By Sarah McNeil
This is an imagined address from Edward Filene on cooperation, consolidation, and the future of credit unions.
First, a note on why this was written.
I often wonder what Edward A. Filene and other early credit union leaders would say if they were assessing the movement today. Not in abstract terms, but in response to the very real pressures facing small, mission-driven credit unions: consolidation framed as inevitability, cooperation treated as optional, and purpose increasingly subordinated to scale.
Some time ago, out of curiosity and during a period of professional fatigue, I asked an AI system to help draft an imagined address in Filene’s voice. The intent was not novelty, nor authorship substitution, but perspective. I wanted to see whether placing today’s conditions alongside Filene’s documented philosophy might surface questions we have stopped asking.
The result was sharper and more honest than I expected, and I found myself returning to it during moments when the work felt uphill. It became a private point of reference. A reminder of what this movement was designed to stand for, and why the work still matters.
‘Outpouring of Response’
Months later, a colleague, who was also worn down by the pace at which healthy small credit unions are disappearing through consolidation, remarked, “I wonder what Ed Filene would say if he could see what our movement looks like today.” I shared the piece with her, hoping it might offer the same clarity and resolve it had offered me.
She found it powerful and we both began sharing it more broadly. Others did the same. What followed was an outpouring of responses from leaders across the movement, many describing a renewed sense of inspiration, as though Filene’s ideas had been momentarily brought back into the present and allowed to speak again to current conditions.
The piece that follows is an imagined address, written in a historically grounded voice, drawing directly from Filene’s published speeches and writings. It is not presented as something Filene said, but as a rhetorical device. One meant to challenge contemporary assumptions by re-examining founding intent.
An AI Assist With Reflections on Purpose
Artificial intelligence was used as a drafting and reflection tool, particularly in shaping tone and structure. The interpretation, emphasis, and conclusions are my own. The responsibility for how Filene’s ideas are applied to present-day conditions rests entirely with me.
References to tax status in the essay are not arguments for or against exemption, but reflections on whether cooperative systems are fulfilling the purpose that justifies it. The question raised is not whether credit unions deserve their tax status, but whether we are investing sufficiently in the cooperative infrastructure that gives that status meaning.
What Progress Requires
These observations are not offered as an effort to divide the movement or to cast judgment on institutions navigating growth, scale, or competitive pressure. They are offered in the belief that progress requires shared ground and shared responsibility. Filene’s own words and philosophy provide a way to surface hard questions without caricature. They encourage us to examine system design together, rather than positioning one another as adversaries.
This essay has been circulated organically among credit union leaders because it articulates a tension many quietly feel: that consolidation may not be a law of nature, but a signal that we have allowed cooperative infrastructure to weaken. Whether readers agree or disagree, the response suggests that this is a conversation the movement is ready, and perhaps overdue, to have.
What We Built and What You Have Allowed It to Become
An imagined address from Edward A Filene on cooperation, consolidation, and the future of credit unions.
I did not help create credit unions so that a few institutions might become large.
I helped create them so that no family would ever again be helpless in the face of money.
That distinction matters, because somewhere along the way you confused scale with success, growthwith good, and survival of institutions with service to people.
The founders of this movement—Roy Bergengren, Alphonse Desjardins, and those who worked with us—were not naïve idealists. We were practical realists. We had seen capitalism work. We had also seen it abandon millions of ordinary people. We knew charity would never be enough. We knew government could not do everything, so we designed something more dangerous and more powerful: An economic counter-system owned by the people it served.
What Credit Unions Are Not
Credit unions were never meant to be small banks with friendly slogans. They were meant to be astructural correction to capitalism.
You were supposed to compete with banks — yes — but more importantly, you were supposed to discipline the financial system by proving that finance could be organized for people instead of profit.
Instead, much of the movement now behaves as though its highest goal is to become indistinguishable from the institutions it was built to reform.
You celebrate billion-dollar balance sheets.
You reward executives for asset growth.
You applaud mergers as “strategic.”
But let me be very clear: When one cooperative consumes another, the cooperative system has failed.
In a healthy cooperative system, struggling institutions do not disappear, they are absorbed into shared systems of support.
In your system, they are sold — politely, with paperwork — but sold, nonetheless. That is not cooperation. That is market logic wearing a cooperative costume.
You Were Warned
We warned you about this.
I wrote that consumer cooperatives would either become instruments of economic democracy or servants of concentrated wealth. There is no middle path. Institutions drift. Systems decay. Power centralizes unless deliberately constrained.
And you removed the constraints.
You built trade associations that advocate more for the freedom of large institutions than for the survival of small ones.
You built leagues that provide services to whoever can pay, not whoever most needs them.
You built technology systems that reward scale instead of shared ownership.
Then you stand astonished when small credit unions are told they are “no longer viable.”
No. They are no longer convenient. There is a difference.
The cooperative movement was never meant to be efficient at the cost of being just. It was meant to be just even when inefficient. Because justice is the point.
You now speak of consolidation as inevitable. That is a confession. It means you have accepted the premise that the market, rather than the cooperative system, decides who deserves to exist. That is not what we built.
We built credit unions precisely so that markets would not get the final word. We believed in shared back-offices, shared liquidity, shared risk, shared governance — what today you might call “infrastructure.” But we called it something simpler: Mutual responsibility.
Moral Abdication
When one cooperative fails, the system should feel it.
When one community loses its credit union, the system should answer for it. Instead, you treat each failure as an isolated event and each merger as a success story.
That is not realism. That is moral abdication.
Let me say this in the clearest terms I know: If your cooperative system cannot keep small, well-run institutions alive, then it is not a cooperative system. It is a market with a tax exemption.
The tragedy is not that some credit unions grow large. The tragedy is that the movement no longer grows together.
You have confused independence with isolation.
You have confused strength with size.
You have confused survival with victory.
And worst of all, you have forgotten that credit unions were not built to win a market share war. They were built to change the rules of the game.
If you want to honor the founders, do not quote us; rebuild the infrastructure of cooperation.
Share risk. Share systems. Share power.
Make mergers unnecessary again.
Otherwise, do not pretend that what remains is a movement. It is simply finance that forgot why it was forgiven.
Note: A video of this address can be viewed here.
Sarah McNeil is CEO of United Trades Federal Credit Union in Oregon. She serves on the board of the Endangered Small Credit Union Defense (ESCUD) and focuses on cooperative system design, small credit union sustainability, and the role of shared infrastructure in preserving local ownership and mission. She can be reached at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.
Author’s Note on Sources
This essay draws on the published writings, speeches, and economic philosophy of Edward A. Filene, including his work on cooperation as a structural necessity rather than a voluntary ethic. Contemporary language and examples are used to translate those ideas into present-day conditions. Any interpretation or synthesis reflects the author’s judgment, not a claim of historical quotation.
