My team and I have an intense desire to make financial information accessible, engaging, practical, and enjoyable. Trust me. It’s liberating and powerful when you understand your relationship with money.
Having recently joined a social purpose program by the United Way Social Purpose Institute of B.C, We realized that Athena Wealth and Legacy Solutions along with Athena Planning perfectly fits the definition of a social purpose business. Aimed at organizations that want to define or redefine their core societal reason for being, as a team we have joined their most recent innovators cohort. We hope this program will unleash Athena Wealth’s potential to create positive social change by evoking social purpose in every client that engages in our services.
From speaking to many of our clients, we know we help them create lifelong dreams and turn them into reality. Having sound financial knowledge allows us to not only take care of ourselves but also help our families, our communities, the environment, and our broader society.
In our last blog, we spoke about the rewarding aspect of acts of service and how they’re not only a gift to others but also to ourselves. Ingrained in all of us is a desire to find social purpose in life, and while this purpose can change, our ability to achieve it always has a financial aspect. Today we want to discuss social purpose more deeply and how it relates to our mission to empower Canadians to make informed decisions about their money.
The Inner Development Goals
Central to the social purpose ethos is what the United Nations calls The Inner Development Goals (IDGs). Related to the more widely-known Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the IDGs refer to how individuals can make a lasting change from a social and cultural standpoint. We can easily apply these five goals to philanthropy and legacy planning by looking closely at each area.
Being
This is about our inner compass and having a deeply felt sense of responsibility and commitment to the values and purpose of humanity. While everyone has an internal compass, many people within the financial services sector still ignore what is good for everybody in favor of what is suitable for themselves. While this is sad, we can rectify this by having more meaningful conversations about money and its social purpose in our lives and in the world around us.
Thinking
Using our cognitive skills, we can understand different perspectives, evaluate information, and make sense of the world as an interconnected whole to make better decisions. For our business, this means actively presenting different social purpose perspectives on how we can redirect money from CRA upon our deaths to charities while not taking away from what you want to leave to your children.
Relating
Having close bonds, appreciating, caring for, and feeling connected to others helps us create a more just and sustainable society for everyone. Even within our small towns and cities, so much good is done daily. Our team loves having conversations with people wanting to make a difference through legacy planning. Honoring these charities is a great way to ensure our social purpose is at the forefront of what we stand for.
Collaborating
To make progress that benefits everyone, we must include everyone. This includes stakeholders with different values, skills, and competencies. By identifying, creating, and evolving our social purpose, we can motivate others to work alongside each other—developing our shared existence.
Acting
Qualities such as courage and optimism help us break old patterns, generate original ideas, and act persistently in uncertain times. My team and I forge ahead despite being accused of being overly altruistic or focused on social justice. Having social purpose means seeing the value in doing things differently and allowing clients to choose how they give charitably.
Athena Wealth and Legacy Solution’s Mission
Our ultimate goal is to have helped Canadians redirect at least five-million dollars more to charities instead of the Canada Revenue Agency. To be successful, we need to alter the erroneous belief that you must choose between your family and the charities you love to support.
By reimagining how Canadians put a stamp on their legacy, Athena Wealth & Legacy Solutions will have created a greater social purpose and helped build a better world.
Let’s Do It Together!
With the help of our clients, colleagues, and other stakeholders, we want to go further in developing our social purpose statement to get to the heart of who we are, what we do, and what we want to achieve in the world. We’re excited about this new endeavor and welcome your input and feedback. Care to join us?
0 Comments