Yes, We Share a Last Name, But This is What We Must Share First

By Ed Speed

The recent (October 27^th) CU Daily lead story, “We Share a Last Name,” described the CEOs of the nation’s largest credit unions discussing mission, staff engagement, community outreach and giving back.

Their comments were competent, polished, and sincere, as befits these amazing professionals. But for all the talk of initiatives and outreach, one thing was conspicuously absent: the soul of the movement.

We Talk a Lot About How. We Have Forgotten Why.

The article offered an impressive list of programs: financial-education hubs, employee-wellness initiatives, community-partnership grants. These are admirable. Yet they describe the how, not the why.

Our founders did not set out to create efficient financial institutions; they set out to repair the moral fabric of local life. They believed that finance could serve mercy, that neighbor could be trusted with neighbor’s money. Their ledgers were acts of faith, moral documents written in numbers.

When today’s conversations stay at the level of operational excellence, even if it is community outreach, we risk confusing vitality with volume. A credit-union movement defined only by what it does will eventually forget what it means.

Leadership Without Formation Becomes Management

The executives quoted in the article are capable, articulate, and clearly devoted.  A movement that began as a moral experiment in trust now finds itself competing in a market obsessed with scale. If we form leaders only in management, we will get management. To form movement leaders, we must recover moral imagination – the ability to see a balance sheet as a story of trust, not merely a measure of performance 

In reading the article, I sensed that the moderator’s questions themselves led inevitably to how rather than why. How do you educate staff? How do you give back? How do you manage growth? Each question invited technique and process, but not purpose. That framing all but guaranteed practical, utilitarian answers instead of prophetic ones.

Could Have Been Any Conversation

The result was a conversation that could have taken place in any number of well-meaning enterprises such as major universities, healthcare systems, foundations, or insurance companies. Everyone today speaks easily of “mission,” “engagement,” and “community impact.” These are good words, but they are not sacred words. What I could not find were the words that once defined us: calling and vocation.

When the best and brightest of credit-union leadership begins to sound indistinguishable from that of a university development office or a hospital foundation, something vital has been lost. We have adopted the vocabulary of success but forgotten the language of stewardship. 

Our movement’s strength has never been in operational fluency; it has been in moral clarity.

Mission Drifts When It Is Measured Only in Metrics

Throughout the article, success is described through more: more branches, more members, more partnerships. These are healthy signs, but they cannot be the heartbeat.

When mission becomes metric, we risk mistaking momentum for meaning. A movement’s health cannot be read in financial ratios alone. The true measure of cooperative success is the trust it generates, the dignity it protects, and the conscience it awakens.

One CEO said, “Trust is the foundation.” True—but trust is not a strategy; it is a covenant. It binds us to the people we serve and to one another. Trust grows not from branding but from moral consistency: keeping promises, admitting mistakes, and acting always for the member’s good. Bill Cheney, whom I have admired deeply since our days over three decades ago at competing credit unions in San Antonio, gets it. 

A Plea: Imagine If

The great credit unions of our time, those with billions in assets and national reach have the resources, credibility, and talent to lead a renewal that our movement desperately needs. I implore them to help.

Imagine if the largest credit unions in the country sponsored annual formation retreats for small-CU boards and managers and future leaders, spaces not for ALM, liquidity, fintech or  merger strategy, but for honest reflection on vocation, virtue, and the cooperative vision.  

Instead of PowerPoints and dashboards, imagine conversations about what it means to be a trustee of other people’s hopes, not merely their deposits. Picture sessions on the virtue of prudence, the discipline of transparency, and the habit of gratitude. Imagine honest discussions of humility, succession, and especially the quiet danger of ambition unmoored from service. Picture time set aside not to plan the next quarter but to re-examine the purpose of the institution itself.

Professional development in the cooperative tradition should not mimic corporate leadership seminars; it should resemble spiritual direction. A retreat, not a workshop. A place to recover the grammar of conscience before the syntax of strategy. 

The True Questions

The true curriculum of cooperation would begin not with market data, but with moral questions, questions that have shaped every enduring vocation for the true believers of our movement:

• What kind of credit union person must I become to be worthy of others’ trust?
• How do we form movement leaders who can be faithful without applause, decisive without arrogance, and prosperous without pride?
• How do we make decisions that bless, not just impress?
• What are the sacred scriptures of the movement? 

These are not management questions; they are moral ones. And they cannot be answered by vendors, consultants or dashboards. They require silence, discernment, and the humility to admit that we are stewards of something larger than ourselves.   It requires those of us who believe to be vulnerable enough to share. 

If the largest credit unions took up this work, funding and hosting formation retreats, mentoring smaller institutions, teaching the spiritual discipline of cooperative leadership, they could change the trajectory of the entire movement, if not actually redeem it. That is how renewal begins: not with another data platform, consultant, product or growth initiative, but with conversion.  (The hard task will be breaking the proprietary stranglehold the trades have on small credit union education and development, which is so heavily vendor-driven and funded.)

Conversion of hearts, habits, and imagination. Renewal begins when conscience again becomes the primary competency of leadership, when the formation of character once more takes precedence over the construction of scale.

A Movement or an Industry?

The powerful CEOs in We Share a Last Name spoke with rightfully earned pride about helping their peers and communities. Yet there remains an unspoken question beneath their words: Are we still a movement, or have we become an industry with a fond memory of its moral youth?

Industries compete. Movements convert. Industries scale efficiency; movements cultivate conscience. Industries are judged by what they produce; movements by what they preserve: trust, dignity, belonging.

If we lose the language of vocation, we will soon lose the sense of calling. Without calling, there is no moral anchor, only market share.

A Call to Re-Evangelize

What the article unintentionally reveals is how badly we need to re-evangelize ourselves. Not in a religious sense, but in a moral one. We must recover our first love: the conviction that money can be made to serve mercy, that business can build community, that leadership is stewardship.

Re-evangelization begins when we:

1. Re-center on purpose—ask whether our founders would recognize their mission in us today.
2. Invest in formation, not flattery—develop people who can replace us and be proud when they do.
3. Measure what matters—member outcomes, community trust, and transparency.
4. Honor conscience as much as competence—every product and partnership should answer, “Is this good for the member?”
5. Model humility—remember that the highest title in our movement is still “member.”

Keeping the Faith

We do, indeed, share a last name. But we must also share a first principle: that finance exists for service, not self. The moral imagination that birthed this movement can still redeem it, if we are brave enough to remember.

Our founders built something that was never meant to compete merely on rates, but to stand as a testimony to human decency in commerce. To reclaim that heritage is not nostalgia; it is necessity.

This I do know from years of the study of religious belief systems, if  we will teach such as this, we will find ourselves renewed in return.

The question before us is simple: Will we settle for being a successful industry or strive again to be a faithful movement?   When can we start? 

Edward Speed is the retired CEO of a multi-billion-dollar credit union and holds a master’s degree in theology. These days, he spends his time serving food, washing dishes, and sweeping floors at a Catholic Worker House, helping homeless senior citizens. email: [email protected]