ORNL FCU 75 Years

OUR OWN WORDS We used the Community Reinvestment Act—which encouraged financial institutions to help meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities. Coincidentally, I’d jointly written a paper on this Act while teaching, so I had the benefit of knowing the criteria. We had this idea we could serve a larger community, a geographic area that might possibly be considered a close-knit group of people that were underserved or had limited financial services available to them. The board believed there was an opportunity to coalesce these multiple 2,500 or so groups into a community charter that would be centered on Knoxville. So we began preparing a new charter. We all worked on the data. It took a while, but we were able to demonstrate common utility, transportation, work, education, and other links. We used our own membership data showing how many people in the surrounding counties were commuting into the core around Knoxville to work and do business with us. We showed the census data that had just come out, with numbers that indicated an underserved community in need of financial services. I wrote it in the late hours of the night on my teenage daughter’s Macintosh computer, and our marketing team prepared a presentation and DVD. When the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) received it, they called us and said: “THIS is what a community charter needs to look like!” The effort was well worth it when they approved our new charter. JOHN McKITTRICK Former ORNL FCU President

56 | 75 YEARS ORNL FEDERAL CREDIT UNION