Making a difference in others’ lives is what makes us tick, whether it’s helping a person with a loan, providing unbiased advice about financial products or offering services that save people time and stress. Taking that a step further, we also thrive on doing good things in the community. For the latter, the Heartland Credit Union Association recently honored us with a pair of awards for our community involvement!

First place in the Dora Maxwell Social Responsibility Award Program

We won this award primarily for all the time, effort and money we put into coordinating, promoting and holding paper shred and electronics recycling events at our branches during the summer and fall of 2017 and the spring of 2018. These events help people in the community protect their identity while also protecting the environment.

We collected 15,595 pounds of old, broken and obsolete electronics during the summer of 2017, with nothing ending up in a landfill. At our fall 2017 paper shred events, we collected 4.75 tons of documents and at our spring 2018 shred events, we collected a total of 10.5 tons.

Also considered were the many other community drives that we hold throughout the year to help those less fortunate, including but not limited to our back-to-school drive, Warner’s Winter Warm-up, a toiletry drive and several others. One of our primary social responsibility efforts is making sack lunches and care packages for area shelters, with the prime beneficiary being St. Patrick’s Center downtown.

Second place in the Alphonse Desjardins Youth Award Program

We won this award primarily for our classroom outreach efforts – from contacting teachers and cultivating working relationships with them, to coming up with customized lesson plans and teaching students about money matters at various grade levels – which are spearheaded by our own Certified Educator in Personal Finance, Jenny Remes.

Overall, we gave 84 classroom presentations that reached 2,955 students at St. Louis metro area schools (elementary, middle and high) during the 2017-2018 school year. Because our dedication to these classroom presentations, we perennially rank second or third in the state for number of students reached as reported to the National Youth Involvement Board.

Among the other reasons our entry was selected as one of the winners: We also financially sponsor digital-based financial education at four local high schools and have a popular kids savings club program that teaches members age 12 and under the importance of saving their money. The club makes saving fun for kids, with incentive prizes given for making deposits, monthly cash drawings, and cash rewards for getting good grades in school.

More about the competition

We competed against similarly sized credit unions ($50 million-$250 million asset size category) in Missouri and Kansas. Both of our awards reflect a team effort among Arsenal staff, our members and the communities we serve.

Arsenal will be recognized at an awards banquet on September 14 during HCUA’s 2018 Convention & Annual Meeting in Kansas City. Our first-place entry now moves on to the Credit Union National Association where it will compete against first-place winners from other states for national awards!

With these two latest awards, Arsenal has now earned 15 Dora Maxwell Awards for community involvement and seven Alphonse Desjardins Awards (six for youth and one for adult financial education). We have also won nine Louise Herring Awards for Philosophy in Action.