Why Cooperative Ownership Matters—And How Credit Unions Can Pave the Way

The listeners of this podcast are likely aware that credit unions are financial cooperatives — an identity that some credit unions lean into and others don't talk about much. Amongst the general U.S. population, our understanding of cooperatives is limited, at best. Most people are ill-equipped to distinguish between, say, a consumer co-op, like a credit union, and a worker co-op, like our company PixelSpoke. 

We'd like to change that, and we think that credit unions can play a crucial role, not only in expanding our general understanding of what co-ops are and why they matter, but also in supporting the broader cooperative ecosystem.

We're excited to be joined by two guests who have made it their life's work to expand access to ownership through the cooperative business model. Frank Cetera is the Business Transfers Program Director for the Democracy at Work Institute, which helps communities overcome accelerating economic and social crises through worker ownership, and also a board member of his local CDFI, Syracuse Cooperative Federal Credit Union. Stacey Smith is SVP and Head of Programs at Project Equity, which helps raise awareness of broad based employee ownership and supports businesses transitioning to employee ownership.

Frank and Stacey help us tackle this month's BIG Question:

How can credit unions more broadly support a cooperative economy, and what specific needs can they address for co-ops in their communities?

Key takeaways

• Cooperative ownership is so often the missing piece. Whether we’re talking about support for small businesses, or the nonprofit landscape, or corporate social responsibility, we rarely talk about pursuing equity through business ownership. A lot of credit union members out there aren’t aware that they own a small piece of their credit union, or don’t really know what that means. When it comes to employee ownership, while not everyone will own a home, most everyone will work at some point in their lives. Wouldn’t it be powerful if more of us had access to ownership through our work?

• It's critical to expand the cooperative ecosystem. It’s not just about expanding the number of co-ops but also that network of support that they rely on to grow and thrive. This is where there’s a huge opportunity for credit unions to come to the table and assess unmet financial needs in the cooperative economy. We hope this conversation will inspire some to take the leap!

• Credit unions and other co-ops are essential to the foundation of democracy. During a time when our own democracy feels constantly under siege, it’s important to think about opportunities to practice democracy in our day-to-day lives. For so many Americans, democracy just means going to vote every four years. Frank is on his credit union board — that’s democracy in action. At PixelSpoke, so many of us are doing more than what's specifically in our job description because we're also serving as co-owner and board members. That means we're not just learning new job skills and earning dividends, we're also learning how to make decisions democratically for the common good.

  
  

Resources & links:

• Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI) 
  
• Project Equity
  
• Cooperative Federal Credit Union
  
• Workers to Owners Collaborative
  
• Ward Lumber
  
• Employee Ownership Equals (EO) 

Read the full transcript:

Katie: 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 at PixelSpoke...

Kerala: And I'm Kerala Taylor, also a co-owner here at PixelSpoke and the director of marketing and impact. As usual today, we're going to talk credit unions, but we'll be taking a few steps back today. 

The big question is how can credit unions more broadly support a cooperative economy? And what specific needs can they address for co-ops in their communities? 

So we have 2 great guests on our podcast today to help us answer this big question. I'm excited to introduce Frank Satira, who is the Business Transfers Program Director at the Democracy at Work Institute, and otherwise known as DAWI. They help communities overcome accelerating economic and social crises through worker ownership. 

Frank also has some credit union experience. He has served his local CDFI credit union, Syracuse Cooperative Federal Credit Union, as a board member for 15 years and he's been the chair of that board for 10 of those years. Frank, thanks so much for joining us. 

Frank: Very happy to be here. This is a great opportunity to talk credit unions, one of my great joys in my day-to-day life, and to connect that to the cooperative movement. 

Kerala: We're so excited and also to introduce Stacey Smith, who is SVP and head of programs at Project Equity. And Project Equity helps raise awareness of broad-based employee ownership and supports businesses transitioning to employee ownership, bringing capital to finance transactions. 

I'd also like to add that PixelSpoke as part of our community giving program in 2024 supported both of these organizations and really appreciates the work that you both do. Stacey has led capital placement on many EO transitions and also supports the education and training of lenders exploring the EO capital space. Stacey, it's great to have you. 

Stacey: Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you, Kerala. It's great to be here and great to be with Frank and Katie as well. 

