could do more to give lines of credit to worker co-ops and farm co-ops and things like that, food.

So we know that right now under the existing laws, they could do more to expand the kinds of investments they make and the kind of support and who their customers are. Trying to figure out, again, how we could get them to do more, I think it’s possible for us to dream about bigger roles and then figure out what would be the law changes, what would be the differences. So how can credit unions really be some of those engines of cooperative growth?

Katie Stone:
Yeah, it’s really a radical way of thinking about cooperation amongst cooperatives.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
Absolutely.

Katie Stone:
So Jessica, many of our listeners are credit union marketers, so we’d love to hear from a marketing perspective, what do you think credit unions could be doing better to differentiate themselves from banks and to emphasize their cooperative model?

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
So I think the first thing is credit unions shouldn’t be afraid to say they’re co-ops. And what does that mean? Their member-owned values-based enterprises, and I think people are even more than ever interested in hearing that, understanding that and participating in that. I know in the past it hasn’t always felt safe or prudent to focus on that, but I think now is a time when you could focus on, and I know I’ve seen some great ads and of course after the Great Recession, there were some wonderful ads and some big movements of people moving from commercial banks to credit unions.

But I think now is another time to talk about, yeah, what does it mean that we’re member-owned, that we’re values-based? What are the benefits of membership? It’s not just access to financial services. We do it better in these ways. We protect you better, we educate you better, those kind of things. So protection and education I think really matter and could be ways that you talk about it and that credit unions are in partnership with their members I think is also an important thing to talk about. Stability and safety. I think that also be really important, especially we had, what, last year, I guess, another bank closing scare.

Again, credit unions are much more stable and safe for your money. And why do we care about values-based enterprise, especially values-based financial institutions? Well, we care about them because the wealth gap is so huge, right? Because we still suffer, working class and lower class people still don’t get the services they need and the right supports they need. But also we care because we all live in communities and we want communities to be better and safer. Credit unions are one of the best examples of a community asset. And so they could also market themselves, “We’re a community asset. You should want us in their community.” And then they can list out all the ways that they’re a community asset, just their being in a community creates some level of stability. They give back to community, they donate to community, they support, they often let community groups use their building or office space. They could just list all these ways that we’re in anchor and an asset in your community in addition to all the members support and values-based economics that they do.

And I think there could be some great marketing around that and not to be afraid of making those claims, ’cause I know commercial banks also say they give back to community and they sponsor baseball teams and stuff that they’re not really a community anchor and community asset the way credit unions are. So picking the way that you explain how you’re a community asset and what you do and that credit unions have been doing this for the long haul, even in some of the most financially risky neighborhoods and some of the most challenging places, credit unions have been able to be there and do this. And I think we shouldn’t be afraid to say that.

Kerala Taylor:
That’s great advice. I think it’s very aligned with what we talk to a lot of our clients about and that we develop websites and totally understand the pressure our marketing team might face to feature rates or latest offer on their homepage, but we just want to make sure they’re also really telling their story, both of their credit union, but also what it means to be part of a cooperative. So yeah. What would you say is your number one hope for the future of the credit union, particularly as it relates to economic, racial, and social justice?

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
Well, I really hope that credit unions recognize and assert their power in the co-op movement and as a community asset. I was really excited when I started using that word of seeing credit unions as community assets because I felt like it both uses of the language, the mainstream language of finance and assets, but it’s also really about community wellbeing, collectivism, solidarity, that kind of thing. So it kind of combines both worlds, which credit unions do do. So I think for me, recognizing that and then using that to move forward to see themselves as one of the anchor institutions in these ecosystems that we’re hoping and trying to build and create more and more of. And so being at the forefront of some of that work that we’re doing.

I connected to racial justice because I feel like I learned a lot about how to see credit unions in that way by studying Black credit unions and Black leaders who were involved in credit unions or part of movements that included credit unions. We see how important both economic justice and racial justice are, and that they’re really intertwined. You can’t really achieve either one without the other. And again, credit unions are right there in the middle of it all. And so that vision for me is that credit unions can be one of those places where we pull in all those pieces and show how it works.

Katie Stone:
All right, time for some rapid fire questions. So if you could wave a wand and change one thing, what would it be?

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
Well, I may get in trouble for this one, but my real answer, rapid fire, is replace capitalism with cooperative economics.

Katie Stone:
Great. No arguments here.

Kerala Taylor:
No.

Katie Stone:
All right. If you could have dinner with one historical person, who would it be?

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
I think it would have to be Ella Jo Baker. In the co-op movement, she started out early in the ’30s with the Young Negroes Cooperative League. She was executive director and co-founder of it. But she learned everything that she’s known for in the civil rights movement about grassroots leadership and grassroots democracy and leadership development. I believe she really learned all that from the co-op movement when she was in it in the 1930s. So I would love to be able to pick her brain.

