SAN JOSE, Calif. – In perhaps the crowning moment of the Bank Transfer Day movement, officials with Most Holy Trinity Church today will deposit $3 million of church funds withdrawn from Bank of America into the new branch of Self-Help FCU, a start-up community development credit union.
The huge funds transfer was prompted by the banking giant’s recalcitrance in helping troubled homeowners among the church’s parishioners restructure their mortgages and the Self-Help organization’s long history in helping underserved communities, according to Father Eduardo Samaniego, the Jesuit pastor who heads the church.
The group is moving funds from some 12 accounts the church and its school had held in BofA – whose ill-fated move to charge a $5 monthly debit fee spurred the nationwide bank transfer movement – into the fledgling CDCU’s new micro-branch, said Father Samaniego, known among his parish as “Father Eddie.” “Yes, we’re divesting from BofA and we’re moving it into a branch called micro branch, which was founded by Self-Help,” Father Eddie told Credit Union Journal Friday.
“I’m personally divesting my own accounts from BofA and putting it into the micro branch,” he added.
The micro branch is a pilot project of Self-Help’s aimed at extending low-cost services, such as check cashing, remittances, and deposit-based checking and savings accounts, to the unbanked and underserved. The micro branch offers extended weekend hours Friday through Sunday to serve working class people. An East San Jose pilot is the first of a planned four micro branches for the area.
Father Eddie said he and his parishioners, many of whom are low-income Hispanics, were drawn to the newly formed West Coast affiliate of North Carolina’s Self-Help CU by the original credit union’s dedication to low-income African-American communities in North Carolina and the work Self-Help’s Center for Responsible Lending has done to combat predatory lending in mortgages. “It was founded on social justice principals and continues to operate out of that,” he stated. “Their main goal continues to be of service, and not gouging like the major banks are.”
The BofA loss of deposits makes the three-year-old CDCU, created from a conglomeration of six troubled low-income credit unions in Northern California, one of the biggest beneficiaries of Bank Transfer Day, which saw hundreds of thousands of consumers withdraw their funds from bank giants such as BofA and deposit them with credit unions and community banks.
Oakland-based Self-Help FCU is sponsored by the Durham, N.C.-based Center for Community Self-Help, which also sponsors Self-Help CU, the Self-Help Ventures Fund and the consumer lobby Center for Responsible Lending.
