Community Values

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Thanks for joining today’s episode of Small Talks for Big Change, where we help simplify financial topics to help with your financial wellness. Greetings, everyone out there. My name is Michele Enriquez, your host here at Patelco Credit Union. On the show, we try to inspire ways to improve financial wellness, and today we’re going to highlight Patelco’s community giving program that supports local non profit organizations here in the Bay Area.
That extend financial wellness support to the community. And I’m super excited to welcome Patelco’s community relations partner, Cara Houck, to the studio today to share all the wonderful things that we’re doing to support our communities. Cara, it’s been a long time coming. Welcome to the studio. Thank you so much for having me, Michele.
I’m so happy to be here today because you know I love talking about what I do and what Patelco does in the community. But not only that, I’ve been listening to your podcast and I have to say I’m a [00:01:00] big fan. So getting a little, you know, excited today to be here. I’m very honored to be your guest. So thanks for having me.
And we get to have lunch after this, our favorite thing to do. Awesome. In debrief. So, Cara, your program is really amazing and seems to be growing. I’m going to rattle off some stats just from last year. In 2023, we partnered with 35 community organizations, so those are local nonprofits. We provided a thousand backpacks full of supplies to elementary, high school, and college students.
We supported 11 high school student interns with real work experience and skills. Thank you. We donated 300 new toys and gift cards during the holidays, provided over a thousand new socks to several organizations around our service area, and this is the big one. Our telco team members volunteered over 2, 000 hours to community organizations, which is almost twice what we had given or done the year before.[00:02:00]
Tell everybody about, a little bit about yourself and our community giving program. Absolutely. , thank you for highlighting some of those great things that we did in the last year. However, one thing that strikes me when I hear a lot of those is. how much our team members contributed to all of that that we gave to the community.
So it’s really a part of our culture here at Patelco. I’ve been here for about six years and I have to tell you, we do new and different things every single year. We get new partners, we have new opportunities. It’s really exciting what we’re able to do . But as I mentioned, one of the things I love doing here is being able to contribute.
I love how supportive and passionate our amazing team members are when it comes to giving and I love seeing the ways we can serve not only our members, but also people in need I actually came from a non profit background, so I have a unique perspective and experience, , doing that.
So I always feel like First and foremost, we want to find out what the community needs from the [00:03:00] people who are doing, you know, the work every day so that we can talk to the experts about how we can best help so before I came to work at Patelco, I spent my career working in nonprofit organizations.
As I mentioned, I was educating youth, supporting seniors, providing food and housing for those in need. So I’m familiar with all of those different areas making the transition to working at Patelco wasn’t difficult since we’re a not for profit organization with a mission to help people live better lives.
That is super important to me. So Credit Unions, as you know, believe in people helping people and we have a mission to provide financial education and support our members in living their best financial lives. Being part of a mission driven organization is what gives me joy and helps me grow. keep me passionate about what I do here.
But I also want to emphasize what you said earlier too, is we do a lot of direct service , but we also help organizations so they can pass those same skills and ability and educations on to the people that they serve. And there are so many great [00:04:00] organizations in the Bay Area that are doing great work out there, you know, similar to us and to your point, our, our missions really align in that way.
And It’s no secret that there’s a ton of need in our communities, especially here in the Bay Area, particularly around affordable housing and food insecurity. A couple stats, I grabbed, that are really kind of alarming. The Bay Area has an estimated 28, 000 people experiencing homelessness on any given day.
And California accounts for 25 percent of the entire U. S. homeless population. Okay, let that sink in for a sec. The vast majority are unsheltered and seek help from these local non profits that we’re talking about. And then regarding food insecurity, a group called Each Green Corner conducted a 2020 study that shows about 870, 000 people in the Bay Area are food insecure.
And that represents about 11. 5 percent of the Bay Area population. Right? Alarming. Striking. But again, [00:05:00] this is the reason why we do what we do. What’s Patelco’s approach to supporting this need, particularly in those two areas? Yeah, well those are some staggering statistics for sure when you think about them.
And we all know, you know, are familiar with it just from seeing it and what we’ve experienced ourselves. And you know, there are so many needs in general in the community. And of course, we’d love to support them all. We want to really make a difference with our programs, so we focus our efforts into specific areas.
