NAFCU Hitting the Mail With Effort to Keep CURIA Percolating

ARLINGTON, Va. – NAFCU has mounted a program to build support for CURIA which resembles some of the credit union’s industry’s effort to support HR 1151. “It definitely doesn’t have the urgency of 1151,” said Murray Chanow, NAFCU’s director of political affairs “but the last thing I want to see happen with CURIA is for the bill to be introduced and then just lay there. I want to keep interest in it high,” he said. NAFCU has chosen postcards (see sidebar), plain white postcards which either thank Representatives Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) for introducing CURIA or for urging support for the legislation. The postcard’s target will be members of the House Financial Services Committee. “My goal is that when the bill comes up before the [House Financial Services] Committee, every one of the members can know that they have received plenty of communications from the credit unions and credit union members about that bill,” he said. Much of Washington legislation can enter a legislative black hole after it is introduced, Chanow explained. Without a lot of activity around it, legislation can lose momentum and slip under the radar. The postcard effort is a way for credit unions to keep interest around the legislation high. Chanow reported that 500 of the postcards were already sent from the organization’s most recent Volunteers Conference in San Francisco and he anticipated another 2,000 being sent from the organization’s annual conference in Las Vegas in July. But the real work of sending the cards will come from member credit unions and credit union members themselves, Chanow explained. NAFCU has made the postcard available to its members on its Web site so that member credit unions can download the post cards and print them out on card stock themselves for their members to fill out in their lobbies. “It’s always better to get cards from the credit unions in the member’s district than to get all of them from a Washington D.C. area address,” Chanow said, adding his personal goal is to get 10,000 cards sent to Committee members and other Representatives before the end of this September. -