Kerala: Oh, wonderful. So we have some questions for each of you, but this first one's for both of you. I would just love to start by hearing a little bit about what drew you to this work. Why are you passionate about cooperative ownership models, and why do you think they're particularly important in this moment of time? Frank, maybe we can start with you. 

Frank: Thank you. I go way back to when I was growing up as a child and didn't realize it at the time, what it meant to be part of a working-class family in terms of my father on the coal train, day in and day out, and living in a poor rural area. But the fact of the matter is that it did shape me in a lot of ways. The first thing that I can remember being engaged with through this community, this rural and working-class community was getting an account at the credit union where my father was a member through his railroad work.

And so I always loved to think that, you know, that had a big effect in how I thought about everything moving forward. And the idea is that I wanted to do good. And I think that whenever we think about doing good, a lot of us think about the nonprofit world and working in those agencies. And I did that for a bit.

It was a great experience in that I got a lot of project management work and was able to transfer that to a lot of other areas of my life. But what I really wanted to do, I realized at one point was to have as much of an impact as I could on my local community. And I ended up working with the SBDC, the Small Business Development Center, as a business advisor. And that opened up a lot of opportunities for me to bring the cooperative business model to bear and to place that in front of people, to educate people about that, and to get them knowledgeable and hopefully excited about that as well. 

It was a great opportunity for me to do a little shift, but to really then expand upon how I was able to help individual business owners and work with my credit union.

Kerala: Wow, I'm glad to hear that there are some folks at the SBDC who are actually even just talking about cooperative ownership models. I feel like it's something that, I worked with Oregon Entrepreneurs Network and it was just never something that was discussed. Ownership in general, but especially cooperative ownership. Oh, what about you, Stacey?

Stacey: So I came to employee ownership later in my journey and my career, but my career has always been focused on how to make capitalism better and make sure that it actually does enhance individual and collective lives.

So I actually spent a long time working in the corporate sustainability space and corporate responsibility space, working on global supply chain issues and the environment. And one of the things that we were always missing from that framework, from my perspective, was a really good economic development model as to sort of round out the three-legged stool when we talk about corporate responsibility. 

When I came to Project Equity, it was learning about employee ownership, like all the light bulbs went off and I was like, well, here it is. It's been here all the time. And in the United States, we have some great models for broad-based employee ownership of which worker-owned cooperatives are one of.

So it's just been wonderful for me to like late in my career, like come to this and be able to sort of round out my whole history of really trying to enable the private sector to do good and not do harm and really fulfill that promise. 

The United States has always uplifted equity in real estate and home ownership and so many people that's not accessible to, but all of us work somewhere. And many of us work in the private sector and in small businesses. And if we're able to deliver equity ownership in those small businesses as well, it puts that many more people on a pathway to having an equity piece in their portfolio, which is so important in today's world when a W-2 job is just not sufficient often to raise our families and live our lives the way we want to, so.

Kerala: Oh, that's so great. And I really appreciate what you said about capitalism because I feel like a lot of time the cooperative economy, to the extent that people are thinking about it at all, which is really not much, is often seen as very antithetical to capitalism, seen as sort of like this totally alternative solution. But I definitely have some qualms with capitalism as we currently practice it, but I do also think those two can go hand in hand.

And I would just love to learn from each of you about what a cooperative economy actually looks like to you in practice. Frank, I'd love to hear from you. 

Frank: I really think that it involves incorporating democracy, access, equity, and practice into as many parts of your life as you can. So, we talk about, do you bank at a credit union, which right, democracy and governance that you can practice as an individual? Do you have the opportunity to potentially live in a housing co-op? 

I've had the opportunity to do that in two different times in my life, including currently. And are you able to support cooperatively owned consumer and production businesses as well? And then are you able to participate in them?
Are you able to flex those democratic muscles, those governance muscles, and engage them, and then bring other people into those folds? 

All in all, the cooperative economy is only as strong as the people who are practicing it. And we really need to educate and inform while at the same time using those skills that we have and those opportunities that we have in building the cooperative economy to make sure that we're giving access to everyone to the needs that they have, the basic needs that they have to find jobs, to create jobs, to be business owners in the aspect of worker cooperative, to have control of their housing, to have control of their financial institutions, et cetera. 

