Photo courtesy of American Eagle FCU
Simeon Chapin
Chief Community Officer, American Eagle Financial Credit Union
Age: 49
Industry experience: 11 years
American Eagle Financial Credit Union isn’t just handing out checks. It is using its card products as a way to give back to the community, says Chief Community Officer Simeon Chapin.
The East Hartford credit union just donated funds to three nonprofits (the Vernon Youth Football and Cheerleading program, the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Connecticut & Western Massachusetts, and The Cornerstone Foundation) but it routinely uses the interchange fees it collects from members’ debit and credit card usage to give grants to local nonprofits.
While the credit union uses this unique way to give back, it also does traditional philanthropy and volunteer work which it believes is interwoven into what it truly means to be a credit union.
Q: How did the credit union came up with this concept? How does it differ to giving out a check?
A: It’s definitely more involved than just giving out a check. That’s for sure. The impulse ties back to the fact that as a credit union we’re member owned. We’re here to serve the membership because they are the owners of the organization as a cooperative financial institution. So Cash Back to the Community was designed to take that idea and put it into practice around the way that we give back to the communities. Many credit unions do – and banks as well as many other businesses – work to give contributions back to community where they’re serving. We are just doing it in a little bit of a different way in this particular program.
What we do is we open up a nominating period where members will nominate nonprofits that they care about from the community to the program. We do some light vetting on those, make sure that they are meeting our giving criteria, and then we put them up on our website for the membership and the larger public to vote on which ones they really feel strongly about. Which ones are reflecting the needs that they’re seeing in the community. Which ones are the ones that they feel are meeting the needs that they’re seeing day in and day out. Then from the voting, the top three are awarded some funds, and the funds are coming from the usage of our debit and credit cards.
It’s a real “circular economy” kind of move, where every time an American Eagle member uses their debit card or their credit card to pay for a coffee or groceries or the basics that they use day in and day out, a portion of that swipe is going to the Cash Back to the Community program. So every quarter we run the program, and on average every quarter we do three awards of about $10,000 each. Over the course of the year, 12 nonprofits are getting a total of about $120,000.
Q: What is some of the work that maybe yourself or different credit union employees have to do in terms of keeping track of these credit card swipes and seeing how much usage is occurring?
A: We track a lot of things as a credit union, and one things we do track is, of course, transactions and usage of that. We get reports on the regular about how many transactions are happening with our credit and debit cards, and so we take a portion of the interchange income, which comes from that, and put that into the program. So on a quarterly basis, we get a report that says, “Okay, here’s the amount that we have for this program.” It’s kind of like a “1 percent for the planet” program where we commit 1 percent of interchange [fees] to this project. Once we have that number, we know how much the winning nonprofits are going to get that quarter.
Q: How does the credit union help to support employee-led or in-person volunteering efforts?
A: Well, there’s a number of different programs that we do. We do grants and contributions directly to nonprofits to help them do the work that they do. A great example of that is Connecticut Food Share, where we write them a check and they do amazing work to feed families in Connecticut. We also do sponsorships. So if there’s a really good community event that we feel is really strong and matches what we’re trying to see in community, we will sponsor that event.
A good example of that would be work with Riverfront Recapture. They’re working to clean up and beautify and bring people down to the Connecticut River on both sides, East Hartford and Hartford and beyond. When they do their Asian festival and run a dragon boat race and have some really exciting things happening, we show up with a dragon boat and sponsor the event with some contribution dollars as well. We also will go out and do volunteer work, where we send our team members out to do things like go to Hands On Hartford and cook a meal for the Meals on Wheels program for the elderly folks, and that’s really meaningful work.
Our team members get a chance to go out from the office. They get a chance to get their hands in the work of supporting communities directly, and our communities benefit because they’re able to have given that time and that energy to that.
We also support team members who are doing their own volunteerism in the community. We have volunteer time off. People can use that time to volunteer at a nonprofit themselves. Maybe be on the school board, maybe they are coaching Little League or they are coaching a soccer team – that can count. We have one team member who’s a volunteer firefighter who is often taking time to go do that. This year so far, our team members have done 2,338 hours of volunteer work in in our community through that volunteerism program.
We also do quite a bit of financial literacy work, where we go into schools or into nonprofits. It’s really our core capacity is understanding finance and understanding what needs are there for people to create financial freedom for themselves and for their families. By going out into these spaces with our curriculum, with our team members out there delivering that knowledge and having those conversations with folks to help them overcome barriers, take the next step towards budgeting, think about a plan. We try to uplift the communities to have greater access to financial freedom and the pathways to achieve it.
Chapin’s Five Favorite Drummers
- Elvin Jones
- Stuart Copeland
- Carlos “Patato” Valdés
- Manu Katché
- Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste
