With our community charter we have changed a couple of fields in the system to reflect the member’s qualification. Changes have been made to the system to reflect the new qualification options. For the time being, we will need to manually input this information when opening a new membership. Long term, we will update the MerdianLink interfaces to include this information in the data transfer.

One issue of immediate concern in regard to member qualification is that we had one or two staff members who somehow came to the conclusion that family members no longer qualified for membership. Unfortunately, these individuals did not confirm their interpretation and simply went about making statements to other staff to that effect without attempting to get clarification which makes it difficult to know exactly what the effect of these misstatements was in total.

As you can see below, not only are family members still eligible, the definition of family members is broader than it was under our previous charter.

Membership Qualification:
Benton, Clackamas, Columbia, Crook, Deschutes, Jefferson, Lane, Linn, Marion, Multnomah, Polk, Washington, and Yamhill. In addition the immediate family members of those who qualify above are also eligible to join which includes parents, spouse, children, stepchildren, grandparents, grandchildren, brothers, sisters, half‐siblings, aunts, uncles and domestic partners.

Please ask your manager about any questions you have regarding what it take to qualify for membership. I think it’s pretty straight forward but this is not something we can take for granted. If you are anything less than 110% certain about who can join the credit union, please have a discussion with your manager.

The following fields under member demographics need to be completed as part of the new member process. In most cases, the first selection will be “Sponsoring Group / Community” followed by Live or work in the appropriate county. If we are using family member as qualification, simply input the existing family member’s account number in the “User Defined Qualification” field.. If the new member is qualifying based on a family member who would qualify but is not currently a member place that person’s last name and zip code in the “User Defined Qualification”with a space between. For example “Launius 97089”

Membership Basis field has the following drop down options:

Membership Qualification field has the following drop down options: