Page 16 - Contact Magazine: 2nd Quarter, 2016

A History of
Credit Unions
in Detroit
You won’t find a single branch or ATM for Detroit Postal Employees
CU, but 90 years after being chartered, it remains one of Michigan’s
most historic credit unions.
Today, Zeal CU in Livonia is the last surviving link to Detroit Postal, time, it had grown into the largest educators credit union in
which was rebranded as Zeal following a series of mergers. But
on February 26, 1926, Detroit Postal had the distinction of being
the first credit union to be chartered in the city of Detroit.
“It was very close-knit,” said Beverly Outland, who served as mar-
keting director of Priority Community CU, which later became
Zeal. Outland is considered Zeal’s in-house expert when it comes
to Detroit Postal, and she noted that the credit union’s members
all knew one another through ties to the postal industry. “They
were yelling across the room, hugging, and then they’d go out
into the parking lot and stand and talk; they were always a very
close bunch.”
Priority Community expanded to a community charter in 2005,
around the time that Outland came aboard, but even after that,
she said, “It still remained 80–90 percent postal workers and
their families.”
Following closely on Detroit Postal’s heels was Detroit Teachers CU,
better known today as Michigan First CU.
“In the early days, we were very, very small and operated out of
a house—a living room where they set up a table,” said Michael
Poulos, president and CEO of Michigan First. Detroit Teachers
Breaking ground on Brewery Workers CU’s Gratiot Ave. headquarters in Detroit “There was a very big audience for credit unions”
16 Second Quarter 2016 I Contact
A glimpse at the 1963 Detroit FCU annual meeting
didn’t move to another location for a decade, and it wasn’t until
1955 that it moved into a professional building—but by that
the world and was four times larger than any other
Michigan credit union.
According to Poulos, Detroit Teachers was so successful in those
days because it stuck to the basics: serving one SEG and doing it well.
The credit union didn’t even expand to serve others within the
educational system for many years.
“What you see is a credit union whose members are really ded-
icated,” he said of those early years. “We talk a lot today about
members who might be doing most of their business with us or
only have an account here for an occasional thing; our members
were very serious about what they did, putting their money here,
borrowing and advocating.”
“A Very Big Audience for Credit Unions”
That dedication to SEGs was a key to thriving in the early years
of many Detroit credit unions, including Detroit Newspaper
Industrial CU—better known today as One Detroit CU. Unlike
Detroit Teachers, Detroit Newspaper Industrial cast a wider net,
serving a variety of members within the newspaper industry,
particularly those on the printing press floor, said One Detroit
CEO Hank Hubbard. Eventually, it expanded from
serving just the newspaper industry to those
working in TV and radio, along with other areas of
printing and publishing, changing its name in the
early 1970s to Communicating Arts CU. In 2015,
it shed that name and rebranded as One Detroit.
in the manufacturing sector, explained Hubbard,
noting that newspapers and printing press work-
ers were a natural fit. “Just the working Joes who
were often left out of the financial mainstream
and probably the labor union movement had