Annette Snedaker
Helping “Plant” the Mission at First Green Bank
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When we asked Annette Snedaker to talk about the role she assumed last June as First Green Bank’s director of marketing and strategic relations, it was our intention to touch only in passing on her experience as a United Methodist Church minister. After all, what bearing could her spiritual life have on her life as a banker? As it turns out, quite a lot.
First Green Bank CEO Ken LaRoe met Annette in April 2015 when he engaged her as an event planner for his Art of Medicine fundraiser. She had just moved to Central Florida from upstate New York. But her earlier success as a church planter—creating new churches and congregations where none previously existed—had as much to do with why he recruited her to work full-time with the bank as her event-planning skills. “I guess he thought that if I could get people to go to church in this day and age, I might be able to help people live deeper into First Green Bank’s mission and build relationships with us based on that,” Annette reports.
Before moving to Florida, Annette founded a United Methodist church in Binghamton, New York, overcoming along the way the many self-imposed obstacles that kept people from getting in touch with their spiritual selves. “A lot of people want spirituality but they don't know where to start,” she explains, “So I grew a church out of developing one in other than traditional ways.” She did that by removing those barriers, by meeting people where they “were.” She held church in restaurants and bars, inviting people to come in t-shirts and jeans, saying it was okay to bring their sometimes disruptive children and to come late rather than not come at all. She found that the enthusiasm sparked from this informal alternative way of building a spiritual community became self-generating. Pretty soon she was able to step back from actively recruiting new members. “Once people got excited, they came up with awesome ideas. They made it grow on their own and the mission drove itself,” she reports. |
Translating her church planting skills to her work at First Green Bank, Annette looks for informal, “low-barrier” ways to create the space for bank staff to step back from their hectic workaday lives and come together around the bank’s regenerative mission.
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For example, staff members who are mission ambassadors typically lead regularly monthly “Lunch & Learns” Annette has recently organized. At recent lunch sessions, management associate Kelly Kruso shared her knowledge about the Global Alliance for Banking on Values (GABV) and at another credit analyst Justin Allender talked about his visit to the Bolivian microfinance institution BancoSol, as a member of the GABV Leadership Academy. At December’s lunch and learn, Year in the Life Mentor Carol Sanford talked about what it means to be a “Regenerative Human,” in preparation for her visit with staff in late January. In early 2016, Amanda Rich and a group of her colleagues, will be reporting on what First Green Bank can learn from practices at another GABV bank, Beneficial State Bank. Even bank board members are asking to join these “pause and reflect” lunch sessions. Annette is sensing that the bank’s mission is beginning to spark inside the bank and is radiating out into its client community. “What we are coming to realize,” she says, “is that we need to take the time to educate people about what the bank stands for. We need to allow them to ask questions and to get to know us and trust us. That’s not easy.” While people might trust the bank as a safe place to park their money or borrow some, she said, “the hard part is getting people to connect with the mission side of the bank. |
“Our mission is about people’s passion for something that has nothing to do with a bottom line. You need to get people to believe in it and that can be challenging. You have to grab their hearts.
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I think a lot of us at the bank are coming to realize that the pot of gold isn’t just about money, it is a lot bigger than that.”
As Ken recruits more mission-aligned staff to the bank, they are eager to go deeper with the mission on both a personal and professional level, Annette reports. “So now as we build up the momentum internally—through education, collaborations, and conversations—we are finding we can also now live the mission more with our clients,” she says. |
“We are inviting them to ‘come as they are,’ and then to go on this journey of deeper regenerative practice with us.”
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FGB Credit Analyst Justin Allender
"I am not saying we put the environment ahead of the economy. I am talking about making ethical and moral decisions as part of our economic decisions." READ MORE |
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FGB Teller Jessica Schwarz
"We see this new account as our way of being there for people in our community who are living paycheck to paycheck." READ MORE |
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Kelly Krusoe
“We are all trying to make a difference in the community, to be focused on sustainability and not just on making money." READ MORE |
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Nancy Little, Winter Park Branch Manager
“What the bank does in the community really speaks to me. I feel it has made me a better person." READ MORE |
