Our roots, our commitment, and orange pens.

It began with a dream, thirty-six dollars, a desk, and two chairs. In 1932, sixteen Portland schoolteachers formed the Portland Teachers Credit Union in what was then the High School of Commerce, known today as Cleveland High School. Hugh Stout was named the credit union’s first Treasurer. They were classroom teachers by day and credit union builders after hours, pooling their savings to give fellow educators a safe place to bank — a place built on trust, mutual support, and the belief that everyone deserves access to fair financial services.

That founding spirit shaped everything that came next. Through the lean years of the Great Depression and into the challenges of World War II, the credit union not only endured, it deepened its commitment to the community. Members pooled their resources to purchase more than one hundred thousand dollars in war bonds — the equivalent of more than 1.8 million dollars today — while many of the original founders joined the thousands of women welding ships at the Portland and Vancouver shipyards.

By the 1950s, the credit union movement was gaining momentum across the country, and PTCU was helping lead the way. In 1952, Hugh Stout offered a course on credit unions through the Oregon State System of Higher Education, teaching a new generation the principles that had guided our founding. Five years later, founding member Martha Shull — by then serving as president of the National Education Association — traveled the country advocating for teachers’ credit unions nationwide. From sixteen founders and a single desk, an idea had grown into a movement, and a movement had grown into a community.

By the late 1990s, one truth had become impossible to ignore: many of the educators shaping our neighborhoods could no longer afford to live in them. So in 1999, PTCU introduced the Homeroom mortgage program — a first-of-its-kind offering that gave educators a zero-percent-down path to homeownership. It was our way of giving something back to the people who give so much.

Homeroom was more than a mortgage product. It was a reflection of who we’ve always been. Founded by teachers, for teachers, the credit union had spent nearly seventy years helping educators build financial stability, and Homeroom took that mission a step further — helping teachers plant roots in the same communities where they taught, coached, and mentored. For many of our members, it was the moment a first home stopped feeling out of reach.

The program’s spirit lives on in the work we do today. In 2025 alone, OnPoint financed 1,079 first-time homebuyer mortgages across Oregon and Southwest Washington, and we continue to invest in programs that make homeownership possible for the people who make our communities stronger. Every first home starts somewhere. For a lot of Oregon educators, it started with Homeroom.

By the early 2000s, PTCU had grown far beyond its original classroom roots. Generations of members — teachers, their families, their neighbors, and eventually entire communities — had helped shape a credit union that no longer belonged only to educators. It belonged to everyone we served. And it was time for that reality to be reflected in more than just our membership rolls.

In 2005, we were granted a community charter in Oregon and Southwest Washington, opening our field of membership to anyone who lives, works, worships, or attends school in the region. The following year, we made the change official in name, too. In 2006, Portland Teachers Credit Union became OnPoint Community Credit Union — a name that reflected who we were becoming while keeping our founding mission at the center. The word “community” wasn’t decorative. It was a promise.

Twenty years later, we have almost sixty branches serving over 650,000 members across the region. We’ve grown, but we haven’t drifted. We’re still the same credit union those sixteen teachers started with thirty-six dollars and a desk, and we’re still just as invested in education. The annual OnPoint Prize celebrates the region’s top educators, our support for the KGW School Supply Drive helped 40,000 local students start the 2025 school year with what they needed, and every day, in branches and classrooms and living rooms across Oregon and Southwest Washington, our members carry the story forward.

Ask a longtime PTCU member what they remember most about walking into a branch, and there’s a good chance they’ll mention the pen. Introduced in the 1980s and a fixture well into the early 2000s, the Orange Pen was small, ordinary, and completely unmistakable. Its bright color and distinctive triangular shape made it easy to spot on a teller counter, and even easier to accidentally take home — tucked into a purse, a coat pocket, or a kitchen drawer where it lived for years afterward as a quiet little reminder of the credit union that had welcomed you in.

Over time, the Orange Pen became something more than an office supply. It became a symbol of who PTCU was: a place where every member mattered, where service was personal, and where showing up for your community was simply the way things were done. When the pens eventually disappeared from branches in the mid-2000s, they didn’t stop showing up in members’ homes — or in members’ memories. We’ve heard the stories for years.

So we’re bringing the Orange Pen back. Not as a giveaway, and not as a marketing gimmick, but as a small, meaningful gesture of gratitude to the members and community who built this credit union alongside us. It’s a nod to our origins as Portland Teachers Credit Union, to our long-standing connection to educators and students, and to the local, personal service we’ve been providing for more than 90 years. Keep an eye out at your local branch, at community events, and at moments throughout the year. If you find one, we hope it brings back a good memory — or starts a new one.