50 years: for half a century, the OAS Federal Credit Union has provided reliable and affordable financial services of the highest quality for its members and their families.

• Author: Kiernan, James Patrick
• Position: OAS Staff Federal Credit Union: Intelligent Ownership - Organization of American States

The Credit Union of the Pan American Union (PAU)--now the OAS Staff Federal Credit Union--was founded in May 1962 when 25 staff members carne together to form the entity, each making a minimum deposit of five dollars. By the end of that year, 286 members had joined. A number of those founders and early members brought with them experience with credit cooperatives in Latin America, and two of them, Fernando Chaves and Mario Yuri, worked in the PAU's Department of Social Affairs on projects that promoted the development of credit cooperatives in Latin America. The OAS Credit Union was founded on certain principles for cooperatives and over the years, it has remained true to those principles which include: voluntary and open membership, democratic member control, autonomy and independence, and the economic participation of members.

In the 1960s, in the days of the Alliance for Progress, the General Secretariat of the PAU was growing rapidly in size and in number of personnel. As newly hired PAU staff members arrived in Washington without credit histories in the United States, they needed a source of loans to reestablish themselves. But the needs of the Credit Union's new members quickly outgrew the capacity of the Credit Union to lend money, and members had to wait for enough money to accumulate in the cash box before they could get a loan.

In 1964, the Credit Union was authorized by its board to borrow money from commercial banks and then re-loan that money at a slightly higher rate of interest to its members. However, the OAS had its own bank account, and with a certain amount of discrete leverage, that bank was persuaded to loan monies to the Credit Union. This greatly increased the staffs ability to borrow and to finance their new lives in the United States and with the Organization. This in turn led to a large increase in Credit Union membership and allowed the Credit Union to keep pace with the rapid growth of the General Secretariat.

By 1970, the Credit Union had 1,329 members. In the first issue of the Credit Union newsletter, the recently elected president of the board, Mario Yuri, proudly reflected that "the day of hesitancy and doubt and of testing are over. In a short time, we have come a very long way." The majority of the employees of the Secretariat have always been from Latin America and the Caribbean; they are not US citizens. Since access to credit in the United States is particularly limited to persons coming from a foreign...