ANAHEIM, Calif.–It won’t be the bankers or reg burden that could be the ultimate demise of credit unions—it will be apathy and “group think,” one person is cautioning.
“We don’t like to think of ourselves as apathetic,” said Randy Karnes, CEO of the Grand Rapids, Mich.-based CUSO CU*Answers, in remarks to NACUSO’s annual meeting here. “The apathy toward the things that are going on, including this (NCUSIF) refund that is kind of a joke and the actual justification of stealing that money, goes unsaid, because we go along to get along. We are apathetic toward the souls of owners.”
Karnes spoke to NACUSO as part of a co-presentation with Sue Mitchell of Mitchell, Stankovic & Associates that broadly reviewed the effort behind the “Underground Collision” movement within credit unions that seeks to bring to the forefront discussion of issues not typically discussed.
As an example, Karnes recalled the practice of former NCUA Chairman and Patelco Credit Union CEO Ed Callahan who would attend CUNA’s Governmental Affairs Conference and never go into any of the meeting sessions.
“He would sit out front and ask, ‘What are they not talking about in there that we ought to be talking about out here?’ How do we talk about things that are going to move the ball?” asked Karnes. “At a lot of conferences we come to, we come together to come together. We come to capitulate to group think. We come to think about how to fit in, and things are left unsaid. When we leave things unsaid then we miss the entire point of coming together at all. I know they can be controversial, but when do we ever get anything out of it when group think overwhelms us and we just go along to get along?”
Returning to the core issue of credit union owners and ownership, an issue on which Karnes has written and spoken passionately, he continued, “Ownership and the power of ownership is a difficult thing to grasp. We’re a CUSO, and I have about 127 credit union owners who pay $300,000 for 200 shares, and those are worth less than $150,000. Those people care about being owners. Most important, we have forgotten that cooperative owners, consumer-owners, are important to our future. We believe that they just care about being consumers and we watch that get worse and worse every year. A lot of times we hear people say, ‘Consumers don’t care,’ and then they have a merger vote and no one shows up to save the organization. Or they are screwed by the examiner, and nobody shows up to say, ‘I don’t want to be screwed by the government.’ And the next thing the CEO is standing in a room where there isn’t a soul of an owner.”
“Cooperatives,” Karnes reminded the meeting, “are started by consumer-owners. Owners are the pioneering spirit and the last safeguard to you going out of business. We can no longer leave conferences and say I wish we had talked about what was left unsaid.”