Kingston Community Credit Union

VI BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 4 loans for anyone who couldn’t meet payments.” “We helped about a third of our mortgage holders with deferrals. All of them got by without losses or loss of homes or ran into trouble. All of that got rolled up, roughly by the middle of 2022. There was nobody who needed that anymore and they’re all still in their homes and that’s the key thing,” Dessau reflects. KCCU’s operations go far beyond just serving its members’ financial needs. “We’re not just a business,” Dessau maintains. “Our purpose is also community engagement. It’s part of our mission and part of our strategy and part of the definition of a cooperative. Here at KCCU, it’s the staff who make most of the decisions about who they want to be involved with because there’s no end to needs and you have to pick and choose. But if it doesn’t include something of benefit to the community, it’s not for us. It’s got to have that value proposition.” Most recently, a lot of KCCU’s efforts and donations have gone to local women’s shelters and food-sharing projects in the area’s indigenous community. It has also partnered with the City of Kingston’s Community Climate Action Fund. “It’s a fund that seeks donations to help all our cooperatives, non-profits, and charitable agencies in town to do green projects for themselves,” Dessau says. “You’re busy serving your clients, and you’re busy fundraising, and you have little time to think about your own facilities – your office, your vehicle, your needs. This project is to enable all those organizations to become green themselves – whether it’s their physical infrastructure, the materials they use, or the sources they use for their services. The fund has helped a lot of the charitable organizations in town to become green in their own operations. Climate change is a matter that we have to have on board on the same level as all the other stakeholders: staff, suppliers, members, and the community. The environment is part of our mission.” Dessau talks about what lies ahead for KCCU. “One of the things that are always challenging when you’re small is on the one hand, we’re about personal service – we don’t have phone answering machines; we answer the phones ourselves. We K INGSTON COMMUNI TY CREDI T UNION