A Few Updates

As I've been recently busting my butt getting Cooperative Vermont (a cross-sector initiative) off the ground, Credit Union History has been back-burnered as of late. However, in the last few months there have been some interesting credit union history related developments, so I figured I'd throw out a few quick updates:

1. Paul Thompson's new book on recent credit union history is out! I reviewed the manuscript a little while back, and the final product is a solid work of history that should be on the reading list of every American credit union board member and employee.
2. Jeff Hardin has started a project looking into the history of African American credit unionism in North Carolina. Check out this CUiNsight post for more info.
3. "The American Credit Union Industry Still Embodies Its Founding Values" by Stuart Levine is an interesting essay that draws a strong connection between an understanding of CU history and the movement's present values.

As for this site, one of my goals for the summer is to really delve into the pile of old issues of the Credit Union Bridge that have been occupying my book-shelf, so stay tuned for any gems that might turn up... :)

Time Banks: A Powerful Tool for Building Social Capital in Credit Unions and Cooperatives?

As I've discussed previously in greater detail, the strength of the sense of community that members experience in their credit union/co-op has a huge impact on their level of identification with the organization. This level is important because, the more that members internalize the fact that they are member-owners of an organization rather than its customers, the more their skills, energy, and relationships can be mobilized in support of their co-op's goals and interests. For example, a member who barely identifies with his or her co-op will be much less likely to, say, contact his or her Congressional delegation to encourage them to support Member Business Lending legislation than a member who has a clear sense of ownership of, and belonging to, the organization.

As such, I believe that one of the most important challenges facing contemporary credit unionists is the development of methods by which the collapse in the social capital that accompanied the post-1969 trend of credit union professionalization can be reversed. In the above-linked essay I proposed one strategy: democratizing community giving. In this piece I will propose a second, parallel opportunity: time banking (see the below video for a brief introduction to the concept).

I made this connection at the Vermont New Economy Conference last week, when, after the Cooperative Vermont convergence, I decided on a whim to attend the session on time banking. I'd heard of the concept before, but had never really given the model much thought. Happily, the presentation and subsequent discussion were extremely illuminating, and it quickly became apparent to me that time banks could be a powerful tool for strengthening the web of members' social inter-relations (i.e., social capital) within a cooperative organization.

Practically, a co-op/credit union time bank could work as follows. Using one of several existing open-source platforms, the organization would set up a time bank on a section of its website and create accounts for all of its members. Members would then have the opportunity to post both services they'd be willing to perform, as well as things they need done, and they would be able to use the site to keep track of how many hours they'd given to, and received from, others. As all of the participants would be co-op/credit union members and the system's infrastructure would be administered by the institution, every helping act facilitated by the time-bank would thus serve to increase the salience of the participating members' relationship with their co-op, while also increasing the organization's overall social capital by fostering new intra-membership relationships that had not previously existed.

In any case, the proof will be in the pudding; at the end of the session, a group of folks from my town got together and decided to develop a proposal to attempt to implement such a system through one of our local cooperative organizations. We'll be pitching it to the board on the 17th, so keep your eye out for updates as the project progresses!

Artifact: New Jersey Credit Union League "Little Man" Glass

Knowing my love of all things credit union, my partner recently went on Etsy to find me a birthday present. After a bit of browsing, she stumbled upon a New Jersey Credit Union League glass that some crafty person had turned into a scented candle. Probably made in the 1960s or before (since the "Little Man with the Umbrella" was retired as an official logo in the middle of that decade), the glass is a nifty window into the past, and I'm looking forward to using it to toast the memory of Bergengren once the candle is kaput...

North America's First Credit Union: Reflections on a Visit to the Maison Alphonse Desjardins

Ever since I first became interested in the history of the credit union movement, I've wanted to visit Levis, a suburb of Quebec City and home of the very first credit union in North America. Founded by Alphonse Desjardins in his home as the Caisse Populaire de Levis in 1900, the model pioneered in Quebec quickly spread and was instrumental in the establishment of the American movement.

However, in American historiography, the French Canadian element of the credit union story is treated as something of a prologue, and tends to conclude with Desjardins' meeting with, and inspiration of, Edward Filene in 1908. After that moment, the focus of the dominant narrative shifts to the work of the Filene / Bergengren team in the United States. While their story is vitally important to understanding the nature of credit unionism in the US, I've been quite curious to learn more about the work, life, and legacy of Desjardins.

Happily, I got just that chance during a recent family vacation to Quebec City, when I was able to convince my parents and partner (with promises of micro-brews and chocolate) to accompany me on a ferry ride across the St. Lawrence to Levis. The town itself, situated at the top of a steep cliff, has long been a working-class suburb of the provincial capital and, after climbing the long set of stairs leading up from the ferry dock, we headed towards the steeple of the Catholic church.

