“What good it is to learn how to be happy for myself, if I do not also help my friends and neighbors to be happy? What good is it to find my one inner peace, if I treat others in disrespectful ways? Does it make sense to learn how to be happy if I do not have a healthy planet on which to live?” (Marujo, et al., 2017).
In regards to personal finance and well-being, what good is it to be successful in your own finances if other people are not financially well enough to create a better market of goods and well-being?
What good is individual financial success if you are unable to use that success in a way that promotes sustainable success for a collective?
“If we want to contribute to the betterment of our endangered world, a more collective approach to well-being is best. It can be dangerous to develop positive individual dimensions of well-being without also considering the effects they have on others and the common good. Imagine someone who is so devoted to feeling good and promoting his or her positive emotions that he or she is constantly buying new material goods. He or she is embracing a materialistic outlook, which is actually associated with lower individual levels of well-being and depletes scarce earth resources. It’s fine to develop one’s positive qualities and a pleasant style of life, but if we are not also contributing to the benefit of others, society, and the planet, pursuing individual well-being alone is insufficient.” If someone “is so deeply concentrated in self-development and the inner world that he or she is disconnected from important social issues such as the climate crisis, inequalities among people, or violence against vulnerable people, is that person truly thriving?” (Marujo, et al., 2017).
How can we thrive if we have no community to thrive in?
“For this reason, we advocate a ‘positive community’ approach to well-being that endorses conversations among different people: those who have a high social status and those who don’t; those who have a voice and those who don’t; those with power and the ones who deserve to be empowered. We therefore try to bring together people from different groups based on differences in age, gender, cultural and social group of origin, and functions and roles on campus to increase the potential for meaningful change” (Marujo, et al., 2017).
The positive community approach can be used in the concepts of personal finance and well-being as finance is such an integral part of our lives, and it affects almost every aspect of it. Everyone is affected by money in one way or another, and understanding the different experiences people have in regards to personal finance can help us understand how to create meaningful change in this capacity and move towards a thriving community.
In combination with understanding the experience of personal finance in the collective, we also have to understand how communities improve their well-being. “Community wellbeing is the combination of social, economic, environmental, cultural, and political conditions identified by individuals and their communities as essential for them to flourish and fulfill their potential” (Delagran).
There are three aspects to community well-being and those are connectedness, livability, and equity. In connectedness, communities must offer social engagement and trust. In livability, communities must offer infrastructure that allows people to participate and flourish like housing, transportation, education, etc… In equity, communities must be “supported by values of diversity, social justice, and individual empowerment” (Delagran).
In the context of banking, personal finance, and well-being, this means that we must offer a way for people to be connected with the bank while also providing proper infrastructure for communities. This also has to support the fact that there must be values of individual empowerment in the diversity that our communities have. In this sense, we ask how design may begin to tackle the complexity of what is needed by consumers of the bank in regard to their involvement in the bank and their own personal finances.
References:
Delagran, L. What Is Community Wellbeing? University of Minnesota. https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/what-community-wellbeing
Marujo, H., Neto, L. (2017). Exploring the Concept and Practices of Felicitas Publica at Lisbon University: A Community-Based Relational Approach to Well-being. Quality of Life in Communities of Latin Countries, 15-35. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-53183-0_2
