Accelerating Impact: Opportunities from the Net Impact Conference

by Lisa Totaro

The credit union movement is full of good people – energetic leaders, bright idea generators, passionate advocates. But as Mark Meyer has said, we need not look only internally, but also outside the credit union “cul-de-sac” in order to encourage new growth.

We must explore what others are doing – including partnerships we can create to make our work have an even greater impact – a central theme of last week’s Net Impact conference in Baltimore. Net Impact is an organization of students and professionals using their careers for good, and the conference focused on how to accelerate the impact of your work. Three clear opportunities for our own industry emerged from this conference.

Opportunity 1: Strategic Partnerships

Inside the movement, we know that credit unions are an important part of our communities – cooperatives empowering our members to take ownership of their finances and in their neighborhoods. However, we also know that credit unions as an industry still struggle with projecting this image to the public at large. Even at Net Impact, attended by like-minded individuals focused on social enterprise and poised to do meaningful work to better our world, I heard no mention of credit unions.

This struck me as odd.

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