The stately white house's location at the edge of the church green was clearly convenient for members whose common bond was the parish, and the building is now prominently marked with a sign identifying it as "Maison Alphonse Desjardin." When we arrived, we were greeted at the door by an enthusiastic and knowledgeable bi-lingual docent named Patrick Lafrance, who took us on the (free) tour as soon as we arrived.

The house itself has been restored, thanks to the financial support of the Desjardins Caisse Populaire federation, to how it would have looked in 1906, and our guide mixed a great deal of fascinating Quebec social history into the tour, including a discussion of the distribution of electric lamps in the house (electricity was put first in rooms that could be seen from the street) and the black cross hanging in the kitchen (a symbol of the Catholic temperance movement, of which Desjardins was a supporter). Many of the artifacts in the house were original, and in each room our guide filled us in on the origins, functions, and social meaning of a great diversity of items, from cutlery to furniture to wallpaper.

The First CU Office!

After touring the other rooms in the house, through which the social, economic, and cultural context of North America's first credit union was established, our final stop was the small office out of which Desjardins and his wife, Dorimene, ran the Caisse Populaire de Levis in its formative years. Our guide made a point to emphasize how critical Dorimene was to its success, since Alphonse's job as the French language reporter for the Canadian Parliament meant he lived six months out of the year in Ottawa. As a result, Dorimene was primarily responsible for the successful operation of the Caisse for long periods of time, and she is now remembered as its co-founder.

Toking for Economic Democracy?

On the original desk sits the original ledger-book, a handsome, leather-bound volume that covers the years 1901-1908. Also heavily present in the office (and scattered around other parts of the house as well) are numerous pipes. According to our guide, it is believed that Desjardins bought himself a pipe for each Caisse he helped successfully found, which was well in excess of one hundred. Many of the books in the space are also original, although his correspondence has been moved to the archives of the Desjardins federation (which is also in Levis).

After thanking Patrick, purchasing pretty much everything available in the gift shop, and getting some amazing chocolate-dipped ice-cream at Chocolat Favoris, a shop a couple blocks from the museum, we hopped on the ferry and returned to Quebec City. However, leaving Levis did not mean our encounters with Desjardins' legacy were over; rather, unlike the American credit union pioneers, he has achieved a significant and recognizable place in Quebec's historical consciousness.

Fancy seeing you here...

The first real indication of this came as we walked through the streets of the old city from the Ferry back to our hotel. En route, we encountered an enormous, multi-story mural portraying historically important people from various eras on the streets of Quebec. It was quite the spectacle, so we stopped for a few minutes to take it in. As we examined it, we suddenly noticed a familiar face, and went over to look at the guide. Sure enough, Alphonse Desjardins was standing next to Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer widely credited as one of the founders of Quebec. In an American context, this would be like seeing Edward Filene or Roy Bergengren portrayed in a mural as a figure of equivalent importance to Lewis and Clark or George Washington.

This sense of the prominent place of Desjardins and the caisses populaires in the historical identity of Quebec was further confirmed the following day when we visited the Quebec history exhibit at the Museum of Civilization. In an exhibit whose subject stretched from the indigenous pre-history of the First Nations to the recent near secession from Canada, fully half of the display on the development of banking in Quebec was focused on the caisse populaire movement (including an original teller counter, sample checks, passbooks, ledgers, etc.), and visitors could listen to an audio version of one of Desjardins' speeches.

While I learned a great deal about the history of the Quebec credit union movement and Desjardins in particular, the biggest revelation to me from my journey was the weight given to the man and movement in the popular understanding of the province's history. In the United States, credit union history can hardly command a footnote in obscure academic journals, while, in Quebec, the movement's founder can be found painted larger than life in public murals and is well featured in the province's most prestigious history museum. Why the difference?

While there is much in-depth comparative work to be done, I think the relative historical prominence of the two societies' cooperative banking movements can be attributed to two major factors. First, the caisse populaire movement in Quebec was given nationalist meaning by many Francophone people itching under the domination of Anglophones. As the first Canadian banks were owned by the English elite and tended to put those interests above the interests of more working-class Francophone Quebecers, the caisses populaires were not simply ways for working class people to obtain credit, but they were also understood to be building a francophone financial system that could challenge the economic hegemony of Anglophone elites. Add to that the early movement's deep ties to the Catholic Church, which was a core Francophone institution (Anglo elites tended to be Protestant), and it is easy to see how credit unions in Quebec have gained historical importance due to their connection to one of the province's most long-running and central social tensions.

