Leah Kennedy
Program Coordinator, 5 Buckets Foundation
About this series
“What’s Your Why?” is our ongoing series asking one honest question: Why does this work matter to you? Each post is a personal look at what brings someone to the 5 Buckets community and why they keep coming back.
I have always been fascinated by the human mind, our emotions, and our endless capacity to learn and grow. I’ve never really seen myself as a “finance” person. It was always writing, psychology, and people that pulled me in, not economics or the finer details of finance.
Where Money and Psychology Meet
In college, I interned at an organization working with people experiencing some of life’s hardest circumstances. That experience taught me something I still carry with me: we can never assume we know someone’s story, and we can learn so much just by listening to one another. It was also where I saw, firsthand, how deeply money, our emotions, our quality of life, trauma, and the choices we make are all tangled up together.
After I graduated from college last May, I knew I wanted my first full-time job to be one that did some good in the world and cared for people, something that would push me to grow and teach me a new way of understanding others. It’s a little ironic, actually. I was so sure I wasn’t a finance person, and yet here I am, working at 5 Buckets, teaching financial wellness. But even that traces back to mindset and psychology for me, which is exactly why our Mindset bucket resonates so much with me.
The Moment Something Shifts
We often start our workshops by sharing pieces of our own financial journeys, our families, our upbringing, our choices and our struggles, as a way to normalize the conversation and show learners that everyone’s story with money looks different. My favorite moment in a workshop is watching that shift happen in real time. Someone hears something that sounds familiar, and you can see them start reflecting on their own money journey, whether they say a word out loud or not. When that reflection happens early in a series, it tends to ripple through everything that follows, and learners connect with the rest of the work a little more because of it.
That’s my why, really. I still believe life isn’t about money, and I hold onto that firmly. But money touches every part of life whether we want it to or not, and our relationship with it says so much about how we feel, what we’ve been through, and what we believe we deserve. I want to help people understand that relationship with a little more kindness toward themselves, to grow their confidence, ask for help when they need it, and talk about money without shame. I’ve learned so much of this from the 5 Buckets team, and I don’t take for granted how rare it is to work somewhere that embodies community as much as it talks about its importance.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
— Carl Jung
This why belongs to
This blog features the “Why” of Leah Kennedy, Program Coordinator at 5 Buckets.
Your turn
What’s your why?
If financial wellness matters to you, we’d like to hear the reason. Facilitators, partners, learners, volunteers — every voice belongs here.
