From Community-based to Values-based
In June, I was lucky to get to spend a week in Copenhagen at a meeting of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values. This is a group of 25 community banks, financial cooperatives, microfinance institutions and credit unions around the world focused on addressing the world’s environmental, cultural and social equity issues through financial tools and instruments. Vancity joined in 2010, and gains strength and knowledge from our fellow members in this worldwide network. The goal of the Global Alliance is to touch the lives of a billion people with sustainable banking by 2020.
The member institutions have several tracks they are collaborating on for mutual benefit, including metrics to track our global impact, human capital to ensure we nurture the next generation of sustainable bankers, and financial capital to fund the growth and impact of sustainable banks.
In Copenhagen, hosted by the inspiring and successful Merkur Cooperative Bank, people from values-based banks and credit unions in nine different countries, including Canada, Denmark, Germany, Bangladesh, Italy, Uganda, France, the Netherlands and the UK came together to discuss one of these tracks. This track is focused on creating the messaging to get more people thinking about what their money can do for society while it is parked in a bank account. When selecting a bank, people think about rate, location, brand, products and a few other things, but they don’t think about what their hard earned money is activated to do while it’s sitting in their account.
We have seen other mindset shifts like this over the past while. The shifts that come to mind are the Fair Trade and Buy Local movements. Some people think about how their clothing or coffee or jewelry was made, who made it and what conditions they were working in when they made it. They have shifted some of their purchases to reflect this heightened awareness of how that bag of coffee beans came to their hands and increased desire for their money to be spent in a way that reflects their societal values.
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