Kerala: That's so well said. At PixelSpoke, we talk about how we're learning to co-op. I kind of like using it as a verb because there are a lot of skill sets you have to develop that don't necessarily come intuitively for those of us who especially have worked at, you know, more traditional organizations. 

And it can be very challenging, but I mean, I love the name of your organization Frank Democracy at Work Institute because I feel like being part of a co-op has made me a better democratic citizen. I'm learning and practicing democracy every day even if I'm living in times when it feels under siege on a national level, I'm at least incorporating it into my day to day life. Yeah, Stacey, what are your thoughts on what a cooperative economy actually means?

Stacey: Yeah, I love it. Well, I don't have tons to add because I think Frank's definition is pretty comprehensive. But I do think of it as this sort of cooperative and shared ownership, sort of synonymous, and this idea of that we are sharing ownership of all things, all of our productive things in the community, businesses, housing, land, et cetera. And Frank and DAWI integrates the concept of democracy directly into that answer. And that's right. 

So when we look at employee ownership and shared ownership, that element of governance, that element of voice is absolutely key to what it's, yes, sharing in the financial aspects of ownership, but it's also that voice of governance in those institutions.

And I love what you said, Kerala because that's exactly what we do when we support businesses after they transition to employee ownership with a program we call Thrive. And that is really to teach people this voice piece. You have a voice and how do you use it? And many folks are not used to doing that. And we absolutely believe that the more worker-owners that we have out there, the stronger citizenry that we have because of what you're saying. You learn how to bring your voice forward. You learn how to insert it into these conversations in a way that is working towards collective good.

Kerala: Yep. So well said. 

Katie: Frank, I wanted to pivot back to you. I was really struck by your last answer. It reminded me a lot of the goals of our credit unions that we work with, especially around more access for more people to more financial products and the opportunity to build wealth, so comes as no surprise that you are on the board of a credit union. I know that you have some pretty in-depth consumer co-op experience. I'd love to just hear more.: Where do you see the synergies between consumer and worker co-ops? 

Frank: Well, I think that the first step is, again, reiterating that idea of ownership and democracy and governance. Karela, when you were following up on my last answer, talking about how, you know, you're learning to co-op is a thing in your company, it struck a memory in my mind about hearing how people who participate in participatory budgeting activities are more likely than to vote at the general election, for instance, right? 

They have found that they can exercise a voice. And so I think that that is something that consumer and worker co-ops both provide an opportunity for.
Now, in our community, particularly here in Syracuse, our credit union has financed our local grocery consumer cooperative, right? And many credit unions have not had the opportunity yet to finance a worker cooperative. And so I think that there is a learning curve for that in regards to how do the finances of a cooperative, how are they similar to each other, what are the differences between a worker and a consumer co-op? What are the needs for those different types of entities?

But to kind of wrap it all up, do they practice what we know as principle 6 from the 7 cooperative principles, which is cooperation among cooperatives. Are they helping each other? Are they engaging with each other? We don't want these things to be siloed. 

We don't want a worker cooperative to be in one bucket and a consumer cooperative to be in another bucket. We want them to learn and to teach to each other and have the ability to support each other as they go forward. Because I think that they're all working with the same mission and vision at some level.

Katie That's certainly something we've benefited a lot from at PixelSpoke, is that cooperation amongst cooperatives. And I would say particularly before we became a cooperative, we leaned so heavily on other cooperatives that were already established to learn more about their journey. What worked, what pitfalls did they run into that we might be able to avoid, and we were just so kind of awestruck by how we were embraced by the cooperative community. And that level of just mutual support is really profound. So we've been really thankful to be a part of the cooperative community. 

Kerala: I do wish we'd known about Project Equity when we were undergoing our transition, but we're definitely trying to spread the word now. 

Katie: Speaking of spreading the word, Stacey, I wanted to ask you, I know that a lot of your work is centered on wealth-building opportunities for working people and local economy. So as someone who is in the know about cooperatives, employee ownership as a succession plan for local businesses seems like such a no-brainer to me, but it's just not talked about very much.

I always think back to my MBA program, which I finished in 2020, so not that long ago. And we never talked about cooperatives as a model for running your business. It was never like part of the curriculum. And that really strikes me looking back. I'd love to just hear, you know, why do you think so many business owners aren't aware of this opportunity, and what unique hurdles do they face if they decide to go this route?

