Hello!
It's been a long minute since we've popped into your inbox to share how we're shaping a more expansive Bettr. Sorry for this silence. We've been hunkering down to shape the story we go to market with. That story starts here, with us📍
So today's memo is dedicated to sharing our thinking, and asking for yours.
When we launched the Bettr brand in 2020, we were driven to call global attention to the fact the youth has a serious financial crisis. We came out against a financial system where those who need help the most are receiving it the least – all by design.
We rallied under the call to action that #WeDeserveBettr. Fast-forward to 2021, #WeDeserveBettr propelled a nationwide movement of young people united with us against a banking system designed to make us cogs in its wheels. That journey is captured by our Creative Director, Rasheed Ferguson, here👇🏽
An excerpt from our fundraising journey | 2021
An excerpt from our fundraising journey | 2021
To date, we’ve led with what we stand against: the financial exclusion of the youth from reaching their potential. The opportunity ahead of us is to bridge that with what we stand for in order to chart a way forward👇🏽
When we ask ourselves who we're for...
***This is for the creator in each us.
For us, who once knew nothing of limits and only of possibility. For us, who bend time – until our insides ache – to bring an idea to life. For us, who know the taste of gravel – not from falling, but from daring to fly.
This world does not move without us.
It does not laugh, love, cry, or connect without our courage to wake up each day and commit to creating something that did not exist before.
Still, the world asks, "What is your role here?" As if we do not come from a long line of people who first set the world in motion. As if our presence does not leave it shaken daily in awe. As if it is not our labour that lifts the world out of its own darkness. As if that labour is not a lesson in love.
Best believe, with every new shift in life as we know it, the world declares that ”the future belongs to us if we think we can create it.” But it never lets us forget that we are crazy for it. Difficult for it. Unrealistic for it. Too much, too little, too expensive, too inexperienced, too experienced. Unheard of or unlikely to achieve any of it.
Still, the world cannot move without us.***
***Yet here we are: creators, makers, thinkers, builders, self-starters, get-up-and-doers. Our very existence is the achievement.
Make it make sense.
We deserve better. We deserve accessible freedom. We deserve real opportunity. We deserve to have our worth recognised. And we sure deserve a little basic f*cking respect.
So we're done waiting around for it. We're building it.
For every one of us who’s had a dream knocked so many times we started to believe that that's how dreams should be – knocked. For every time we've had to shrink ourselves, hide parts of ourselves, or abandon ourselves in order to make it to tomorrow. For every person waking up in a world where the odds are stacked against them.***
***For us, we’re building Bettr: A New Culture of Money.
Because the world has only ever been pushed forward by the young and the creative. Here's to a world that does not move without the creator in each of us.
The time is now. #OwnYourWorth***