Note about the author: After earning his MBA from UCLA John spent 20+ years in the for-profit world. He says the biggest challenge of leaving corporate roles for credit unions was the realization that loans were assets, and savings a liability. He was CEO of American Airlines FCU for 17 years. He then guided a troubled credit union to stability for three years, followed by a decade of consulting and speaking about leadership and strategy.
Trust and Stewardship
by John Tippets
Leadership character has a great many dimensions. Among these are, to be trusted, honest and open. Customers, owners, and employees rightly expect no less.
Leaders also have a role as stewards, the care and protection of the reputation and brand, the quality of its products, the welfare of employees and their families, and the financial and physical assets of the entity. These are all parts of his or her responsibility.
Self-Interest Versus the Public Good
Sadly, in today’s world these principles are far too often not adhered to, or intentionally violated. In some charities, NGOs and similar non-profit entities, overhead costs including numbers of executives with excessive compensation are eating up significant portions of donations, government (taxpayers) funding or of earned incomes.
We are seeing these fraud “clinics” diverting their dollars to cars, boats, vacations, and other personal benefits. We see politicians compromised, doing the bidding of large donors, or taking personal financial advantage of non-public information.
SAFE’s Role Reversal
Credit Unions are ‘not-for-profit’ co-operatives with tax exemption certifying their civic public duty role. Credit Union employees go to work every day to help improve the lives and welfare of their members and their communities. Credit Union employees generally love what they do and love the people they do it for. One credit union (of many or most) which has done a fantastic job living this vision and mission for generations has been SAFE Credit Union of Sacramento, California.
So, it is stunning to me (and likely to many) to learn of plans by the SAFE Board of Directors and the Senior Executives to have the SAFE Credit Union acquired by (merged with) another credit union.
Hopefully, all members will be able to learn of the factual pros and cons, the operational changes, and the financial and service impacts. Will employees be encouraged to share their thoughts, or will they be instructed otherwise and just go along? Will all the insiders’ seemingly extreme benefits be fully disclosed and justified?
The Real Question for SAFE Members
My initial text above is about the loss in many institutions where the character of leadership is vital. We know this process involving SAFE Credit Union would at the minimum meet the legal and regulatory requirements (that’s the lawyers’ job). But the real questions are whether the potential and likely outcomes are, in all ways, morally right and consistent with the principles and purpose for which SAFE exists?
Sometimes it is emergency responders running toward disaster to provide help. Think of the New York fireman who climbed the stairs of the World Trade Center knowing full well the dangers.
Emotional courage can be as simple as the ability to say “I’m sorry” when your words hurt another person, often in private.
In a public contexts it is someone raising their voice to object. by openly standing against the current powers that be. Think of protestors ushered our of a congressional hearing.
Moral courage is needed when challenging prevailing social or economic inequities that have been norms for generations. Or to stand up to those in authority who misuse or abuse their power.
in our life span there will be times to “stand up and do the right thing” when confronted by situations that call for acts of individual bravery.
It is even harder when our immediate self-interest is not in jeopardy, We always have the option to watch, “play it safe.”
Every society, every organization, every community needs individuals who. when much is at stake, have the courage to do what is right not what is expedient. In other words, to let someone else take care of it. Not my job.
An Example
Below is a post with a two minute video from an Ukrainian drone monitoring an attempted evacuation of two soldiers wounded in an assault.
They were being carried by an unmanned vehicle which was stopped, hit by a Russian drone. Note they are strapped in. Unable to move or help themselves.
Suddenly a unarmored normal pickup truck speeds to the scene and backs up on the one lane road to the two soldiers. The driver jumps out, lifts and pushes both wounded men into the back of the pickup. He wears no helmet or body armor.
Watch full screen to see close up as he lifts both and push them into the open truck bed.
He speeds away, serves around a disabled vehicle on the road and then reaches to safety entering a part of the road covered with netting.
The action is in broad daylight and would be seen by Russian enemy drones.
He completes this entire mission in about two minutes
The driver is the battalion unit”s commander.
Most of us will never have such a life and death choice. This example reminds us that individuals can do extraordinary acts for others’ well being. Not because of position, power or reward, but because that is who we can be when presented with circumstances testing what we truly believe.
We all have the potential to do the right thing. It doesn’t take a battlefield evacuation to show courage. Standing against the market’s status quo was and for some still today, the motivation for working or leading a credit union.
