Credit Union 1: helping members, soldiers, employees and neighborhoods.

• Author: Kalytiak, Tracy
• Position: ALASKA BUSINESS MONTHLY'S 2010 CORPORATE 100

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Long ago, Mountain View was a place where working folks with modest incomes lived in their own homes and formed a tight community.

Construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline brought with it an influx of people and not enough homes to house them all, and so Mountain View was rezoned to accommodate multi-family buildings. "That's when the transiency and lack of connectivity to neighbors took place," said Jewel Jones, executive director of the Anchorage Community Land Trust.

Businesses moved, leaving behind a scattering of pawn shops and quick-cash outlets. In a place where residents walked to their destinations or relied on public transportation, there were no banks.

"There was nothing in terms of loans, financial counseling and education," Jones said. "Credit Union 1 came to us and said, 'We like that piece of property. We want to be in this area; it's underserved.'"

COMMUNITY MINDED

Its fervent attention to community needs in the areas it serves is one reason Credit Union 1 earned a spot in the Corporate 100.

Credit Union 1 CEO Leslie Ellis set the company on its successful course two years after she first went to work as a teller in 1981 with what was then the Alaska School Employees Federal Credit Union. The organization had been chartered in 1952. Ellis' husband's Army career as a JAG officer had brought the couple to Anchorage from New Jersey.

When Ellis first became general manager in 1983, the credit union was struggling to recover from embezzlement and a bevy of operational problems, Mopping up the mess and keeping the business alive through the catastrophic economy of the mid-1980s taught valuable, long-lasting lessons, Ellis said.

"We were able to remain profitable through all that," she said. "That really set the tone, the pace, for where we are now."

Ellis said the one thing that has guided the company through economic dips is being financially disciplined, controlling costs and making sure lenders are exceptionally good underwriters.

"Because the key to being a nonprofit, our primary source of revenue, comes from making loans to our own members," Ellis said. "But by the same token, if you have too many of those loans go bad, there are problems."

CREATING A NICHE

Ellis said Credit Union 1 learned to be a prudent lender and is careful in that area. "For us, our niche is not anything that's commercial or construction related," she said. "We just loan to regular people, our regular members. We don't have...