MEMBER PROFILE

The Credit Path

Credit Path Illustration

As Alternatives Credit Union has grown and changed, our use of the Credit Path model of financial empowerment has changed as well. Originally developed by Bill Myers as a way of understanding our members' financial situations and incorporating that into our business planning, the Credit Path describes where people are situated at various points along a continuum between poverty and self-sufficiency. Our job, as a community development financial institution, is to help our members move along that continuum by empowering them to make decisions, and offering opportunities, that will move them towards financial self-sufficiency.<

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The good works of Alternatives is being showcased nationwide as part of "Indivisible." One of 12 organizations selected to depict grassroots democracy in America, Alternatives? stories are told by our members and staff in narration and photographs.

Indivisible is a project of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, and funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Indivisible: Stories of American Community debuted in October as a museum exhibition in Chicago, and as a major trade book, Local Heroes Changing America. The Terra Museum was the first of eight museums around the country displaying nearly two hundred original photographs and an audio guide with excerpts from recorded interviews. Though the museum tour is not scheduled to hit Ithaca, the postcard version opened in Center Ithaca in December. Designed to take the words and images of Indivisible to a broader audience, the postcard installations (brought to Ithaca and set up with a lot of help from Ithaca Downtown Partnership and Center Ithaca) feature racks of free postcards and an interactive computer stations that allows visitors to record their own stories of community.

"Indivisible portrays the struggle to build our democracy at the ground level-connecting our everyday lives with our civic lives-and documents how, with hard work, it can be done," said Rebecca W. Rimel, president and CEO of The Pew Charitable Trusts.

The project also includes an educators-guide, the booklet Documenting Community Action, a guide to producing a documentary and local archives. I highly recommend you check out the web site, www.indivisible.org where you can hear the stories of Alternatives and the other local initiatives to better their communities. From the website, you can purchase the book (feel free to look at it at the Credit Union), send e-postcards, and find out if the museum or postcard exhibit is crossing your path.