One of the personal intentions I set for 2025 was to ‘reengage with my community.’ After years of raising my hand for countless local opportunities, I have admitted to myself that I am probably a lifelong volunteer.
I lovingly blame my parents for setting a wonderful example of always helping others, whether it’s a specific volunteer opportunity, or simply seeing a need and then lending a hand. My dad is the kind of person who has changed a tire for a complete stranger in the hardware store parking lot, and my mom has sewn custom clothes for someone who couldn’t find anything at the store to fit their unique body.
The early years of the pandemic put a damper on volunteer work for me—some opportunities went away, some moved to the challenging virtual environment, and some morphed into timely needs, such as helping at community vaccine clinics. As much as I am both shy and introverted, I actually did miss people—specifically, connecting with them and feeling like I was part of something that was hopefully moving us all forward in a positive way. To me, helping where it’s needed is also a critical part of maintaining the infrastructure of our democracy.
A couple of months ago, I attended a local cooperative meetup, where PixelSpoke was asked to speak about our own cooperative journey. Huddled around some tasty food and beverages, I was immediately inspired by the curiosity and energy of a creative, diverse group of individuals who are interested in doing business differently than the status quo. After all, estimates around the number of worker-owned cooperatives in the United States are around 600-1,000, or less than 1% of all businesses!
This was an example of one of my favorite cooperative principles in action, which is ‘Cooperation Among Cooperatives.’ Both employee-owned cooperatives like PixelSpoke, and member-owned cooperatives, such as our credit union partners, foster civic participation and lessen inequality. These two outcomes are consistent with both my personal values, and those we share at PixelSpoke.
The seemingly intentional dismantling of our country’s democratic infrastructure by the current gaggle of self-serving billionaires at large, inspired me to set my intention and raise my hand once again. Recently, my spouse and I started volunteering to make plant-based burritos to feed folks in our community. It’s no shocker that being elbows-deep in beans and rice in the basement of a local church, has led to connections with folks we might not have otherwise met. I asked one of the program founders about the recipe we were using. Their response? “Yeah, this is pretty much vibes-based cooking.” Translation: We take whatever ingredients we have available, and attempt to create something that we can offer to most everyone.
Some of the answers on how to meaningfully engage with our communities and leverage cooperatives to proactively uphold our democracy, might just be rolled into a vibes-based burrito recipe: Work with the ingredients we have; do our best to build something that helps everyone; and come together to improve it along the way.
Whether your credit union is designing a new financial product, a revamped website, a financial education curriculum, a new branch, or another exciting initiative, let’s explore how to apply these key vibes-based burrito recipe concepts:
Community development often focuses on deficits, but what if you switch the focus and hone in on your community assets instead? Though the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) model has gained quite a bit of traction in recent years, it’s not something many credit unions seem to be actively practicing. It starts with a process called community asset mapping, during which the existing strengths and resources of a community are identified. Community members actively participate in documenting and visually representing these assets to determine opportunities for collaboration.
In practice, this could mean:
In practice, your credit union likely already does some of the above, but you would also benefit by more intentionally incorporating asset mapping as a core part of your strategy whenever you’re designing a new initiative or partnership.
Inclusivity has always been at the core of the credit union movement. After all, credit unions came into being to serve the needs of vulnerable populations who could not otherwise get loans or open bank accounts. But how can you ensure you’re creating an experience that doesn’t alienate your most vulnerable and financially stressed out members—the very people that credit unions were designed to serve?
In their excellent book, Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher describe inclusive design this way: “Instead of treating stress situations as fringe concerns, it’s time we move them to the center of our conversations—to start with our most vulnerable, distracted, and stressed-out users, and then work our way outward.”
What happens when we center the needs of these “stress cases” instead of treating them as “edge cases?” In practice, we end up designing a better experience for everyone. Closed captioning, for example, is obviously beneficial to those who suffer from hearing impairments. Yet we have all sat in a crowded bar, waited in a noisy airport, or forgotten our headphones at an inopportune juncture. Similarly, a solution that works for someone who has visual impairments may also benefit members on lengthy commutes who are unable to take their eyes off the road. A voice-to-text option benefits those with physical disabilities and can also benefit new parents who are frequently holding and feeding their babies. A high contrast screen and enlarged text option proves equally advantageous to users with colorblindness as much it does to users who simply misplaced their reading glasses.
Inclusive design accounts for this spectrum of abilities—permanent, impermanent, and situational alike. The result is connection across a diverse range of people facing similar circumstances and a reaffirmed organizational commitment to underserved groups.
One of our core values here at PixelSpoke is “Improve Every Day.” We are always looking for what we can start, stop, or continue doing to improve. A continual improvement mindset focuses on our strengths just as much as our weaknesses and enables us to grow while staying balanced. Meanwhile, a perfectionist mindset can lead to burnout.
Whatever you’re building or however you’re engaging with your community, you want to make sure to offer multiple opportunities for feedback. This could take various forms. We send out NPS surveys to our clients, but we also engage in both group and individual listening sessions to better understand our clients’ challenges and opportunities. If you’re designing something that leads up to an official “launch,” it’s important to set aside some time for celebration and equally important to ensure there’s an ongoing process for iterative improvement. This involves being intentional about active listening, identifying key metrics to determine whether or not you’re reaching your goals, and creating a continual process for applying insights from your conversations, survey feedback, and metrics reports.
Many credit unions are already surveying their members and tracking key performance indicators, but the problem is that most of the insights their efforts are designed to arrive at relate to the credit union’s performance—whether or not it offers decent service or how a product contributes to its bottom line. Very few credit unions are meaningfully measuring community impact, beyond superficial numbers like dollars donated to nonprofits or volunteer hours served.
In a prior episode of The Remarkable Credit Union podcast, Dan Osuky, Director of Standards at B Lab, said:
“I think what’s most important around the idea of measurement is it’s telling you things that you don’t know. If it’s only reaffirming what you already believe about your company’s performance or how you’re doing, it’s not all that useful, but the key is to create measurement systems within an organization to actually create some real insights for you to then figure out how you can change that performance.”
Most credit unions already know how much money or sweat equity they’re donating to local causes, but what is the impact of a financial product for low-income home buyers? Is a Spanish-language version of the website increasing engagement from underserved immigrant communities? How has financial well-being in a community improved since the rollout of a new curriculum or the opening of a new branch?
Your margin is important, of course, but so is your mission. These are the kinds of questions credit unions need to be asking, and answering through both qualitative and quantitative data, if they are serious about their social impact.
Whatever your credit union might be designing, you are sure to design something more useful if you tap into existing community resources, center your stress cases, and continually improve through active listening and meaningful measurement. As I recommit to my own community volunteer work, I’ll be applying these unexpected lessons learned from a vibes- and plant-based burrito recipe—and probably enjoying a burrito or two myself along the way.
This article was originally published on CUInsight.