Stacey: Well, I mean, that's the multi-million dollar question. And we have what we call the silver tsunami crisis here. So we have a tsunami of business owners in their 60s and 70s who don't have an exit strategy because they're small entrepreneurs. Many of them started their businesses without ever thinking about how they would exit their business, right?
They just focused on growing their business, which they did. 

And there's an institutional issue here, just like you said. So we're working with a number of higher-end institutions to start to embed broad-based employee ownership in their core programs because if we aren't educating the next generation right now, we're just going to, like this will just be on repeat for every generation of business owners. 

So the other thing that we at Project Equity and many other organizations are looking at is small businesses surround themselves with an ecosystem of advisors. That includes lenders, that includes a CPA, an attorney, maybe a wealth planner, if you're in a position for that, right? There's this ecosystem of advisors. 

Those advisors never got educated. They don't know what broad-based employee ownership is. And in worst-case scenarios, a business owner goes to one of them and says, 
"Hey, my kids don't want my business. I don't know what to do.
I'm thinking about selling it to my employees."  And their advisor is like, 
"Well, that's a crazy idea. That's terrible. I've heard of so many bad things." 

So we're really working to stop that. We have a whole suite of online accredited education products to help educate that advisor class because they're really the first line and they're really the trusted advisors to these business owners and They don't know anything. So that needs to stop as well. 

So those are all really important levers that we feel when we talk about scaling employee ownership in this country. Scale is going to come when that whole ecosystem is familiar with the structures and the process and has some skills and experience to support these business owners so that if you've already launched your business and you're growing it and everything else, that you can get that advice. And working the other end, like you're saying, let's work with the next generation so that they are learning broad-based employee ownership from the get-go.

We also talked to incubators and we want folks inside of an incubator starting their business to already start thinking about what is your exit strategy. Great. Well, employee ownership should be on the list of potential exit strategies when you're ready. And employee ownership is a great tool for succession, as you mentioned, Katie, and increasingly we're using it for mid-career business owners as well and doing a partial sale of the equity so that you get the bump from employee engagement, productivity, retention. 

The employees, if they have a financial stake earlier on, are going to help you accelerate the growth of your business ahead of when you need to exit.
And you've already bookmarked the structure to sell the whole thing to them down the road at the right time. So we want to see it as a play earlier in the life cycle of these businesses and more often because there's so many benefits from it. It's not just a great succession strategy. It's an employee engagement and retention strategy. It's a growth strategy.

And I think there's another part to your question. Oh, the unique hurdles. It's really like having the ecosystem. And so finding the right partners on this journey. So yes, you can go to DAWI, you can go to Project Equity. There are many folks in the field now who can provide that support, but we need more. We need this advisor class fully educated and up to speed because that we need a strong ecosystem to support all of these owners.

Katie: I really like what you said about the ecosystem that really resonated with me as someone who's managing our finances and looking for tax accountants that are familiar with the cooperative model. And it's really a challenge to find folks and what a big opportunity for them as well. It just really feels like a win-win relationship. So yeah, I really like that piece in particular and it's a piece I hadn't thought about. 

Kerala: Yeah, and actually that segues perfectly to my next question, because speaking about the ecosystem, I'm curious how credit unions can play a role in that ecosystem. I think credit unions do a great job when it comes to cooperation among cooperatives with cooperating with each other. And Frank, you mentioned that you are credit unions supporting your local grocery co-op, which is awesome. It is happening, but I think it could happen at a much larger scale.

So, Stacey, I'm curious if you just get a little more specific about the needs employee-owned businesses have that really aren't getting met and that maybe credit unions could step in and fail. 

Stacey: Yeah, that's a great question. I love it. And I'm so excited for the audience of this podcast and getting folks at credit unions, like getting this on their radar and thinking about that. 

So I think about it twofold. One is they're there to provide service to their clients, to their customers, and some of those customers are small business owners. And those small business owners need to be able to go there and get advice and counsel. And so that is something that we want credit unions like other small business lenders and servicers to have this information so that you could provide that good solid information that counsel that advice. 

Then getting into the credit union business model, like any small business, an employee-owned small business needs financial products that are going to meet their needs over time. The first step in the process is helping to finance the sale of the equity from the owner to the employees. And we call that transition capital. 

