Pamela Owens, CUDE
Senior Vice President, People and Organizational Development
Pamela Owens has over 20 years of experience supporting community development credit unions' delivery of products and services to underserved communities. Ms. Owens has accomplished this with special attention to innovative product development, training, and technical assistance. Since joining Inclusiv, a major focus of her work has been capacity building for small and faith-based credit unions. Her first assignment with Inclusiv, the CDCU Institute, successfully graduated eleven classes and trained more than three hundred credit union professionals. Ms. Owens also developed and coordinated Inclusiv’s Each One, Teach Many financial literacy train-the-trainer program. This national program was taught in more than forty states to over one thousand trainers. The trainers returned to their communities and taught to more than 25,000 members. Ms. Owens coordinated the Cooperative Finance Leaders for America (CFLA) fellowship program, which brought new and emerging thought-leaders to the credit union movement. Ms. Owens is also responsible for developing the African American Credit Union Initiative (AACUI), which focuses on supporting legacy MDI credit unions as they look towards sustainability and growth through membership expansion and building efficiencies through technology. Ms. Owens currently serves as Senior Vice President, People and Organizational Development, and heads the human resources department for Inclusiv. In her per view is Inclusiv’s professional development and diversity, equity and inclusion work for staff and members.
Ms. Owens served as a judge on CUNA’s Desjardins Youth and Adult Financial Literacy Committee for nine years and was as a Board Member of the National Disability Institute (NDI) for a decade. She worked on several steering committees throughout New York looking at the need for bilingual adult education programs. Ms. Owens is certified as a Credit Union Development Educator (CUDE) and was inducted into the AACUC Hall of Fame in 2019.
Prior to joining Inclusiv, Ms. Owens worked in higher education, developing post-secondary training, counseling and academic advisement programs for adults and at-risk youth. She holds a Master of Science in Adult Education and Human Resource Development and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Fordham University.