MADISON, Wis. — Dr. Robert Hoel, the former long-time executive director of the Filene Research Institute and this year's winner of the Herb Wegner Lifetime Achievement Award, said he fell in love with credit unions primarily by seeing the impact they made in the lives of their members.
"I was teaching business at Colorado State University in the late 1970s and the university had a credit union," Hoel recalled during a break from skiing with friends on an annual trip back in his beloved Colorado. "And a lot of the people who worked there didn't make a lot of money. They were custodians and cooks in the cafeteria. I got to know and appreciate the value of credit unions by observing how much of a difference our credit union made in their lives."
Hoel got involved with the credit union, starting first by serving on the credit committee and then on the board, where he eventually served as chairman for four years between 1987 and 1991. Over the course of that time, he became aware of the work of the Filene Research Institute and steadily more active with the credit union until, finally, he left the university in 1991 to become the executive director of the Filene Research Institute.
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Looking back on it now, Hoel acknowledged that the decision to leave a tenured teaching position at a university in the mountains of Colorado to take up the post in the flat land of Wisconsin struck many of his friends and colleagues as somewhat bizarre.
But Hoel explained that he had grown restless with his job in Colorado and that, after his daughter had left home for college, felt less like remaining in the strictly academic teaching and research field.
Instead, Hoel chose to begin working at Filene and start guiding credit unions through the waves of change that Hoel said he and others could see coming. Among the earliest challenges was helping credit unions resolve conflicts ranging from overlapping fields of membership and subsequent conflict.
"We would have meetings where people were shouting at each other and accusing one another so the tension was really quite high," Hoel recalled. But with the help of the Filene researchers, he added, CUs were able to learn how to resolve the conflicts and to influence the NCUA to adopt a different and more flexible approach to fields of membership.
Helping CUs navigate their way through changing economic and regulatory circumstances gradually became a hallmark of Hoel's career with Filene, leading researchers through investigations covering a variety of topics–including the suggestion that credit unions were not serving lower-income members.
A highlight of Hoel's time at Filene came when the institute provided some of the research into the impact of a Supreme Court decision that challenged credit unions' ability to serve multiple groups. Filene led a research effort to show that the Supreme Court's decision unfairly discriminated against employees of smaller firms and in favor of employees from larger ones. Filene's work provided the underpinning for the CU industry effort that cumulated in HR 1151.
But Hoel and Filene didn't stop there. Over the years Hoel continued to help lead the institute to keep on looking to the future and the next waves of change that credit unions would have to confront.
Notable in this category was the Center for Credit Union Innovation, which Filene founded to explore innovations and programs, including the practical uses of some of its research findings. This led the institute to launch the Ideas, Innovation and Implementation project that became known as the i3 research and development effort.
Filene also served as the incubator for REAL Solutions, an effort to help credit unions develop and implement programs for serving lower-income members and communities with products and services tailored to their needs with assistance from specialists. That project has since moved to the National Credit Union Foundation, but it was the Filene Research Institute and Hoel that brought it to the point where it could be passed on as a full-fledged program.
Now, after having left full-time leadership of Filene, Hoel said he is still working but focusing on research he has wanted to do and not the administrative work that can easily take up an executive director's time. He also declined to give his precise age, saying only that he is over 50.
"You know people type you by your age," he remarked. "And anyway it's irrelevant because I have said for a long time that I don't plan to really retire, just to do different things."
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