Salal Credit Union is committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion for its members, staff, and the community. Within Salal, each team develops and pursues EDI goals annually. This year, Salal’s leadership has challenged every team to think about the meaning of EDI more broadly, focusing on ways to increase access, improve outcomes, and reduce barriers for all.
For 2025, Salal’s Business Services team has drafted nine EDI goals, reflecting a wide array of projects and initiatives that will help us reduce obstacles and promote good outcomes for everyone. These goals are grouped under three categories: Members (current and potential), Community, and Employees. In addition, our EDI goals include striving for innovation and better collaboration with other departments within Salal.
To benefit our Members, Business Services is pursuing three goals. Based on last year’s success, we’re continuing our outreach to Social Equity cannabis licensees to open new Social Equity accounts in 2025. Second, we’ve also launched our new Refer A Business Member program, which provides special benefits both to the referring business member and the newly referred business member.
Third, we continue to provide member education by offering financial information and technical assistance to Social Equity licensees. We’re partnering with community organizations and state agencies, as well as designating a Salal ambassador to champion the Social Equity program. And we’re continuing to publish our quarterly newsletter—which we thank you for reading!
Looking outward toward our community, we built upon our work last year through volunteering and engagement. In 2024, Business Services team members completed 221.9 hours of volunteer and engagement activities in the various communities in which we live. This year, we’re challenging ourselves to reach a higher goal of 250 hours total for the team.
But that’s not all. Salal Credit Union has a benefit offering Volunteer Time Off to all staff, and our leadership has issued a goal to every team: at least 25% of each team should utilize all of their VTO by August 31. A couple of us have already met this goal, and the rest of the Business Services team is actively looking for volunteer opportunities that would meet the policy requirement of serving at a 501(c)(3) organization. If you volunteer at a favorite 501(c)(3), please let us know!
Finally, Business Services has also created four EDI goals that focus on improving efficiency and outcomes for our Employees, and we’re making significant progress so far. We’ve completed our goal to automate our ACH (Automated Clearing House transfer) processes, which helps us review our members’ temporary ACH limit increases faster and reduces overall risk. Additionally, we reorganized our business members’ files to reflect an easier filing system, allowing us to serve our members more quickly.
Two other Employee-focused EDI goals are in progress. We’re working on creating Career Maps to help every team member reach their potential, increasing our team’s efficiency by retaining our investments in our people. We also created an EDI Task Force to spur new ideas for EDI activities. We’ve met three times as a group, brainstormed about a dozen great ideas, and have begun to research and develop those ideas into possible new goals or actions for our members and community.
And we’re happy to hear your ideas, as well. If you have thoughts or requests about how we can reduce barriers for our members or increase access for the community, please reach out to your Account Officer or Business Services. We thank you for being a Salal member!
