By Sarah Snell Cooke, Principal, Cooke Consulting Solutions

Credit union membership is not representative of the overall U.S. population. Some will say we need to do a better job. Some will say it doesn’t matter because they know their members and skin color/sex/sexual preference doesn’t matter in financial service demands. Others are fired up and ready to take action.

“I don’t think credit union membership in the U.S. looks like America. It continues to be the case,” NASCUS President/CEO Lucy Ito said during a Feb. 25 Underground Collision panel on the topic. “The second thing that ticks me off is in our credit union marketing, we continue to talk to people who already belong to credit unions instead of people who don’t.”

Being Asian, she explained and having worked in credit unions for 30 years, she wishes more Asian-Americans knew about credit unions. “Why aren’t we reaching them? I get frustrated that my fellow Asian-Americans aren’t aware.”

Certainly, there are some credit unions that understand the concern and are acting. Ito pointed out that San Diego County CU was celebrating the Lunar New Year, the Year of the Dog, in its marketing.

Stand up with the Underground Community and click here sign up to receive our newsletter.

Along those same lines, Element FCU CEO Linda Bodie marches in gay pride parades in her home state of West Virginia, which has some areas that are more accepting than outsiders might think. “Charleston, West Virginia is a gay mecca—not.  When I started in credit unions, I was 30 and I was way gay before I was a credit union activist. As a small credit union CEO in West Virginia, I am in this foreign land. They are all white. The men run the big credit unions, and the women run all the small credit unions.”

Now, after 20 years in credit unions and attending conferences over that time, the crowds look no different. “I finally took some baby steps to do something ourselves. We became very involved with our gay population. We made up a t-shirt in 2010 that that we distributed at the gay pride parade which read, ‘Coming Out is Easy Compared to Dealing with Your Bank.’ It’s probably even truer now.”

Credit unions must create products and services that relate to different types of people to make them feel accepted “when during their entire lives they have been locked out of the system,” Bodie explained. “The ‘gay agenda’ is people want to feel loved, like everyone else. The thing that pisses me off is people say if you are for something, then you are against something else.  The point is it matters to our entire population, not just our staff, boards, CEOs—it matters all over. The gay-dar thing is real, and I haven’t been pinging much lately (within the credit union community).”

Those in the majority also have the responsibility to lend their influence to affect fair representation. –Stacey Walker

The situation isn’t any better across the pond either. Police CU (UK) CEO Paul Norgrove said a key fact in the lack of diversity is antipathy toward board recruitment. In 2014, credit unions in the U.K. launched a new program to develop your credit union professionals. “I heard one member of the trade association say under his breath, ‘What do these people know about credit unions? I remember thinking, 'We may not know how to run credit unions, but we do know what not to do.'”

When credit unions need board members, they typically tap their buddies, Norgrove observed. Then, he continued, “you end up with a board that all looks the same–45-60, white, male. If you have hair, it’s gray.”

“The credit union is not yours, board members. It’s not your legacy. It doesn’t belong to you,” Norgrove emphasized.

A variety of skills and backgrounds are necessary to maintain credit unions’ importance in the financial services market, in local communities and around the world. “The movement is only sustainable if it is diverse,” Norgrove said. “Ease off on the tokenism and the next time you look in the mirror, and ask are you mad or are you making a difference? And if you aren’t, just leave. It’s the only way to be relevant to our members.”

Stand up with the Underground Community and click here sign up to receive our newsletter.

But making a global change is overwhelming so it all starts with boots on the ground in individual credit unions. In addition to board members, credit unions must figure out what to do to plug a more diverse set of people into upwardly mobile career paths and on the boards.

“When I started it was all about how to get Gen X. Now it’s how to get millennials,” Stacey Walker, a board member at XCEL FCU, explained. “There needs to be an individual commitment level. Is your credit union committed to diversity? Do you have staff on board responsible for overseeing diversity initiatives?”

She added that credit unions reap what they sow. “I think we also need to get to the source of what we believe. There are people on boards who will throw out seeds of doubt. I heard one person recently say, ‘Young people don’t want to volunteer; they don’t care to volunteer.’ I was appalled. I thought to myself, ‘I joined the credit union (board) 13 years ago. If you don’t think young people want to get involved, what do you think about my level of engagement and interest?’ Their actions reflect their beliefs, whether it’s true or not. They recruit people who look like them. It’s not about checking off a box. It’s about finding someone who is qualified.”

Walker concurred with the other panelists regarding the industry’s lack of action. “What irritates me about diversity is that we talk a lot about diversity and we talk and talk and talk. But we don’t do much more than talk. The level of our actions doesn’t match how much we talk about diversity.”

They are all white (CU CEOs in West Virginia). The men run the big credit unions, and the women run all the small credit unions. —Linda Bodie

During the Q&A, one attendee said he had a discussion recently with his credit union’s CEO who is gay, and he was asked about participating in a local gay parade. The CEO responded, ‘Do you think my board would actually let me do that?’ I think that this is so uncomfortable in credit unions. Are we reaching out to other minorities? I think we need to ask ourselves, are we really walking the walk or are we just talking the talk?”

Brandi Stankovic, senior vice president at CU Solutions Group and Mitchell, Stankovic & Associates partner, pointed out that we need to be inclusive of everyone, including those in power. “When we complain about the old white man, is it fair to that person? What did they do to merit the negative connotation?” she questioned pointedly.

Walker added, that those in the majority also have the responsibility to lend their influence to affect fair representation.