How one credit union created a generation of millionaires in Brooklyn

In the mid-1970s, Greenpoint, the northernmost neighborhood in Brooklyn and long nicknamed “Little Poland” for its large concentration of Polish immigrants, was not a place where American capital wanted to be.  

New York City was teetering toward bankruptcy. Municipal services had been slashed. Across Brooklyn, crime rates were surging, buildings were burning, and more than 300,000 residents had already fled to the suburbs. In Greenpoint specifically, the shipyards and factories that had sustained the working-class neighborhood for a century were closing. Commercial banks refused to open branches in the neighborhood, let alone write any mortgages there.

Into that vacuum stepped a group of Polish immigrants who had arrived from behind the Iron Curtain with almost nothing. In December 1976, led by Rev. Longin Tolczyk, a Polish priest, they gathered around a single desk in the corner of a Polish diner on Greenpoint Avenue and opened a credit union. They had no capital. What they had was each other, and a community tradition of mutual aid anchored by parish networks and a shared understanding that if no one else would serve them, they would serve themselves.

Fifty years later, the Polish & Slavic Federal Credit Union holds nearly $3 billion in assets, serves more than 126,000 members across 24 branches in five states, and invests roughly $3 million a year in the community that built it.  

A neighborhood abandoned, a credit union born

“It was a very difficult time for Polish immigrants because they were coming from behind the Iron Curtain,” said President and CEO Bogdan Chmielewski. “This part of Brooklyn was very dangerous. Nobody wanted to invest in this neighborhood. The commercial banks didn’t want to grant the loans, and they didn’t even open the branches there.”

Originally chartered as the Industrial and Commercial Federal Credit Union, the upstart organization gained NCUA approval on December 27, 1976. Membership deposits hit $1 million by the summer of 1978. The following year, the credit union purchased its first headquarters at 140 Greenpoint Avenue and adopted the name it carries today.

Martial law, mass emigration, and a Greenpoint real estate bet

Then came the accelerant. In 1981–82, martial law swept Poland, triggering a massive new wave of emigration. Hundreds of thousands of Poles fled to the United States, and many of them landed in Greenpoint, a neighborhood that, at its peak, was estimated to be roughly 80% Polish American. PSFCU was the only institution willing to write mortgages on properties there, properties that sold for $50,000 or $60,000 at the time.

“We still have members who purchased properties for like $50,000–60,000 in Greenpoint,” Chmielewski said. “At this point right now, you can’t find anything cheaper than $3 million in Greenpoint. We created a group of millionaires.”

The credit union’s early growth model was simple: “Whoever came from Poland landed at JFK airport. Next day they came and opened an account,” Chmielewski said. By 1987, PSFCU had crossed state lines, opening its first branch in Union, New Jersey. Illinois branches came in 2010. Pennsylvania followed in 2019, Connecticut in 2021. But even as the branch network grew, the model that had fueled the credit union’s first 25 years was about to expire.

Competing with the biggest names in banking

Poland joined the European Union. Its economy surged. It is now the 20th largest in the world. And immigration from Poland has effectively stopped.

“There is no immigration from Poland at all,” Chmielewski said. “The planes are still full, but people just come to visit, do shopping, as tourists.”

That forced a fundamental shift. Almost every new member PSFCU attracts today already has an account somewhere else, and according to the credit union’s own marketing research, most of them bank with Bank of America or JPMorgan Chase. PSFCU is competing head-to-head with the largest financial institutions in the country, and it is winning: the credit union opens between 9,000 and 10,000 new accounts every year. Net income in 2025 hit a record $24 million. The net worth ratio stands above 11%.

“I’m very often thinking what’s the source of this success,” Chmielewski said. “And I think it’s our mission.”

The competitive edge starts with service. PSFCU’s call center consistently exceeds an 80/20 standard, with more than 80% of incoming calls answered by a real person within 20 seconds. Branches stay open longer hours to accommodate working members. And the credit union’s nearly 400 employees, four-fifths of them women, are themselves part of the community they serve.

“We know the members’ needs very well because we send our children to the same schools, we go to the same parishes, we do shopping in the same Polish stores like our members,” Chmielewski said. “I think that this is one of the bases of the credit union’s success.”

$3 million a year, returned to the community

What truly separates PSFCU from its for-profit competitors is where the money goes. The credit union directs approximately $3 million annually into community support: more than $600,000 in scholarships for Polish American students (more than $8 million and 7,500 recipients since the program began in 2001), more than $900,000 in direct donations to 142 organizations, and roughly $2 million in sponsorship of cultural events, parishes, Saturday schools, and Polish American media.

The most personal expression of that commitment is the Children’s Holiday Smile campaign, a fundraiser Chmielewski himself launched in 2014. Every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, members donate at branch teller windows and online, with the proceeds going to children’s hospices and cancer foundations in Poland. The 2025 campaign raised a record $251,713, including a single $20,000 contribution from one member, bringing the 12-year total past $1.7 million.

The largest share, more than $100,000, went to the Na Ratunek Foundation (Saving Kids With Cancer) in Wrocław, which treats approximately 2,000 children per year at Poland’s most advanced pediatric oncology hospital, a facility the foundation itself built through a national fundraising campaign. The foundation’s CEO, Anna Apel, is herself a childhood cancer survivor who once received treatment at the very clinic the foundation now supports. Under her leadership, the organization is building a national center of excellence for cancer survivorship across Poland.

“These are not the credit union’s money,” Chmielewski emphasized. “These are the money which are deposited to the foundation account. We as the credit union just help to collect. Our tellers, our MSRs, they encourage the people. And our members, they are very generous.”

A different measure of success

PSFCU is opening its 25th branch, its first in Florida, this spring. It operates a representative office in Warsaw. It has been recognized by Polish heads of state, including visits from President Lech Kaczyński in 2009 and President Andrzej Duda in 2015 and 2023. By any financial measure, the institution is thriving.

But Chmielewski frames the credit union’s purpose in terms that no bank CEO would use. “Without the Polish and Slavic (Federal) Credit Union, the Polish American community wouldn’t be the same,” he said. The tax-exempt status that critics question is what makes the community investment possible. The $3 million a year in scholarships, sponsorships, and donations is not a marketing budget dressed up as charity. It is the institution’s reason for being.

Fifty years ago, a handful of immigrants sat at a desk in a diner in a neighborhood that the rest of New York had written off. Today, their credit union sends hope to children fighting cancer across the ocean, from a neighborhood once known as Little Poland, through an institution that proved what people can accomplish when they pool their resources and refuse to give up on each other. For 126,000 members, it is not abstract. It is the institution they own, the community it sustains, and the next generation it invests in.