A Year in Review: State of the (DE) Union

It’s been a year since I came aboard the National Credit Union Foundation to lead the DE program. I’ve never been happier (or busier!) as I’ve worked to put DE and our related programming in a position to provide more value to credit unions and the movement than ever before.

When your head is down and you’re working hard, sometimes you don’t take time look back and reflect. And DE is a program that so many people, including myself, care deeply about. So, for the benefit of my fellow DEs, I wanted to reflect and share some of the highlights from the past 12 months.

The evolution of DE Trainings: A mix of tradition and new ideas

Whether you went through 20 years ago or two years ago, the DE Program will still look familiar in many ways. Credit union history and philosophy, the operating principles and development issues remain the core focus of DE.

But as it’s been since 1982, DE Training continues to evolve in the best ways possible. We’ve put a stronger emphasis on DE project work and providing lessons and resources to help new DEs complete their projects. We went without the Life Simulation for a bit last year, which gave us some space to come up with some new, creative ways to practice empathy and expand more into the topic of emotional intelligence. Diversity & Inclusion is growing into a standardized and important part of our DE curriculum. And for this year, we reduced training by a full day to consolidate some of our content and make it a little easier for folks to attend.

 

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