Click on the link, read the intro, then watch the video. This is an action which shows the potential in each of us-when we feel called to stand up for the common good or welfare of others.
Temporary Protection Status is an option under US immigration law to admit migrants who face life and death threats in their home country.
President Trump won a Supreme Court decsion saying he could reverse such status under his executive authority. Trump immediately used the ruling to revoke this legal status for hundred of thousands of Haitian and Syrian families living and working in the US legally.
The order went in effect approximately ten days ago. These immigrants are in legal limbo and uncertain fate. If any of these affected persons or any other immigrants taken by ICE are credit union members, what is your organization’s responsibility to them?
These individuals are now without protected status or, at best, an unknown future. Do you continue to serve? Take deposits? Make or collect loans? Transfer funds? Close their accounts? Act as trustee?
Do you wait and watch to see what happens as some members may have other legal options? Let events just play out and put a hold on activity?
What is the credit unions responsibility Legally? Practically? Morally?
A Temporary Immigrant’s Story from WW II
The following example is from another era of global migration, This excerpt is from Martin Gilbert’s InSearch of Churchill. My connection is at the end.
In the summer of 1940 my father, who was then serving with an anti-aircraft gun battery on Hampstead Heath, took advantage of a British Government scheme to send children across the Atlantic to safety.
My parents were not well off, and it seemed to them that I would be better cared for there. That July, a month after the fall of France, when the German Army was on the cliffs between Calais and Boulogne, I sailed in the care of an aunt with several hundred other children, to Canada.Our boat, the Duchess of Bedford, was in a convoy of fifty ships.In mid-Atlantic, after the destroyer escort turned back, the convoy was attacked and five ships were sunk by the Germans.
The Duchess of Bedford sailed on safely, via the iceberg-dotted sea off Labrador, to Quebec.Those icebergs, marvellous for a child to behold, were among my first memories.Shortly afterwards another boat with child evacuees on board, the City of Benares, was sunk and seventy-seven children drowned.The scheme was then abandoned.
I was only three years old. Many years later I learned that at the time of the sailing of the Duchess of Bedford Churchill had been asked by the organisers of the scheme to give the oldest child a letter to Mackenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister, thanking him for receiving us.He was so opposed to any children being evacuated to Canada (he saw it as a “scuttle”) that he refused to write the letter telling the minister concerned:“I will not send any message through the eldest child, or through the youngest child either.”Thus I missed the chance to hold a Churchill letter in my hands, and to deliver it, though there were, I suppose, several children on board even younger than myself.
I hated Canada, not the country but the separation from my parents, and while the war was still being fought, I returned to Britain.It was Churchill himself, I later learned, who had noted, in his regular scrutiny of ships in transit and in port, that the ocean liner Mauretania, then a troopship, was sailing from New York in the summer of 1944 with several hundred empty berths.He at once suggested that several hundred children be rounded up and brought back.
As a result of his intervention I found myself all alone, with an identification tag round my neck, on the night train from Toronto to New York, arriving bewildered in the yawning cavern of Grand Central Station, clutching my brand new Canadian passport (“valid duration war”) and standing in a long, slow-moving line by the quayside on a sweltering New York summer afternoon.I did not know, as we later steamed across the Atlantic towards Liverpool, that Churchill had specifically asked the Admiral to make sure (amidst his many other cares in the immediate aftermath of the Normandy landings) that there were enough lifeboats on board for all the extra children.
My Interest in This Temporary Asylum Story
In the spring of 1968 I was the only student of a tutor reading for an exam on the topic of Britain’s foreign policy between the two world wars.
The tutor was a junior fellow at Merton College, Oxford who had just been asked to complete Randolph Churchill’s biography of his father as the author’s health deteriorated. He was given unrestricted access to Churchill’s private letters and personal notes.
Several events you may have overlooked. I believe each has significance for credit unions’ future.
GESA credit union will purchase the Salem based Oregon Bancorp at at purchase price of $43-$45 per share. Prior to the announcement the bank’s publicly shares had traded around $27 or lower for the past year.
According to a Banking Dive article, this is the fifth proposed whole bank purchases by credit unions in 2026. The report says there was a record 22 bank purchases in 2024. The number. fell to 16 last year.
