In the post-financial meltdown of the last year or two, credit unions — sleepy, boring and decidedly old-fashioned — have taken on a certain cachet.
Their conservative lending practices seem brilliant in light of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that led to the demise of banking giants like Washington Mutual. Their interest rates — hovering around 4 percent — seem sensational in these days of modest growth. And their unabashedly local orientation is music on a place like Vashon, where home-grown pride runs deep.
Now, thanks to the tireless work of a handful of Islanders, one is headed our way.
It’s fantastic news.
Credit unions were born in the days of our other huge financial crisis. And perhaps because they were forged during the Great Depression, the first time we witnessed the colossal collapse of the commercial banking industry, they have a certain resiliency that enables them to weather financial storms.
Because they’re nonprofits, they don’t have the desperate drive we’ve witnessed in the for-profit banking industry to reap huge revenues. They’re tax-exempt and membership-based. And their careful, conservative practices mean that they can do things the big banks can’t or won’t — home equity loans for weatherization and solar panel installations, for instance.
In the last year or so, financial leaders have taken note of these modest institutions. “The worst bullets of the (financial) crisis seemed to bounce off credit unions’ chests,” Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wrote in a recent issue of The New York Times. “Now, they are on a roll, bolstered not only by their subversively conservative lending practices but also by a loss of public trust in larger financial institutions.”
On an Island where the three commercial bank branches command $135 million in local assets, a small credit union like Puget Sound Cooperative Credit Union likely won’t pose a serious threat. But it will offer consumers a significant choice, and it will help some of us, as well as the Island as a whole, embrace a meaningful conservation ethic.
There’s another aspect to this development that’s particularly noteworthy — and that’s the role a small, disparate band of Islanders played in securing PSCCU’s commitment to open a branch on Vashon.
For the last year or so, this group — Bill Moyer, Rex Stratton, Rob Harmon and several others — worked long hours on what at times no doubt seemed a daunting project. When they hit walls, they looked for ways around them. And when they realized that their vision of creating a credit union from scratch could take a decade or so to achieve, they quickly embraced PSCCU — a credit union that seems right, both in size and orientation, for a place like Vashon.
This is community volunteerism at its best — an inspiring example of what’s possible when people use both their vision and their brilliance to realize a dream.
