Igniting Potential

If you’re like me, you are jazzed about how much our up-and-coming future leaders — aka our Young Professionals (YP) — have been engaged over the last few years. You see them at events, on social and digging in and working at the chapter level. I have been fortunate to spend a lot of time with them over the last several years and it’s clear to me that they love this industry. It’s up to us, as current leaders, to make sure they stay invested and continue their career with us in our amazing movement.

If you attended our recent Executive Summit, you may have heard me talk about an upcoming MCUL competition that I’m really excited about. It’s called CU Spark Tank and it’s a YP-based competition that I think will tap into our talented group of YPs for the progress of our industry.

Unsurprisingly, many of our YPs have big ideas, but maybe they’re not yet in a position to put those into action. Well, the idea of CU Spark Tank is to challenge participating YPs to showcase those ideas. Specifically, we want to use this competition to see their unique perspectives while they provide insight into what they think is the “next big thing” for the credit union movement.

Maybe they have concepts on marketing the next generation of members, theories about how to reach underserved community members via technology, fresh perspectives on human resources or something else entirely. I’m excited to see all the different angles YPs take on this “next big thing” prompt.

CU Spark Tank will play out at three levels: after competing at the chapter level, semi-finalists will compete at the YP Conference in June, with finalists presenting their ideas on Center Stage during our 2025 ACE in Grand Rapids. While this competition is designed to be mutually beneficial for both participants and their credit unions, who will be exposed to these new ideas, I also think the experience YPs get from presenting at both the chapter level and at our annual conference will go a long way to instilling confidence, growing industry knowledge and equipping them with additional tools as they pursue their path to being an industry leader.

I really hope that your credit union is getting in on this and that you are encouraging team members 40 and under (membership in a YP group is not required) to check this out and throw their hat in the ring.

For more information about the competition, you can visit our CU Spark Tank website.

If you have any questions about the competition, how to hold an internal competition or anything CU Spark Tank-related, please reach out to Haleigh Krombeen.

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