Bloomberg News reports the US 30-year bond yield is trading above 5% for the longest stretch since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007. One factor is the US government’s detonating fiscal situation. Total Treasury debt is $31 trillion or about the same size as US GDP. Total debt was only $4.7 trillion in 2007. Interest payments on the debt not total $1.0 trillion per year. This government borrowing is occurring at the same time debt issuance in the private sector for AI and data center growth is expanding by hundreds of billions of bond and corporate borrowing.
Two days ago the House Committee on Financial Services held the first Congressional hearing on the Federal Home Loan Bank system in 15 years. The 11 regional Federal Home Loan Banks made $677 billion in loans to financial institutions in 2025. Two notes from this Next City’s The Bottom Line report on the hearing:
After Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Banks are the third-largest “government-sponsored enterprise” created by Congress to support the housing market, , ,
Today, . .the nation’s largest banks and private equity funds on Wall Street have become the biggest borrowers from Federal Home Loan Banks — and recent analysis shows those large institutions no longer use those funds to boost their residential mortgage lending, as was the original purpose of the Federal Home Loan Banks. . .
The articles conclusion: Even if all the reforms discussed in today’s hearing were to pass, many communities won’t benefit from those changes without local banks or credit unions to make use of those changes.
And what has the CLF been doing to assist credit union mortgage lending?
The Rest of the Story
In and earlier post this week, I lifted a headline from a front page story in Credit Union Times April 22, 1992, “High Roller” Lifestyle called “contemptible” in NCUA Memorandum. Several readers asked for more details.
The opening paragraphs in a very. long account:
Former credit union leader RichardD. Mangone has been enjoying the kind of retirement many people dream about: frequent cross-country trips, first-class accommodations, top-notch entertainment and more–all free of charge.
But Mangone’s “high roller” lifestyle was brought down to earth this month by court-imposed travel restrictions. The reason, according to National Credit Union attorneys, is that Mangone’s “life of Riley” has been at the expense of defrauded credit union members.
Since August 26, 1991, Mangone, most recently the president of Digital Employees Federal Credit Union, has been under a court order to limit his spending to $8,000 a month. The order was imposed to prevent Mangone from draining or transferring his assets while lawsuits are pending against him.
Mangone has been sued by NCUA, Digital Employees, and Berkshire County Savings Bank for his role in an alleged real estate loan scam.
The Article’s Relevance Today
Following several additional paragraphs, there is a related story with the title: Digital Members Set to Vote on New Board
So there was a time in the not too distant past when the NCUA, the members, the credit union’s new leadership and the community stepped up to hold self-serving leaders to account. Without leaders with integrity, governmental regulation and exams, internal governance and leader accountability are just concepts, not meaningful checks and balances.
The coop system did have such individuals who rose to their responsibility in the past. There was a credit union press which published traditional investigative journalism. And in the present?
I’m in the process of downsizing which means looking through a life’s work of paper files and documents.
My Grandpa Webb was a high school teacher in Taylorville, IL for almost six decades. In a letter to me dated Feb 26, 1963 in my first year of college which was challenging, he quoted the preacher Henry Ward Beecher:
It’s not work that kills a man; it is worry. Work is healthy; worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolutions that destroy the machinery, but the friction.
He also reported that the night before the temperature had reached 20 degrees below zero at the local area airport.
Now as a grandpa, I have never written a letter to any of the four grandkids. Maybe a birthday card or two. Certainly numerous short text exchanges. All now gone. Makes one wonder how prior generations experiences are passed on.
Evergreen Credit Union, Portland. Maine was founded in 1951 to serve the employees of the S.D. Warren paper mill in Westbrook. Today it serves six counties in the state with a complete line of personal and business services and with multiple community partnerships.
The credit union embraces the culture and spirit of Maine in its branding. But importantly with its many local, engaged roles with the communities where it has branches. Although Maine’s fourth largest at $641 million at June 30, it resonates with small town intimacy.
The CEO, Jason Lindstrom is a merger refugee from Belvoir FCU just outside Washington DC. In March 2016 the senior management and Board of Belvoir completed a merger with PenFed. In November 2016 this former Chief Marketing Officer was chosen to lead Evergreen as CEO.
