UniBank launches $2M charitable foundation

Photo | Courtesy of UniBank UniBank announced its new charitable foundation at an event Wednesday night. At the ceremony (from left) are Frank Carroll, UniBank Board Chair Timothy Wickstrom, UniBank CEO Michael Welch, Jim Coughlin, and James Kenary IV.

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By Sloane M. Perron

UniBank, headquartered in Whitinsville, announced the launch of the UniBank Charitable Foundation after a Wednesday event marking the milestone.

The UniBank Charitable Foundation has $2 million in funds, and its giving will supplement the approximately $750,000 in annual community giving UniBank already distributes to local charities and organizations.

The Uxbridge Historical Society, Northbridge Historical Society, and Whitinsville Community Center were the first recipients of the UniBank Charitable Foundation.

Plans for a charitable foundation were already in the works before the coronavirus pandemic, but the events of the last two years highlighted the importance of community.

Historically, UniBank was founded to help local mill workers in town save their earnings, and eventually the institution grew to offer these middle-class residents accessibility to credit. For the past 150 years, UniBank has focused on giving back to the communities which it serves, said Michael Welch, CEO of UniBank.

“We want to thank all of those people who bank with us because without them we would not be able to do this,” Welch said.

The foundation's annual awards will be derived using 5% of the foundation’s prior year's trailing average, which means the more the bank’s assets grow, the more the bank’s charitable giving grows as well, said Welch.

“We have a focus on reinvesting those funds into the community, so in essence the people we serve are our shareholders,” he said.

With $2.2 billion in local deposits UniBank is the second largest bank headquartered in Central Massachusetts, after Middlesex Savings Bank in Natick, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. as of June 30.