Second, it seems that the Quebec movement has promoted its historical importance in a much more intentional and strategic way than has the American Credit Union movement. Where the American movement's history museum was founded only recently, and is so woefully underfunded that its director spends much of her time doing financial, rather than historical, education, the Mouvement Desjardins has been solidly and consistently promoting its history for decades. Not only is their museum well funded enough to have full-time docents available to greet all comers, but they also employ two full-time historians whose research on Desjardins and the movement have yielded numerous resources both scholarly and popular (including comics books on Desjardins in both French and English). Without similar institutional support for their history, American public understanding of the deeply meaningful contributions credit unions have made to our society is virtually non-existent, and our movement's public standing is thereby substantially lessened.

In sum, I highly recommend a visit to the Maison Alphonse Desjardins, should you ever get the chance. Not only does it leave its visitors with a deeply enriched understanding of the origins of the North American credit union movement, but it also demonstrates the opportunities that can be cultivated when a movement decides to take the task of stewarding its legacy seriously.

The view from Levis ain't bad, either... All photos courtesy of Allison Curran

Roy Cropp and the Lawrence Educators Credit Union

Though my professional interest in the history and organizational dynamics of credit unions developed later in my life, my first awareness of the existence of the cooperative institutions was the result of my paternal grandfather, Roy Cropp. A high school guidance counselor by profession, Roy spent several decades as the part-time manager of the Lawrence Educators Credit Union of Lawrence, Kansas, and his going out to work in the office several nights a week was a consistent element of my father's childhood. Since becoming interested in credit union history, I've been meaning to sit down with my grandfather and discuss his experience as a credit unionist, and my recent trip to Kansas presented just that opportunity.

Roy and Matt at the entrance of the original LECU

As with many credit union people of his generation, Roy Cropp became involved in the movement through his work. Having grown up on a Kansas farm during the depression and Dust Bowl, he began his career at Lawrence High School in 1954 teaching vocational agricultural technology while simultaneously working on his masters degree in guidance and counselling. He was offered a job as a guidance counselor at LHS when he finished his degree in 1957, and he continued in that post until his retirement in 1990.

The office was on the second floor

A few years later, the Lawrence Educators Credit Union was founded to promote thrift and make credit available to the teachers of the school system of Lawrence. The school district provided the credit union with some office space on the second floor of the administrative building adjacent to LHS, and members would stop by to conduct their business from 4-6pm on Mondays and Wednesdays.

After five years of service to the credit union, its first manager retired, and the board approached Roy to ask if he'd take over. He agreed, but, he later recalled, he often regretted the decision for the first two years of his tenure. The previous manager had left the organization mired in debt, and Roy's first major challenge was getting the LECU back in the black. With some careful financial management, he was able to retire the debts within a few years, and he pledged to never again have the credit union borrow money. That conservative position sometimes put him at odds with the central credit union, which encouraged institutions with more loan demand than deposits to borrow to make up the difference, but Roy held firm and the LECU only lent from deposits for the whole of Roy's time as manager.

Edward Filene Speaks to the Radical Purpose of Credit Unionism

Edward Filene

Timely excerpt from an article by credit union pioneer Edward Filene on page 7 of the February, 1936 issue of The Credit Union Bridge (now Credit Union Magazine) entitled "Of the People, By the People and For the People":

...But do the Credit Unionists of America recognize their own historic part in this never-ending movement toward true democracy? Toward the liberation of humanity, and its rise to yet undreamed of heights, not by destroying great and useful powers which are used to oppress it, but by discovering how to use those powers for the common good.

As we celebrate the birthdays of Washington and of Lincoln, it is my hope that Credit Unionists at least will not be content with the mere recital of victories won. These are the two greatest names in our National history; but they are great because they dared to look forward, and it is dishonoring, not honoring such names, to celebrate their birthdays merely by looking back.

May each of us Credit Unionists remember, then, that he is not merely one of a little local group, which has discovered a convenient way of meeting certain little credit problems. We are enlisted units, rather, in a great and growing army of liberation, destined not to destroy the money power or even quarrel with it, but to discover how this power which necessarily controls the lives of people in this machine age may be used most effectively by the people for the people's interests.

To discover that, it was necessary to begin with the little local circle. Until we learned the first lessons, we could not go into the higher grades. But money is power only when it is used. To use it most effectively, we must use it constantly; and as our resources grow, we must learn how to deploy them in ever greater and more comprehensive ways. ...

Fighting for Credit Union Democracy!

Greetings dear readers! First off, I'd like to apologize for my lack of recent postings. The next big project on the horizon for this blog is to methodically read and review the massive pile of Credit Union Bridge issues of which I recently became the proud owner.

However, for the last month, that effort has been sidelined by developments in my increasingly surreal attempt to run for the board of directors of my credit union, Vermont Federal, which is looking like it might end up in legal action due to shenanigans on the part of the incumbent board. If you're interested in all of the nitty gritty details, check out the VFCU Members Assembly blog. If you're waiting for some fresh credit union history posts, the vote will take place on June 7th, after which I'll start into the Bridge project in earnest.