Page 18 - BusinessWest February 7, 2022
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and we were able to respond in a bigger way than normal.”
Craig Boivin, vice president of Marketing at UmassFive Federal Credit Union, said it’s “in the DNA” of credit unions to invest money back into their local communities, and his institution does so in four main ways: writing checks to nonprof- its, running donation drives, encouraging volun- teerism among employees to help out community organizations, and financial-education programs that empower members in their financial lives.
Some of the events UMassFive typically sup- ports, such as Will Bike 4 Food and Monte’s March, which both support the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, took on new importance during the pandemic, while the credit union also raised $16,000 last year for the UMass Cancer Walk and Run, bringing its total support of cancer detec- tion and prevention through that event to around $160,000. It has also made a 10-year, $10,000 com- mitment to CISA to help people access healthy food through farm shares.
Meanwhile, members can use their ‘Buzz Points’ from a debit-card reward program, typically redeemable for gift cards at local establishments, to donate to area nonprofits instead, Boivin said.
“We’ve really tried to play that up over the past couple years because there’s so much need in those local organizations, and not everyone has the means to support them by writing checks, so, just by doing normal shopping, they can donate points earned from the program.”
On what Boivin calls the “roll up your sleeves” side of the bank’s efforts, members and employ- ees provided 350 pounds of personal items to food pantries and the Amherst and Northampton Survival Centers last year, collected hundreds of
events — and there were many of them — that were canceled because of the pandemic.
Moving forward, he said the bank has increased its budget for giving in 2022 to support events
and organizations it has backed for years, if not decades, and also support some of those new, pan- demic-related requests that won’t be going away any time soon.
Expanding Needs
Dan Moriarty, president and CEO of Monson Savings Bank (MSB), said the bank has long sup- ported the basic needs of people in the commu- nity, whether that’s food, shelter, clothing, or edu- cation, to name a few. “We look at the basic needs
We had new requests coming in that we
never had before because of agencies that were feeling an impact from a surge of families and individuals needing support because of the pandemic,” he noted.”
first, and then we look at community development and youth. We try to spread money around to as many organizations as we can. And need plays a major role in those decisions.”
The nature of the pandemic, and how it isolated
winter coats for people in need, while continuing to participate in events like the Connecticut River Conservancy’s Source to Sea Cleanup.
“During the pandemic, we were thinking cre- atively about what else can we do that’s different than what we’ve done in the past to support differ- ent folks,” Boivin said. “In some cases, it was really kind of doubling down on our efforts because the needs jumped more than expected.”
Kevin O’Connor, executive vice president and chief banking officer at Westfield Bank, agreed. He said that, during the pandemic, the bank has received requests for help for many new organiza- tions, as well as different kinds of requests from nonprofits it has assisted in the past.
“We had new requests coming in that we never had before because
of agencies that
were feeling an
impact from a
surge of families
and individuals
needing support
because of the pan-
demic,” he noted.
“We looked at every
agency we didn’t
know and looked
at how they were
doing things to
support people. It might have been people we already gave to before, like the Boys and Girls Club of Westfield, that was doing something new and different.”
The bank was able to support many of these new requests through what he called a ‘reallo- cation’ of resources, especially when it came to
 KEVIN O’CONNOR
“
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 18 FEBRUARY 7, 2022
BANKING & FINANCE
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