The Call of Duty
Jason recently posted his thoughts on freedom, responsibility and legacy after a decade as the credit union’s leader. I might describe his thoughts as the Call of Duty. His words are a charter for anyone serving in a position of private or public responsibility for others.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about leadership over the years, and one thing has become clear to me.
The greatest leaders don’t ask, “What can I get?” They ask, “What can I leave behind?”
As America celebrates 250 years, I think that’s the real challenge for each of us.
The freedoms we enjoy today were paid for by people who believed their responsibility was bigger than themselves. They built, served, sacrificed, and invested in a future they might never see. That is a legacy worth honoring.
Every generation has the same opportunity.
Not just to celebrate America, but to strengthen it. To be present with our families. To serve our communities. To treat people with dignity. To lead with integrity. To leave every person, every team, and every place a little better than we found it.
History isn’t written only by the famous. It’s written by ordinary people who choose to do the right thing, day after day, even when no one is watching.
As we celebrate 250 years of this remarkable nation, I hope we are remembered not simply for what we believed, but for how we lived.
Happy Independence Day, America!
Editor’s PS: Before Belvoir, where I met Jason, he was Chief Political Officer at Schools First FCU and prior, AVP Business Development for Orange County CU.
Jason also has a podcast “Pilot 2 Co-Pilot” with Antonio Neves. The theme is Leadership isn’t a solo flight, it’s a team effort. There are 8 episodes. They can be found in all major podcast directories and here: (link) (https://pilot2copilot.buzzsprout.com/)
This is a closing post tracing the impact of America’s revolution on our political and moral priorities today. The focus is on freedom in its many meanings in America and around the world.
The Battle Hym of the Republic is sung at virtually all patriotic celebrations.
The text was by abolitionist and suffragist Julia Ward Howe. The music is from an 1850s camp-meeting song with the title “Say, Brother, Will You Meet Us?” The tune was also used for the song “John Brown’s Body,” with text about the raid on Harper’s Ferry.
The poetic words include righteous anger, “He (God) is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” The final stanza is a call to moral action by those hearing the words now.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free, While God is marching on.
A Timeless Example for those Yearning to be Free
America’s history of constant, unending endeavors for a more perfect union has inspired individuals around the world. One of the most dramatic situations today is Ukraine’s fight for independence after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
A Ukrainian writer thanked Americans in his Independence Day greeting. Viktor Kravchuk living in Kyiv has approximately 40,000 US readers in all states . He expresses what America and her people mean to him.
I know many of you are worried about your own country. Since today is your birthday, I need to tell you what I have seen.
I have seen Americans stand with Ukraine when they did not have to. I have seen Americans treat the survival of people thousands of miles away as part of their own moral life.
That is why I respect you.
You, the people of the United States who have stood with us, have my respect. You have the respect of this Ukrainian, and I am absolutely sure you have the respect of many people here who will never know your names, but live under a sky you helped us defend.
A promise can be damaged and still carried forward by ordinary people.
You carried it all the way to Ukraine.
Freedom needs friends, and this country found many of them in you.
Happy Independence Day, America.
Viktor’s Latest Post
My wife Lyubov is the one who treats impossible things as a small inconvenience. So for America’s 250th, she arranged a meeting between two women who had only heard of each other. (drawing below)
One brought a torch, one brought a shield.
To many years more, my friends. Thank you for your friendship, and I will never stop celebrating those who deserve it.
This is how Ukraine dressed up its Motherland statue to honor America.
Living to make all free. A role every American can fill.
America’s Declaration of Independence opens with words that inspired a new era of world-wide democratic political revolutions. No more rule based on divine right, inherited position or pure force. The words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Centuries later America strives to achieve these ideals. Even with our imperfections and unfinished dreams, individuals and countries around the world are still inspired by America’s past and its future hopes.
Democracy Is Not Easy
Democracy and its embrace of individual freedom is an ongoing challenge. One of the contributing factors is that the very freedom that encourages debate, dissent and speaking truth to power is used by all points of view. The irony is that some of those views oppose the very values in the opening words of the Declaration.
Changing the status quo, or prior error, has never been a quick task for America. Necessary reforms are opposed as threats to existing structures of power and privilege.
This has always been the case. Some divisions can take decades, or generations, to heal or overcome.
Righting the nation’s or an institution’s misdirections is never easy, whether politically, culturally or economically. But it is also an opportunity for new voices and new generations of leaders.
