Give 1% to honor the woman who gave 100% to credit unions

Louise Herring is known as the "Mother of Credit Unions" because of the many things she did for the movement in her lifetime:

• She was the youngest attendee (age 24) to attend the Estes Park, Colorado meeting in 1934.
• Two years later she founded KEMBA, Cincinnati Police and Cincinnati Teachers Credit Unions (in her lifetime she founded over 500 credit unions)
• She founded the Ohio Credit Union League and was thei first managing director and helped to organize the Michigan and Kentucky Leagues.
• She founded the National Deposit Guaranty Corporation (which is now ASI)

The CUDNC Foundation is a 501c3 corporation. All donations are tax deductible.

Why 1%?

We borrowed this idea from the Italian Cooperative Model. They passed a law that 3 percent of the net profits of all cooperatives must fund future cooperative development. We decided that one percent is easier math, and should be an amount that most companies, credit unions, and CUSOs could afford. The accumulative effort of these donations will have a significant impact on the future of the financial cooperative movement in the US by providing much needed capital to gain a new charter.

Suggested donation:

1% of net earnings or

1% of non-interest income or

1% of interest income or get creative

(Annual, one quarter, one month - dealer’s choice) What would Ed Filene do?

Raising capital for new charters

In the last three years only 8 charters have been granted. Of those, seven were black-led and the other Native American. Most new charters will never see the light of day because they are not able to raise adequate capital. We have been working closely with new charters, the NCUA, and various organizations that have provided "in kind" and greatly discounted service donations to drive the capital requirement down.

There is no minimum capital requirement for a de novo, it is completely dependent upon their business plan. But what we do know is that a credit union that wants to start with basic services, or what we like to call the "cigar box" credit union, that they can usually achieve that with $100,000.00 in capital. Capital is 100% a donation. It is not an investment and will not be repaid.

New credit unions are vital to the health and viability of the movement. It's getting harder to defend our tax exempt status with the credit union difference. Think of this as the NEW credit union difference story!

Provisional Charter Program through the NCUA