Published Monday 21 March 2016 at 13:53
Staff and volunteers at Jubilee Tower Credit Union are celebrating again after winning a prestigious ‘Red Rose Award’. The Credit Union, which is a not-for-profit co-operative offering financial services across the Borough, won the Lancashire Business View award for all its efforts over the past year.
It is proving to be quite a successful few months for the co-operative established by Darwen’s Sudellside Community Association in 1996. In November they won two international Credit Union awards and since then they have celebrated hitting the impressive £1m mark in savings and their 20th anniversary.
Chair of the Credit Union, Janice Parker, said “We are truly delighted. We had been nominated in two categories, Best Not-For-Profit Business and Best Financial Business, and lost out to two notable organisations but then they reached the final award of the evening, a grand culmination of the night, and they read out our name! To say we were stunned would be an understatement!”
“We have done a lot of amazing work in supporting the community of Blackburn with Darwen over the past twenty years and this award reflects the successes we had had in impacting on local people’s lives. Our volunteers, staff and partner agencies like Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council can be proud that this impact is valued and prominent publications like Lancashire Business View recognise this.”
Jubilee Tower Credit Union offers a range of services such as savings, loans and school savings schemes. They also have a very popular Payroll Deduction scheme for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council staff to save or repay loans directly from their wages.
The awards ceremony, held at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens, is now in its sixth year and looks to reward the ‘best of Lancashire’ businesses. The judges were particularly impressed by Jubilee Tower Credit Union’s work in support financially-excluded vulnerable people through its ‘Managed Account’ scheme and an innovative Employee Benefit loans scheme with Darwen-based engineering firm WEC Group which has had a massive impact on their staff retention & recruitment costs.