Credit Unions’ American Context
The shortcomings between our cooperative ideals and our daily realities are part of the credit union story. This challenge was recognized by the founders of the movement.
In Filene’s Speaking of Change, a collection of his speeches and articles published in 1939, there is a chapter, George Washington and Financial Liberty.
Filene’s view was that one of Washington’s greatest achievements wasn’t winning the war for Independence, it was having Hamilton and Jefferson in one cabinet and getting results from both.
He uses that as the model for the credit union movement saying, “temperamental conservatives” and “temperamental radicals” can work together because they’re dealing with facts, not philosophies.
One example of the effective partnership of philosophical opposites is the pairing of Ed Callahan, a conservative who believed in limited government regulations and efficient use of public funds, with the Chicago, ward 1 Democratic precinct captain progressive Bucky Sebastian. Their combined talents revolutionized credit union oversight first in Illinois and then nationally at NCUA.
Several of Filene’s observations are especially relevant this July 4th, 2026, in the movement’s 117th year:
“What is needed is that the American masses shall learn the art of constructive self-government in this machine age — in this age in which life is no longer organized on a small community pattern but in which all Americans are more or less dependent upon what all other Americans are doing.”
“For unless we can achieve economic democracy, our political democracy must be a sham.” (Filene Source: Sarah McNeil CEO, United Trades FCU)
The challenge of member-owner rights and democratic governance is even more critical in today’s $2.5 trillion cooperative financial sector. Credit union leadership is increasingly exercised as a privilege for the few, not a responsibility shared with the many member-owners.
Conflicting Coop Priorities
The rich and diverse legacy built by generations of loyal members is being swooped up in a merger frenzy driven by personal greed and ambition. But many other leaders have remained dedicated to the unfinished work serving members in their communities.
Cooperative history is about more than the many volunteer founding stories and their early efforts to build a new financial system of worker and community groups. It is also about those whose courage called attention to the inequitable financial member circumstances that should be the focus for cooperative solutions.
Those voices are present today. But is their call to rediscover who we are and who we can be being heard? Especially in the present circumstances of coop business dynamics, social and political turmoil. Will the ever-present siren appeals of market opportunity drown out our unique founding goal of public purpose?
On this national holiday, the country is again having a critical conversation about our past and future greatness. So too are credit union leaders.
My hope for how we will respond to the present challenges, as a movement and as a country, is based on two factors: our moral conscience and our history of doing the right thing in time. Our individual duty as citizens and as cooperative adherents is to witness what we value by our daily acts.
The Call for Grace in Times of Need-A Musical Reminder
Nowhere is this combination of America’s lofty aspirations and human reality more evident than in one of the most well-known songs with words from the poem, America the Beautiful.
The author, Katherine Lee Bates; (1859-1929) was inspired by a trip to Pikes Peak in 1893. Her poem first appeared in print on July 4, 1895, in The Congregationalist, a weekly journal.
All eight stanzas open with praise for America’s glories (purple mountain majesty) and accomplishments (pilgrim feet). But each verse then closes with a prayer, a call for grace or a plea. America’s beauty is both her past and the aspiration for a better tomorrow..
Here are the verses edited to show first the real glory of America and then the ongoing needs:
O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain,. . . God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood, From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet Whose stern impassioned stress, A thoroughfare for freedom beat. . . God mend thine every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law!
O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife. . .May God thy gold refine, Till all success be nobleness, And every gain divine!
O beautiful for patriot dream, That sees beyond the years, . . . God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!
Oh beautiful for halcyon skies For amber waves of grain . . . God shed His grace on thee, Till souls wax fair as earth and air And music-hearted sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet, Whose stern impassioned stress. . . God shed His grace on thee, Till paths be wrought through wilds of thought, By pilgrims foot and knee!
Oh beautiful for glory-tale Of liberating strife, . . Till selfish gain no longer strain The banner of the free!
O beautiful for patriot dream, That sees beyond the years, . . . God shed His grace on thee, Till nobler men keep once again Thy whiter jubilee!
An on the ground account following an election removing an authoritarian, corrupt leadership group. Caolin Robertson is an Irish born, national affairs reporter now living. in Ukraine. His knowledge of events and local production qualitt is first class. In this report he documents the sheer joy Hungary’s citizens felt after the national election ended the reign of Orban.
