Had an interesting conversation about the general goverance collapse in US #creditunions over the past few decades, and stumbled upon an additional factor, beyond the shift in locus of control to regulators and the weakening of the #CommonBond, that I'd not considered before.
Namely, how the tax-exemption disincentivizes credit unions from allocating surplus as patronage, and thereby makes it so the equity stake of members is never more than a token amount.
@nev @rbenjamin @clhendricksbc This conversation is intimately connected to the strategic conversation around scaling and #commonbond we've been having on Loomio: https://www.loomio.org/d/Zx2RDNAl/the-common-bond-scaling-strategy-of-social-coop-
In practice, while we accept almost all of the applications we receive, having interest in #coops as a common bond has been useful as a screen that has allowed us to grow at a sustainable rate while minimizing the labor overhead of being an open registration instance...
@Matt_Noyes @BeechMtn I guess I'm not sold yet on the long-term relative viability of general purpose vs. community-specific instances. Kinda a re-tread of the narrow vs. wide #commonbond debate in #creditunions, in a way... ;)
Court ruling on US #creditunion #fieldofmembership boundaries: https://www.cuinsight.com/federal-judge-strikes-part-ncua-field-membership-rule.html
A federal judge on Thursday struck down two sections of the NCUA’s new field-of-membership rule, saying that the sections violate the Federal Credit Union Act. But in a mixed ruling in the suit filed by the American Bankers Association, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich said that the remainder of the rule conforms to federal law. …
The first central credit unions in the US came into being because board members of #CreditUnions were not allowed to receive loans from the credit unions they were elected to oversea. (#conflictofinterest)
So credit unions were formed at the state level for which the #CommonBond was being on a #CreditUnion board or committee. They later became hubs for shared services and mutual deposit insurance, eclipsing their founding purpose.
@GuerillaOntologist @tbeckett @ElizabethMYLaBerge
This was the original purpose of the #commonbond, before credit scores were a thing:
http://cuhistory.blogspot.com/2013/06/1951-quote-on-purpose-of-credit-union.html
One thing it is very useful for is the start-up of #coops, in that it can be the recipient of a #SocialCapital subsidy from its founding community, which makes trust and mutual accountability more robust, etc.
In a way, #SocialCoop is bootstrapping off of this dynamic by having a bit of a meta-#CommonBond in that we're a #coop for people interested in co-ops, so many of us knew each other from various wings of the #coop movement (#platformcoop, #buytwitter, #workercoops, etc.)
If anyone is interested in geeking really hard on #creditunion #history, this is the master's thesis I wrote in 2011...
#CommonBond #creditunions #FieldOfMembership #coopfinance
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwXj8Bi337VzVm9FdURuRUREbzQ/view?usp=sharing
Matt Cropp 🌲🌲