So we have a lot of impact capital out there available for that. And Project Equity has the Employee Ownership Catalyst Fund. We often will bring other mainstream lenders into deals and co-lend alongside, so that mainstream lender can be de-risked a little bit and get familiar with the form, but we need more credit unions and more mainstream lenders in the transition capital space. We're going to talk a little bit about what some of the barriers and the challenges are to that.

But again, if you think about all the small business owners and all those businesses we need to transition, that's a lot of capital. And we can't just get it. We can't keep relying on the impact capital space to support all of that. We're going to have to work with credit unions, CDFIs, and other mainstream lenders to evolve their underwriting practices so that they can be in the space with us.

And then businesses need additional financial product, lines of credit, working capital for growth, et cetra et cetra. These are just mainstream financial products that small businesses need, all small businesses need. And when it's an employee-owned business, it's just the same. 

Kerala: That's so exciting to start thinking about ways that credit unions can get more involved with the space. I'm a big ideas person.
I love dreaming, I love problem-solving, strategizing, but I know there are folks in the credit union space who immediately go to, what are the regulations that would make that hard? There's a lot of regulations in this space. 

So Frank, As a Credit Union board member, you're probably more familiar with some of these regulatory hurdles or other challenges. So I'm just curious where you think credit unions might need to troubleshoot or problem-solve to be able to more effectively support worker-owned co-ops and employee-owned businesses.

Frank: Yeah, thank you. One of the most common refrains right now is the personal guarantee issue that comes along with lending and need for a capital provider, a lender such as a credit union, to be able to guarantee that loan in some way. It's an ongoing discussion. It's an ongoing problem that is uncovering a solution as we go. 

Some CDFIs already practice non-extractive lending in that they don't require guarantees from the businesses that they're working with in a conversion or post-conversion. They relate more to a personal relationship and an ongoing training and education issue. And I think that fits into what credit unions might engage with in regards to their small business lending is that at our credit union, we very much look at the personal touch, right? The personal communications. 

We have higher-than-average level of delinquencies, but a lower-than-average level of defaults because we work with folks to make sure that we can facilitate those needs. 

The other thing that folks have to consider is their capital pools and their capital availability. And it's not really a regulatory issue, but I think it's an important issue because as we, DAWI, Project Equity, others continue to grow the field, bring awareness, bring attention, and bring the possibility of worker ownership to the broader community, we need to, on the parallel, continue to facilitate increased capital availability. 
And where is that going to come from? 

Well, there's lots of potentials. Today, as we speak, we see that a lot of federal funding is being pulled back. And so we can't really rely on that. I just got out of a call before we were talking here today with a group from CDFA, the Community Development Finance Association, about SSBCI, the State Small Business Credit Initiative, and what the expectations are for those federal dollars to be usable. The outlook is not good as far as those kind of federal funds. 

So one thing we're working on right now is relationships with philanthropy for your credit union. We have an example of that here in Syracuse. One of our local foundations, the Central New York Community Foundation, did an impact investment with our credit union. A secondary capital loan, a very low interest, very long term that we can use as capital to put money into lending for our business community, for example. 

And so money will be coming from other places that you may not have expected it to come from in the past, all with the grand vision of increasing membership, right? Increasing member assets into the credit union so that that capital is there in that regard. 

And then the other thing that I want to mention is that we've talked about how the awareness is not there and it's not being taught and where do the answers come from. Just because a credit union exists as a cooperative doesn't mean that being a cooperative at the top of mind and how they might relate to other cooperative businesses.

And so, as Stacey mentioned earlier, a lot of organizations are providing that frontline training. At DAWI, we have something called conversion guides. We're able to provide very similar training to get that baseline knowledge to a cohort. It could be the tellers, the lending officers at a credit union.They can all be on the same page and understand those initial steps that they might need to take and be more versed when they're talking to the regulatory agencies as well.

If somebody is coming in for their federal audit, they might see a new loan on a book to a worker cooperative, right? And want to know a little bit more about that. How did this deal work? And by increasing the education and how well-versed the credit union employees are on the cooperative model, It's just a better overall conversation that we had.

