Recently, the credit union celebrated the groundbreaking of our seventh branch, which will be located on Clarksville Pike in Nashville.  Weather permitting, we hope the new branch will be open this summer.  Construction is expected to move along quickly, because the branch is a modular building, mostly pre-built before it arrived here.  We plan on adding our signature columns and white front to the building, which is the first new branch for us since the Greenbrier location opened two years ago.

William Douglas of our Old Hickory branch will serve as Manager.

Members who travel Briley Parkway near west Nashville will find the branch conveniently located, because it is very close to the junction of Briley and Clarksville Pike.  Saturday hours are planned for this branch.

The branch address will be 4123 Clarksville Pike, Nashville, TN 37218.

Click here to see updated pictures of the branch construction!

Our new friends at Lightning 100’s Team Green are all about adventure…and the environment.  This community of Tennesseans love to get out and experience outdoor activities together.  Right now, they’re really stoked about being accepted into the Nashvile Red Bull Flugtag event being held at Riverfront Park on June 23.  Visit their website at teamgreenonline.com and check out some of the great “green” events they have scheduled this year.

Whether you volunteer or get “volunteered”, if you live in Tennessee, you probably find yourself involved in all sorts of activities.  In my case, I’m usually the volunteer and I recruit my friends to do events with me.  At the credit union, all 90 of our employees are encouraged to volunteer in our communities each month.  We grumbled a bit at this at first because we all have families and plenty of outside activities, but once we got started, we realized how much fun this “work” was.

Our most recent volunteer event was the Old Hickory Letter Carrier Food Drive, held on May 12.  A team of 15 credit union employees and their families spent that Saturday gathering the food donated by residents in the 37138 Zip.  We collected nearly 7 tons of food for our local Community Outreach Center in Rayon City!  This should help the Center fill requests for food until nearly 2008.  It’s hard to describe how good this project made all the volunteers feel.  We all plan to help again next year, and we felt good about getting our families invovled…showing our children how good it feels to help others.

I’ll write about some of the things we’re involved in here occasionally.  Post a comment and tell us what you’re doing in your community.

It does seem like everyone’s looking for ways to be “greener” lately, and Old Hickory Credit Union is no exception.  Just recently we introduced a new checking account called Green Checking, an account that encourages our members to go paperless.  Our logo is a tree after all.  Maybe we should try to save a few.

When you think about it, the amount of paper we use here at Old Hickory is staggering.  We send out about 17,000 paper statements each month, complete with two pages of statement paper, a newsletter and an envelope.  And, we know that most people’s statements lay around on the kitchen table for weeks without being looked at or get filed away in boxes that take up space.  So, we decided to make electronic e-statements a requirement for our Green Checking.  We’ve eliminated more than 1,000 statements so far!

We saved a lot of the other type of green by eliminating those paper statements, too.  So, in typical credit union fashion, we decided to pass that savings along to our Green Checking members in the form of ATM fee refunds.  Now, our members are even saving gas because they’re not driving farther to find an ATM that’s free.

Now that we’re feeling green, we’re starting to look for other ways we can reduce paper waste here.  In our telephone Service Center, we don’t print and mail receipts unless the member needs one, and we often use outdated letter head to print reports on instead of throwing it away.  We swapped from bottled water to filtered water to eliminate those plastic bottles that get thrown away, too. 

Write and tell us what you’re doing to be more environmentally friendly.  We would love to hear from you.

 Malinda Warchus, Assistant VP – Marketing, Old Hickory Credit Union

We’re pleased to be one of the first credit unions in the blog space and would like to welcome you to our little home.  This blog exists as a communication tool — to let you know about the cool things we are doing out in the community and for you to let us know what you think!

For those of you new to blogging, you can read and contribute to any of the discussions we start here.  Clicking the title of a particular blog entry will show the comments that other people have written in.  To add your own comment, simply fill out the comment form at the bottom of the page.  Have fun!