For Talk Money Week 2024 we brought together Rooted Finance’s Lived Experience Steering Group to talk all thing’s money, and to help us plan our priorities for 2025.
We explored key themes important to our steering members,, took their current financial temperature and agreed key topics to address moving forward. This group is a vital step towards ensuring that our services and solutions continue to not only be innovative, but that they are also deeply rooted in the real experiences and needs of individuals from diverse backgrounds across London and the UK.
Why a Lived Experience Steering Group?
At Rooted Finance, we believe that the best solutions come from a deep understanding of the day-to-day challenges people face in their financial journeys. Traditional financial services often overlook the nuances of individual experiences, leading to products and services that don’t fully meet the needs of the community. By galvanising this steering group, we aim to bridge that gap in knowledge through sector specific projects to help shape financial services for the future.
Our Lived Experience Steering Group brings together individuals who have first-hand experience of struggling with debt, navigating inflexible financial systems, being refused credit, or having to pay more for financial products and services as a result of the ethnicity premium. Whether through personal challenges or those of loved ones. their insights will guide innovative solutions development at Rooted Finance, ensuring that our own offerings, and those developed with partners, are relevant, accessible, and effective.
Our lived experts will drive thinking on:
- Deep understanding vulnerable groups’ financial lives and aspirations
- Improving existing products and services, and helping to co-design and test new ones
- Drive our strategy and priorities as an organization and shape our influencing work
- Direct involvement in the delivery of specific projects and bring this learning back to the steering group
Our steering group members will also be ambassadors for Rooted Finance and help elevate the voices of the clients we support.
The workshop this week brought together 9 of our lived experts from different backgrounds and stages of their financial journeys, The launch of this programme of work marks a significant milestone in our commitment to creating a financial ecosystem that is inclusive, equitable, and responsive to the needs of the communities we service.
If you are interested in finding out more, or being part of our lived experience work at Rooted Finance please contact us at: livedexperience@rootedfinance.org.uk