I’ve been on the road most of 2017 talking with people about The Financial Diaries. It’s given me a chance to talk with a lot of people about this idea. Most of them are inspired by it. The Omidyar Network pushed me and CFSI to think about this in the first place, building on the work we had done at CFSI to define financial health and to explore the financial lives of struggling families through the U.S. Financial Diaries. (You can read more about that work here.) This idea seemed to connect naturally with how they were already thinking about the future of work and the evolving social contract. (You can read more about that work here and here.) Our initial inquiry motivated us to go further, setting up a partnership with the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program (FSP) to advance this idea.

But others immediately say it’s impossible — “Americans don’t believe in hand-outs.” They mean both the donors, and the recipients. People neither want to give, nor to receive, charity. There’s some truth to that.

Even some of those who do believe that it is the right thing to do to tackle our nation’s widening income and wealth inequality head on simply believe that there is no political will to seek greater economic security for more people, let alone greater economic equality. There’s some truth to that too.

But we are in a moment of incredible economic dislocation for millions of families. We can’t just wait it out. We need new solutions.

Many workers — even those with full-time jobs — experience volatile and unpredictable cash flows. That means that even working families whose annual income is sufficient to cover their annual costs sometimes struggle to come up with enough cash on hand to pay this week’s bills. These moments of struggle are meaningful, often creating hardship that is far out of proportion to the cash shortfall.

These moments are also inextricably linked with changing dynamics in the American economy — dynamics that are far outside of any individual’s control. The labor market is changing. It is delivering fewer middle-skill, middle-income jobs and more jobs that require workers to bear the risk of economic ups and downs. Whether we blame it on globalization or automation, the fact is that the future of work does not look like the past. At the same time, wages have not kept pace with the rising cost of housing, transportation, education and healthcare — which means that families have insufficient slack to build up a meaningful cushion on their own.

Increased risk of ups and downs, and increased pain from the dislocations caused by the ups and downs, are a feature of today’s economic era, not a bug. This demands that we think differently about the social contract in the 21st century. We can’t simply rely on the models we used in prior generations. And, we can’t just wait out this period of dislocation, assuming we will come out better on the other side. We have to try some new things.

I hope you’ll join me on the journey. I’m looking for partners who want to figure out how small, strategic cash infusions operate as a hand-up, instead of a hand-out.

Sometimes, complex problems demand simple solutions.

According to CFSI’s research, 57% of Americans are financially unhealthy. The Pew Charitable Trust found that over 70% of Americans are income limited, savings constrained or debt challenged, and a third of Americans experience two or even three of those conditions at once.

The network of financial health innovators that we lead is experimenting with how to help their customers manage these problems, through better ways to spend, save, borrow and plan. But, people can only get so far — even with the most effective financial tools — if their incomes are insufficient and unsteady.

It’s not that families aren’t working hard. But, data from the U.S. Financial Diaries shows that lower- and middle-income households experience significant volatility in their incomes from week to week and month to month. Expenses are just as volatile. That means that even if families have “enough” income over the course of a year to cover spending, the volatility in any given week may cause them to fall behind. That kind of fundamental instability makes it extremely difficult to be resilient in the face of the inevitable emergency and to seize opportunities to get ahead.

As Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider argue in their forthcoming book, The Financial Diaries, the policies and products designed to help people manage their financial lives are insufficient for the average American experiencing this kind of instability. They are built for those who have stable, decent incomes, a financial cushion and options. Financial advice, financial products, and government policies tend to tackle one financial challenge at a time. Think about tax subsidies for retirement, or for homeownership, or saving for college, or specific assistance for housing, food or medical care.

But, often, what people need most is more flexible help. Narrowly designed interventions simply aren’t enough anymore.

That’s why we are excited that the Economic Security Project has launched to explore the universal basic income concept. The idea of a universal basic income acknowledges that the financial lives of working class Americans are complicated. It trusts people to make choices about how to use the money. And, it provides a base of stability from which they can improve their financial health.

It’s tempting to think that all financial worries can be solved with more money. But it’s wrong. Almost a third of higher income families in the United States could be considered financially unhealthy. And a similar number of lower income families are actually fairly healthy financially.

It’s not that more money isn’t useful (it is, obviously) or that more money equals more problems (though, yep, sometimes that’s true). It’s that more money is not enough without financial health.

For the uninitiated: financial health means that your day-to-day activities make it possible for you to be resilient in the face of life’s inevitable ups and downs, and to take advantage of new opportunities when they arise.

Think about financial health this way. If you exercise daily, but follow each run with a handful of candy, how is your health going to be? What if that run takes place near a busy highway with poor air quality? What if you can’t run at all because you have no running shoes, or your neighborhood is unsafe and has no parks?

In the world of health, experts increasingly talk about the social determinants of health, meaning that one’s environment and lifestyle can play just as important a role as good healthcare. According to Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the largest impact on health comes from “changing the context to make individuals’ default decisions healthy” and from “socioeconomic factors.”

In other words, people’s health improves most when we clean up the air, make it difficult for people to smoke around each other, or stop serving sodas in schools. Achieving better health requires an interconnected set of interventions, which can show their effects over years.

The same is true of financial health. If you make a good income, but run up a credit card balance you never pay down or sink all your earnings into a bad investment, then your financial health will still suffer.

One memorable woman that I got to know through the U.S. Financial Diaries research project provides a good example. Let’s call her Katherine. When Katherine first started sharing data with the Diaries team, her income covered her expenses, and she was working hard to pay down her credit card debt and student loans.

But then her ten-year old car needed to be replaced. She was able to manage this first shock to her usual spending, buying herself a reliable, reasonably priced replacement car. Her new auto loan pushed her to her limits, but she was making it work — albeit with no cushion to spare. But then she “crunched” that car in an accident. She also had a big dental expense, and moved in with her boyfriend, which meant a longer drive to work and more money spent on gas. She tightened her financial belt, cutting spending on her gym membership and commuting at off-hours to avoid the stop-and-go traffic that was killer on her gas mileage.

Still, these setbacks to her financial health were real, and they got in the way of her ability to chase new opportunities. During the year of the Diaries project, Katherine was taking graduate school classes. But when we caught up with her recently, she had postponed the dream of a master’s degree. She felt weighted down by her existing obligations and didn’t want to take on even more debt.

IIn parts of the developing world, the lack of access to banks and other basic financial services makes it difficult to build financial health. In the U.S, the problem looks a bit different: According to the FDIC, the vast majority of people have access to financial services, but 57% of Americans still lack financial health.

In CFSI’s Consumer Financial Health Study, we found that the biggest drivers of financial health in the United States are having a regular savings habit and thinking longer term about the future. These two behaviors are stronger determinants of financial health than income itself. Income matters, but it is not enough.

Achieving financial health doesn’t mean you can never borrow — or eat candy — but it does mean that over time, you have to make more good choices than bad. The only way that people will be able to do that is if we shift the “social determinants” of financial health in their favor. I eat less candy when it’s not sitting in a bowl in my office. The same is true with financial choices. I’m more likely to save and plan ahead if I have easier, more fun ways to do it.

Katherine is like a runner who doesn’t have the right shoes. She is doing a lot of the right things, logging the miles and practicing her sprints, but her knees are starting to hurt anyway. She, and the millions like her, need more help making better financial decisions, big and small, if they are going to improve their financial health.

#FinHealthMatters Day is June 29. Add your voice to those talking about Financial Health by responding below, or blogging or tweeting using #FinHealthMatters! More resources are here.

Money Alone Doesn’t Make You Healthy was originally published in BRIGHT Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.