My name is Matt Field. I work here at CCBank. I started as the CFO and within the last 3 years became the president and CFO of the bank. Being a community bank, we feel it’s, you know, it’s priority number one, being a part of that community. We like to participate in the schools. We like to, you know, do different financial education, stuff like that. You know, we like to be very engaged with the community.
The Children’s First Education Fund for me was honestly just an absolute no-brainer. It was a kind of like a win win win situation for us. You know, had a community impact, uh, and then it it was not additional dollars out of our pocket. So, what it was is it was a transfer of our Utah State income tax obligation from paying it or paying it directly to the uh Children’s First Education Fund. Uh and then lastly, the benefit of the CRA, the Community Reinvestment Act, and being able to satisfy some of that obligation that we have from our federal regulators to uh reinvest in our community.
It really resonated with me personally because I have a son, our oldest son, uh his name is Preston. When he was, you know, maybe a year and a half old, you know, everything was developing a little bit slower, right? His walking, his talking, and we had early intervention from, I think, from the state of Utah and identified fairly quickly that he was autistic and uh he’s high functioning, but um you know has some trouble in the public education system. And it’s not that there’s not good educators, but there’s just so many students and it’s, you know, it’s not their primary expertise working with um, you know, a kid like him with with autism.
And so we were able to uh to get him into a specialty program uh with a local charter school and and help him really get the the specialized education that he needs. So the CFEF for me really resonated because it was an opportunity to help other kids like our son Preston that have uh you know challenges learning and special needs.
Be my recommendation as the president and CFO of CCBank that that other banks out there look into the Children’s First Education Fund. This is, you know, taking your money from paying it to the Utah State Tax Commission over to the CFEF and getting that CRA benefit and then the press and community relation benefit of being able to go out and say, “Hey, we donated $2.25 million to the CFEF”, and and taking that news also to our employees. I actually had an employee reach out to me and say, “This is amazing. You know, I I love working for a bank that returns to the community.
