The Personal Finance Ecosystem: A Facilitated Introduction to a New Resource for Research and Practice

In 2019, the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) introduced the Personal Finance Ecosystem (PFE) as a framework. The PFE framework helps educators, researchers, and policymakers synthesize, and visually represent, different mutually reinforcing components of individual financial well-being. These components include an individual's level of financial knowledge and their access to safe and appropriate financial products, the financial choices available to them, the set of resources on which they can rely to weather unexpected events, and their values, beliefs, and familial or socio-cultural context. The PFE has also been employed with both financial educators and students to facilitate difficult conversations around the unseen and unidentified forces that affect individual financial experiences as well as the systemic barriers many individuals and communities face to living their best financial lives. In this workshop, researchers from NEFE offer a guided facilitation focused on two interactive activities, applicable within classroom environments and practitioners in the field, using the Personal Finance Ecosystem. Attendees will engage in a "hexagonal thinking" activity, along with structured small group discussion and debrief, to create a mutually supportive space for developing concepts and definitions related to financial well-being. Attendees will identify critical practice implications of the ecosystem for researchers, social workers, and educators operating across disciplines. Participants will come away from the workshop both armed with additional knowledge of how to use the Personal Finance Ecosystem as a tool for research and practice, as well as with access to additional resources and facilitation guides to replicate or tailor activities for use in their own work.