HALES CORNER, Wis. – Some corporate leaders admit that the average member of Congress might not be aware of what a corporate credit union is, but they're working on changing that. The Association of Corporate Credit Unions has a new program in place to try and get members of Congress to visit corporate credit unions more often. That's just what happened earlier this month in Wisconsin at Corporate Central CU. "Actually maybe two or three years ago the ACCU and the corporates got together and said we have such unique needs from a lobbying point of view, we need to make sure people on important committees know about corporates and what we do," said Corporate Central CU President/CEO Marc Schroeder. Schroeder's corporate recently played host to Representatives Mark Green (R-Wis.) and Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Green is on the House Financial Services Committee and Ryan is on the House Ways and Means Committee. "We spent about an hour with each of them giving them some background about what a corporate is. Paul Ryan, our representative here, is very astute financially, so intuitively he knew there had to be something like us for credit unions around, but he was amazed that in his own district there is a $1.5 to $2 billion financial institution that affects the lives of the 1.9 million credit union members in Wisconsin," said Schroeder. Schroeder, a former Marine, said Congressman Green had just returned from a trip to Iraq, which made for some compelling conversation. He said Green was very interested in hearing about what the corporate does in its role to protect homeland security. Interestingly, the corporate used a graphic of the popular cartoon character Sponge Bob Squarepants to illustrate the role a corporate plays in "soaking up" or "squeezing out" excess liquidity. [email protected]