Katie Stone:
Oh, neat. Yeah. Great. All right. I’m going to throw one more in there because I have to ask. You’re an author, you’re talking with two avid readers, so I won’t even ask you to pick one. What is one of your favorite books?

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
So one of my favorite books is Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Are Watching God. It’s not actually a very religious book, but one of the things I liked about it is, again, it’s one of those things that combines multiple issues and perspective. So it was written from the perspective of a Black woman, I think it was the 1940s or ’50s, but she and her husband actually create a town. And so it’s also about community building and town building. And so I’ve always actually wanted to teach it in a community economic development course as a way for people to think and learn about it from a novel’s perspective. But it’s very much a woman’s story, but it’s also this community building, what does it look like to build a Black town? Why would we do it? And how does that work? Along with all the… She’s also a storyteller, so there’s drama and all kinds of other stuff. But those two themes really connect with both my head and my heart.

Kerala Taylor:
I’m definitely putting that on my list to reread. It’s been about 20 years. I think I could bring a new perspective to it now. Wonderful. All right, well let’s do our final take. As a reminder, I think all of our questions today were rather big questions, but our big, big question was what role do Black cooperatives currently play in the ongoing fight for economic, racial, and social justice and what potential is not being realized? So I know this is a tall order, but in just a few sentences, can you summarize your thoughts on this question?

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
So I hinted at it before, I really believe that Black co-ops and Black cooperators, the co-ops show it and the cooperators see it and create it, see and create the connections between economic justice, racial justice, and social justice. And what I mean by that is the more I studied Black co-ops and I first started researching about them in history because I just wanted to find some to show people that we actually did it, but then when I found some and then I found more and then I found more, I also found this whole connection, I think I also talked about it in terms of the political periods. There were connections. They weren’t just doing co ops, they were doing civil rights, they were doing farmers and farm laborers’ rights. They were doing women’s rights. They were doing economic democracy and economic justice. And so this notion that we have to have these interlocking justices in order to make it in the society that we live in the United States and that Black co-ops are at that intersection, they help to address economic injustice and to create economic democracy.

At the same time, they helped to develop leadership and social justice and give people tools for how to address those other injustices. At the same time, there were some elements of the co-op movement that were not racially just, that were discriminatory. And so again, Black cooperators helped to think about what racial justice means, even in so-called liberal organizations and how do we handle racial justice even among people who think they’re already woke. And so that intersection is so important and to remind us it’s not just economic democracy, it’s got to be racial justice. It’s not just social and racial justice. It’s got to be economic justice. And how do we do it? We do it through these kinds of cooperatives and solidarity economic activities. And so that helps us to push that envelope.

So the potential that’s not being realized is I can articulate that and show where I’ve seen it in history, but I don’t feel like we’re always deliberately thinking in those terms. And I think we need to. I think if we’re going to make it through the 21st century, we’ve got to be deliberate about the interlocking justices that are needed in addition to worrying about climate justice and environmental sustainability. And I think we can do all that through cooperatives, solidarity economics and cooperatives.

Kerala Taylor:
Wow. It’s an inspiring message. I love everything you’ve said and I love that it’s backed by so much painstaking research and informed by history. It’s a true honor to have you on our show today, Jessica. Thanks so much for joining us.

Katie Stone:
Yeah, thank you so much.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard:
Thanks for being interested in listening. I appreciate talking with you both.

Kerala Taylor:
Well, that was quite a conversation. We covered a lot of ground there. I could probably easily come up with at least a dozen key takeaways. But first and foremost, and specifically because I know we have so many credit union marketers who tune into this podcast, let’s think about how credit unions can lean more into their cooperative identities and better position themselves as community assets. I love the way Jessica posed the question, what are the impacts and benefits for a community of having a credit union in their area? We often think of impacts and benefits in terms of our members, but what about the broader community? And also let’s think about how to measure those impacts and how to communicate them in our marketing efforts.

Secondly, instead of competing with alternative financial service providers, now I’m thinking about opportunities for credit unions to partner with them. And the example Jessica provided of a credit union in the Bronx working with check cashers was so fascinating. We widely think of check cashers as predatory, but this credit union was able to partner with them to offer a valuable service to their members in underserved communities. Perhaps that’s something more credit unions could explore.

And lastly, it is so important to look critically at how mergers and acquisitions are impacting the credit union movement. Are there ways we can better support smaller credit unions, which often tend to be some of the most valuable community assets, instead of just simply shoehorning them into merging or getting acquired? Or maybe there’s a way they can legally merge but maintain more of their unique local identity and all that knowledge that they’ve gained about their community. I really agree with Jessica that the movement could benefit from asking more probing questions here and exploring alternative paths forward.

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 of force for good. You can learn more and check out our work at Pixelspoke.coop. That’s Pixelspoke.coop. Until the next time, I wish you the best of luck in making your credit union remarkable.