We have so much to be grateful for!

November is a month of gratitude. You may be seeing it on Facebook, where people are posting one thing each day that they are grateful for. Or, you may be feeling it as we head toward Thanksgiving and the holiday season.

Being thankful isn’t just a nice thing — it can positively affect your health. According to research from Harvard University, “gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.” The Mayo Clinic says, “Practicing gratitude improves sleep, boosts immunity and decreases the risk of disease.”

People practice gratitude to their life in a variety of ways, but some of the more popular ways include writing down (or at least thinking about) three things you were grateful for during the day: Maybe the rain finally passed and it was sunny outside, or someone at work offered you a helping hand. Other people try at least once a day to follow a “thank you” with a “because” statement — “Thank you for helping me with that project because I never would have gotten it done on time without you!” And sometimes families sit down at the dinner table and everyone shares the highlight of their day.

Here at CommonWealth One, we have a lot to be thankful for this year. We can’t list all of it (or this email would be 20 pages long, printed!), but here’s a short list:

We’re thankful for our members. Our credit union literally would not exist without our members, and we’re glad that all of our members have put their trust in CommonWealth One.

We’re thankful for the opportunity to give back. CommonWealth One puts a lot of value on giving back to the community. And that means that our staff (and our members, too) get to see happy faces when we donate school supplies to local schools, food to local organizations, money to local nonprofits, and when we participate in volunteer activities.

We’re thankful for technology. The credit union is very different than it was when it started back in 1944, and technology has a lot to do with that. Because of advances in banking and the Internet, we can now strengthen our members’ financial health through online learning tools like Banzai, free webinars and more. Technology has made our efforts to spread financial education much easier.

We’re also super thankful that the Credit Union National Association just awarded us Second Place in the Dora Maxwell Social Responsibility national award category and Honorable Mention in the national Dejardins Adult and Youth Financial Education Award.

You can check out our website for news on our latest webinars, activities like our upcoming Letters to Santa for Youth Members; contests whereby you can Team Up with Us like in our Punt, Pass and Kick contest to win up to 1,000 and more.

Again, we are thankful for your membership and hope you have a happy, gratitude-filled Thanksgiving this year!