Tag Archives: water cooler

Launch of the Co-op Water Cooler.

We are stronger together.

Co-op Water Cooler

We co-ops are a splintered bunch. Credit Unions tend to be isolated from the rest of the co-op world, food co-ops can be distinct from housing co-ops, who don’t know the electric co-ops, who don’t really interact with worker co-ops.

And yet society needs us. We are a big part of the solution to what ails our world of growing inequality, a polluted and warming environment, lack of access to local, healthy food, and jobs that don’t pay a living wage. And to transform our society to one that starts to heal these issues, we as cooperators need to be more connected. We need to learn from each other, engage, debate, discuss, and meet up.

So I am very exited to help launch the new Co-op Water Cooler. My hope is that this site can be part of the connectivity. I look forward to all the discussions we’re going to have with cooperators far and wide.

Hello and welcome!

Experiencing the CU Water Cooler Symposium.

CU Water Cooler - Annual SymposiumAnother Credit Union Water Cooler Symposium has come and gone, and it has matured into a thoughtful and even brave event. For me, it was a highlight of 2012 so far, and I think fair to say one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended.

I have this experience a lot at CU conferences where the things that seem like the most important things we as financial cooperatives need to discuss are far from the things that actually get discussed. We stick to what’s safe, and don’t get into the challenging issues that credit unions face, or, more importantly, the challenges that people in our communities face. Problems that credit unions were formed to address.

The people who are drawn to come to the Symposium for a variety of reasons were ready to talk about some of those big important issues and stay with them. From the first presentation right through to the final wrap up, discussion after discussion about the soul of credit unions kept emerging. They took a variety of forms. Superficially, the discussions may have been about branding, or leadership, or getting employees on side, but down deep they were all really about our mission and purpose. That was the great throughline to the Symposium this year.

And for so many of the presentations the audience was so present, you could hear a pin drop.

I’m going to work on a post for the CU Water Cooler site over the next couple of weeks in which I’ll formulate my thoughts and go into more detail. I just felt the need to put something out there to wrap up while the experience was still so fresh.

Thanks to all who were there.

My upcoming CU Water Cooler talk.

CU Water Cooler - Annual SymposiumThis October at the CU Water Cooler Symposium in Nashville I’ll be giving a brand new talk called Everything I Learned About Leadership, I Learned From Filmmaking.

This week at the Credit Union Central of Canada conference, I delivered my last presentation on social media. It’s been 5 years since I started talking about social media, and it’s time to hang up that topic and start something new. The influence filmmaking has had on my career is a topic I’ve been wanting to speak about for a long time now.

Check out my post about my new presentation on the CU Water Cooler site. And hopefully I’ll see you there in October.