Kerala: Yeah, I so hear you on that. And I feel like there's this spectrum within the credit union movement of how strongly different credit unions identify with the cooperative model. There are some who have dot co-op in their domain names and talk about being financial cooperatives. And then some that very much want to look and act like a bank. And because they understand awareness around credit unions is kind of low in the general population. And they just want people to trust them like they might trust a bank. 

So I understand the different approaches, but I think educating starting with the credit union employees around what does it mean to be a cooperative, how do we talk about this with our members is so important. 

Katie: So I'd love to take a step back and ask you both, if someone was listening to this podcast right now and it has become inspired to explore options for supporting employee-owned businesses in their area, where might they start? Stacy, can we start with you?

Stacey: Sure. Well, I'll do a shameless plug, project-equity.org is a wealth of information. We talk to about 200 business owners individually a year and just talk about what employee ownership is, talk about where they are on their journey, and help them navigate forward.

We are agnostic on form of broad-based ownership. We talk a lot about cooperatives, but there are other forms of employee ownership, ESOPs, employee ownership trust (EOT). We can talk about all of them. So that's certainly one  way. 

There's also employeeownershipequals.com is another great source. That's a national resource that's just, again, has general information, videos, and resource guides, and things like that. That's another great place to go.

And as I mentioned, if you're an advisor, if you're a small business advisor of any ilk, we have accredited learning products that you can go and take those products and learn more so that you can start to talk youself about these things and learn more. So any pathway forward to starting on that journey and just demystifying this space for yourself so that you can be support to your constituents, that's the best thing to do. 

Katie: Right. And how about you, Frank?

Frank: We mentioned ecosystems earlier, and I would say, have you looked in your ecosystem first? Have you looked yet? Because if you haven't looked for actors in the solidarity economy in the cooperative movement, they may be there and you just haven't found them yet. You just haven't been exposed to them yet. So start looking in your local ecosystem first.

Secondly, at DAWI, we operate a website called becomingemployeeowned.org. You can go there to see a lot of stories of successful conversions from across the country. You can also sign up for a free 30-minute intake interview with me and get a little bit more details about where you need to go, whether you're a lender or a small business. And I think that I want to say there are people out there, groups such as DAWI and Project Equity can make sure that you're connecting with those groups and with those resources.

DAWI acts as the backbone organization for something called the Workers to Owners Collaborative. We're a group of 45 member organizations and individuals across the country shaped from developers, nonprofits, financial institutions, CDFIs, professional service providers like legal services, and learning members. So if somebody wants to get into the field of worker cooperative lending, for instance, they're welcome to join our group, have a seat at the table, learn as they go from these other experts. Some of them have been doing it for decades. 

Katie: That's great. And I'll add one more. You know, I mentioned earlier how much we learn from other cooperatives as part of our journey. So I also want to offer up PixelSpoke. If listeners are curious to learn more about our journey and what we've learned along the way, come to our website, drop us a line and we'd be more than happy to connect with you too. 

Frank: Yeah, I think it's great to have that business-to-business connection or business-to-ecosystem connection. I'll plug Jay Ward from Ward Lumber here in upstate New York who converted his family-owned lumber and hardware company to a worker cooperative a couple years back and now is the biggest champion of cooperatives and like gets calls from everyone to come out and speak about it and he does it. He goes out and he shares his story. 

Katie: That's so great.

Stacey: Well and you know your former owner, Cameron Madill, does the same. I mean he's just an incredible champion for the cooperative model and that owner-to-owner conversation is so important at the right stage.

Katie: Absolutely. Great. Well, I'd love to close with some rapid-fire questions for each of you. So my first question is, if you could wave a wand and change one thing, what would it be? 
Frank, let's start with you on this one.

Frank: Speaking back to what I mentioned earlier, just making sure everybody has their bare essentials met. If you're hungry, if you're cold, if you can't get through the snow to work, you're not going to be very valuable to practicing democracy with your fellow mates. So let's get everybody covered. 

Katie: Great. How about you, Stacey?

Stacey: Hard to beat that one actually, I would say that everyone has a pathway to equity in something. 

Katie: All right, if you could have dinner with one historical person, who would it be? And I'm gonna start with you this time, Stacey. 

Stacey: I think I would say Eleanor Roosevelt.

Katie: Oh, great. And how about you, Frank?