Patelco’s chosen four essential needs in which we focus our efforts, and we partner with organizations that are addressing just these needs. , and so that we can make a real difference in just these four areas. They’re affordable housing, children’s health, food security, and financial education. So I’m going to talk a little bit more about what we do in each of those different areas.
We, we work with lots of different organizations, as you mentioned earlier, , but we do try to focus our efforts on some of the big [00:06:00] ones that are really addressing these needs. , of course, the statistics you talked about were about housing and food and we, most of us have been affected by that and the way the economy is right now, right?
We saw the long lines at the food banks during the pandemic. And all those, we aren’t seeing those long lines now. I’ve heard from the food banks that the need has not decreased. Yep. Inflation isn’t helping, right? Exactly. So people, they’re still feeding as many people as they did before during the pandemic.
So that’s one of our pillars, food security. We support seven different food banks within our footprint and service area because we think it’s so important to help them. Many of us have been personally affected by the housing costs, you know, and we support affordable housing. , I used to say a few years ago, we live in the Bay Area, of course we have to support affordable housing, but that’s not just true for the Bay Area anymore, right?
People across the country have felt the housing [00:07:00] increases and it’s a struggle for so many people. And we love working with, , one large organization that we’re gonna talk about in a little bit here in the Bay Area specifically, who’s doing a lot to address this need. We also support children’s health.
Uh, when the way we do that specifically is through Children’s Miracle Network. And I have to say that’s kind of a credit union thing across the country. I mean, many people who are familiar with other credit unions probably have also been involved with Children’s Miracle Network. In fact, , we have a national organization called Credit Union for Kids where we do special fundraising for them.
Patelco is involved in many different, fundraising events, , all across the state. , and even the region in the area just to support Children’s Miracle Network and to help all the children. , it’s been so fun for me to be able to do, tours in the local hospitals to see the specific things that we’ve been able to purchase because of the money that we’ve raised
and then finally, and I hate to leave [00:08:00] this to the end, because this is who we are, right, is financial education, right? So of course, we want to share our expertise out in the community as much as possible. , and as, again, as an organization that believes in people, helping people live their best lives, we provide financial education.
, and of course, that’s a lot of your team. Near and dear to my heart, for sure. We definitely believe that a more financially savvy person is a more financially healthy person. Absolutely. And I love how much our teams work together, too, because financial education is really woven in and through all the giving we do to the community and with the organizations that we work with.
Yep. And you know where we come up with the best ideas, Kara, is over lunch, don’t we? Oh my God, you keep bringing up lunch because you know we love food. I’m already hungry. Alright, can we talk about a couple of these organizations in particular that we support because the work that they do is so amazing.
First is the United Way of the Bay Area who provide immediate and [00:09:00] long term support for employment, housing, financial stability, and helping meet basic needs. They’ve got these spark point centers. Right. And these centers serve low income families seeking to improve their financial situation. You can even find one of these centers at our local community colleges and there seem to be more and more popping up at college campuses.
But we’ve been supporting them for many years and in different varieties. We’ve provided backpacks in the past. We support their centers with credit building programs for their clients. But we came up, probably over a lunch, with a cool emergency savings program. Can you share a little bit more about that?
Absolutely. This is just another example of how we work together and how important it is to, you know, weave financial education into everything we do and give to the community. Well, the Spark Your Savings Program is a pilot grant program exclusively for clients of the United Way Bay Area SparkPoint Centers, as you mentioned.
The program aims to establish an emergency [00:10:00] fund, create savings habits, and increase the financial well being of the participants. It was created mostly because only 44 percent of U. S. adults would pay an emergency expense of 1, 000 from their savings. Isn’t that crazy? Yes. 1, 000. Most people don’t have that in savings.
So if they have an emergency come up, which you know we all do, frequently of at least 1, 000. I mean, I know when I have a car expense, there you go, 1, 000 is nothing, right? It’s crazy. But most people have to borrow, use credit, borrow from a friend, borrow from a family. So we really wanted to address that need and , giving people, participants in this program the opportunity to really get the financial wellness resources and education that they need to help them not only learn how important it is to have savings, create savings for an emergency.
But more importantly, to create this [00:11:00] habit going forward, so that they get used to putting money away and having that savings available when you really need it, because we know we all do. Absolutely. And that’s great, Carrie. You know, here at Patoko, we’re always encouraging folks to save and really emphasizing on that behavioral change.
That’s the best part about the program that I love is it’s really inspiring behaviors to enact change, , and then the ultimate goal is that they’ve got this emergency savings account, which is great. Awesome. Let’s also talk about Habitat for Humanity for a second. Can you tell us about that partner and what they do?
So wait a minute. You said I can only talk about them for a second? Just a second. Did you know I could talk about them for a long time? I love Habitat for Humanity. Me too. And I’m sure a lot of our listeners do too. I mean, they’re an international organization that’s been around for many, many years. And you know, they’re so amazing at creating affordable housing in the Bay Area.
And we have been a partner of the East Bay Silicon Valley chapter for many years. We’ve been involved with them in pretty much almost [00:12:00] any way that you can be involved. , we funded loans in the past. We provide a financial education. We’ve had some of our experts in home loans go and talk and do education with all their Habitat families.
We even had our VP of home loans Vin Salinas served on their board for many, many years and just finished. Term as their board chair. So we’ve been very involved with them. We also work on a lot of programs with them throughout the year. , and we do a lot of volunteering and I have to say I have seen a lot of our , team members who are used to sitting behind a computer go out there swinging hammers all day long, digging ditches, caulking buildings, just whatever needs to be done.
And one thing that’s so inspiring is our CEO, Erin Mendez, has done the same thing. She’s joined our volunteer groups and spent the day out there. You know, swinging a hammer to help people with affordable housing. It’s very [00:13:00] inspiring to see. Yeah, part of our support of Habitat for Humanity includes getting dirty and actually helping with the builds, which is really fun.
I learned how to use a saw last year. That was fun, Kara. Oh. Hopefully we can do that again this year. You know what? One of my secrets is, I always plan our volunteer days. on Fridays, because it’s an eight hour hard labor, and I want people to have the weekend to recover before they come back to work.
You’re so good. Also, if I need to go to the emergency room, I have the weekend to recover. Don’t even say that. We had so much fun last year. I know our team members really look forward to those Habitat for Humanity Playhouse builds. I also understand that we help them with their biggest fundraising event.
Tell us about Cycle of Hope. Well, it’s very exciting. They actually started Cycle of Hope in East Bay Silicon Valley area just about seven years ago. So, , within my first few weeks of joining Patelco, I got to be involved in the very first event here. And, they’ve done it in the South Bay until last year.
They moved [00:14:00] it up to be here on our campus in Dublin. We’re very excited to be hosts of it. And it’s a wonderful event. It’s a ride a thon, right? So you get sponsors to help you raise money. They raised well over 300, 000 last year, and it made such a difference for the ongoing budget and how much they’re able to do throughout the year because of this one big event.
So we’ve been the presenting sponsor for the last seven years. And then, like I said, this will be our second year hosting it here. I encourage people to come out and ride. Yep. This is in October, October 20th. So you have time to start riding and getting ready for the ride. , there’s several different options.
There’s, , 11 miles. So if you’re don’t want to drive, ride a lot, that’s okay. There’s a 30 mile and there’s a 62, which is also a metric century. And they’ve curated these amazing courses in our hills around here. There it’s beautiful rides. And I tell people it’s not cheating to have an electric bike.
I saw a few [00:15:00] electric bikes last year. It gave me some ideas for this year. Yeah. And then we also have a kid’s ride. And one of the things that was so fun last year is, you know, we share our building here with the sheriff’s department and they came out on the kid’s ride and one of the motorcycle officers rode with the lights going and the sirens and the kids got to ride their bikes.
That was fun. It was, it was super fun. So anybody who’s listening to this and says, well, I don’t ride a bike. Don’t worry. We have a lot of other things you can do. We need lots of volunteers to be out on the course because there’s, , there’s a sag wagon. There’ll be, spots along the way where you can stop and get, first aid or you can get any kind of snacks, that kind of thing.
And so we need lots of volunteers. And of course, here at the start finish line, , there’s lots of things you can do to support the ride. So it’s going to be a really fun day. And as anyone listening who is a friend and family of Patelco, they can join the Patelco team. So when you register, look for the [00:16:00] Patelco team.
If you use code PATELCO20, capital letters P A T E L C O 20, and then you can save 20 percent off your registration for the ride. And you can go and register at habitatcycleofhope. org. habitatcycleofhope. org So, we’re very excited to be hosting it and to have people come and be involved in this wonderful event.
There’s other things that happen along with the race, right? There’s some activities we got going on in the parking lot here. Yeah, in fact, I love to talk about this. You mentioned the Habitat for Humanity Playhouses. Yes. Where that’s one of our internal volunteer events. People love doing it. Habitat actually brings all of the materials to build playhouses here to our campus.
We’ve got our team members out there building these playhouses. They all have decorations with different themes. They make actual roofs. It’s [00:17:00] amazing. And, um, and then we’re going to do that a couple of days before the cycle of hope they’ll be out on the ride. So the kids will be able to play in these playhouses on, on the ride.
Another thing that we started doing this year is building bikes for kids with an organized. It’s an organization called Kids Bike Lane, and as it happens, they, some of the people involved in that organization, also are cyclists in the Cycle of Hope. So we’re all working together. We’re going to build these bikes here with our team members, bring them to the day, um, of Cycle of Hope and give them to Habitat families.
Amazing. For their kids. Amazing. So even novice cyclists can still enjoy the course on a nice day out here in Dublin, our beautiful terrain here. Absolutely. Bring an electric bike if they’ve got one. I was gonna say, electric bike was good and you have time to, you know, plan, but 11 miles, that’s not too bad, right?
And I’ve heard that [00:18:00] there’s no big hills on that course. A couple of the other longer ones have a little more challenges. But you also remember, there’s beer waiting for you at the end. Well, sold. That’s part of the celebration. And there’s food. We’ve already talked about food, how important that is. Well, you definitely, you had me at beer, and then you definitely had me at food.
So talk about some of these, , areas in which the support will, , help. help go to? Absolutely. I mean, , we know that Habitat creates housing, right? And affordable housing. And through this big fundraiser,, it over the last, , many, many years that they’ve been doing it, they’ve raised 1. 6 million for Habitat through the cycle of hope.
So it’s kind of amazing how much they’ve raised., so they do home ownership so that people who would not normally be able to afford to get into a house are able to do that. They make affordable mortgages and, with people who have limited incomes. They also have a program a lot of people haven’t [00:19:00] heard about, which is the Home Preservation Program.
They help people with limited incomes to stay in their homes. There might be some real, repairs, big repairs that need to be made. I heard a story last year about someone who almost their whole kitchen floor had rotted out. Ugh. And they weren’t able to afford to fix it themselves and Habitat came in and fixed it and enabled the family to stay in the house.
And then of course, they provide a lot of housing and financial counseling because they don’t just want to put people in housing. They want to keep supporting them to stay in their housing and meet the rest of their financial goals in their life. And again, you know, that is right aligned with us and Patoka and what our mission is.
to help people live the best financial lives they can live. Oh, I love that. I just got goosebumps. Thank you for sharing all of that, Kara. So, all right, to wrap it up, we’ve got our community giving program, which is doing amazing things. It involves all of our Patelco team [00:20:00] members to really kind of extend that support out to the community and work with all of those non profit organizations that are doing such great work out there.
If you’re interested in learning more, More about our partners and some of the work that we’re doing. You can go to our website at patelco. org and click the financial wellness button under the community tab and find out more about those programs and find more information about cycle of hope. Kara mentioned a discount code that’s patelco20 to save 20 percent at registration.
And again, you can find more information at patelco. org under the financial wellness tab and the community tab specifically. under cycle of hope. Kara, it was so great to have you in the studio today. I can’t wait for lunch. I can’t wait to have you back and talk about the next time we’re going to have you in here.
October 20th is the day for cycle of hope. We hope that you join us. We hope that you’ll visit our website to find more information. And we want to thank Kara Haug for being here, our community [00:21:00] relations partner here at Patelco. Well, thank you so much. I had such a good time. I was looking forward to this for so long.
And if I knew you were going to treat me to lunch, I would have come here a long time ago. We’ll come here more often. Come on! Yeah, next week, I’ll be back. All right. Well, that concludes today’s episode of Small Talks for Big Change, where we help simplify financial topics to help with your financial wellness.
We’ll see you next time. Adelco Credit Union is insured by NCUA.