Frank: I would say W.E.B. Debois, who had a lot of experience in the cooperative economy and just did so much with the limitations and cultural aspects of the time. 

Katie: All right. If you had a different career, what would you be doing? Frank, how about you first? 

Frank: So I was on a track to a different career before this when I was in natural resources management and studied forestry and I would probably be out in the forest somewhere.

Katie: Sounds pretty good. How about you Stacey?

Stacey: Well, I too have an unrequited career and mine was pointed at urban planning. 

Katie: Cool. Very cool. All right, last question. What is your life slogan? And Stacey, we'll start with you this time.

Stacey: It's trite, but work hard, play hard. Gotta have balance.

Katie:  Absolutely. Yep. And how about you, Frank?

Frank: I say no gimmicks. Give it to me straight. 

Kerala: Spoken like a true East Coaster. I love it.

All right. Let's do our final take. So as a reminder, our big question today was how can credit unions more broadly support a cooperative economy and what specific needs can they address for co-ops in their communities. So I know we've been answering this in some form or fashion throughout most of this podcast but in just a sentence or two, I'd love for each of you to summarize your thoughts. And let's start with you, Stacey.

Stacey: Yeah, I would say get educated and understand how you can support your compliance and grow your service base, engaging through employee ownership and being open to looking at new models of underwriting that are enabling these forms of ownership. 

Kerala I love it. Do you have anything to add to that, Frank? 

Frank: The note that I was making here was underwriting, right? Learn about cooperative underwriting as a financial institution because it is slightly different. And if you don't know that first piece, you're going to sort of get stuck up along the way. 

Kerala: Well, thank you so much. We will absolutely continue to have this conversation. I would love to keep exploring what credit unions and our network might be able to help get connected to some co-ops in their community and help meet their needs. So this is just the beginning. But you guys also mentioned a lot of great resources and websites. I will be listing those in our show notes when we release the podcast and Frank and Stacey, thank you so much for joining us. 

Stacey: Thank you. 

Frank: Thank you. Had a blast.

Katie: Thank you guys. It's been a pleasure.

Kerala: All right. Well, that was an absolutely fascinating conversation. I feel like I could have continued that for a few hours, but let's move on now to our key takeaways.

Number 1, I would just say that cooperative ownership is so often the missing piece. So whether we're talking about support for small businesses, whether we're talking about the nonprofit landscape, or talking about corporate social responsibility, what's rarely a part of these discussions is pursuing equity through business ownership. I even think there's a lot of credit union members out there who aren't really aware that they own a small piece of their credit union, or they don't really know what that means.

And when it comes to employee ownership, I just love the point Stacey brought up about how not everyone will own a home in their lifetime, but almost everyone will work at some point in their lives, and wouldn't it be powerful if more of us had access to ownership through our work? 

And that brings me to my second takeaway, which is how important it is to expand the cooperative ecosystem. Yes, I would love to see us expand the number of co-ops, but that also means expanding the network of support that they rely on to grow and to thrive. And this is where there's a huge opportunity for credit unions to step in and assess unmet financial needs in the cooperative landscape. I'm really hoping this conversation will inspire some credit unions out there to take the leap. 

And lastly, one thing I just really want to emphasize and leave you with is that the cooperative economy is not just about ownership, which is important, but it's also about democracy. And this is so relevant right now. We're living in a time when our own democracy feels constantly under siege, kind of on the brink. And it's so important to think about opportunities to practice democracy in our day-to-day lives. Even if you vote, which can be a big if, for a lot of Americans, democracy just means, you know, showing up at the ballot box every 4 years.

Frank, meanwhile, is on his credit union board. He has been for 15 years.
That is democracy in action. And I show up to work every day as a marketing director, yes, a co-owner, yes, and a board member. And that means that I'm not just learning new marketing skills or you know earning dividends both of which I enjoy, but I'm also learning how to make decisions democratically for the common good. Credit unions and other co-ops are just essential to the foundation of democracy, and especially right now, let's not lose sight of that.

Alright, 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, an employee-owned cooperative, we believe that business can and should be a force for good. 

You can learn more and check out our work at our newly redesigned website, pixelspoke.coop. That's pixelspoke.coop. 

Until the next time, I wish you the best of luck in making your credit union remarkable.