August 7, 2025

By Kate Poole and Tiffany Brown

In early June, Kate attended the Movement Finance Forum along with a group of Chordata’s investors. Movement Finance Forum (MFF) was a 4-day convening conceived and organized by Center for Economic Democracy (CED). In 2022 CED published a paper on Social Movement Investing, positing that in order to truly build power, the work we’re doing in movement-aligned finance must be in deep coordinated relationship with organizing and movements for justice. As they sought to put this theory into action, CED was faced with the question: “How do we deepen coordination between movements fighting for justice and people in finance who have access to capital and technical expertise?” They call this capital strategies work, and use the framework of divest, contest, invest to describe different key levers that we need to coordinate. 

The Movement Finance Forum grew out of that vision. CED convened nine different networks, bringing together a multiracial, cross-class, and multi-sector group of 140 people. The goal was to build relationships and strategize together in order to develop a shared approach to capital strategies that reflects movement values of wealth redistribution, repair, and power-building.

a session during the Forum – image by Anj Photographer

Let’s be real: It’s a hard time to think expansively about capital strategies, given escalating violence, federal funding being cut, and foundations pulling back. Despite these challenges, the Forum’s leadership brought deep clarity that we need to push much harder to leverage private capital in support of organizing. It was powerful to be invited into this call to action, and to grapple with it together.

There are two major themes we’re reflecting on coming out of the Forum.

The first is the role of “contest” in the divest, contest, invest strategies: How can we contest for power through shareholder activism, and what might Chordata’s role be in that?

Secondly, we’re reflecting on how to show up well as funders and investors to cross-class organizing spaces like the MFF. 

the fabulous Chordata crew at the Forum!!!

Lessons about Contesting for Power through Shareholder Activism

Chordata has long been involved in solidarity economy investing, but we haven’t previously engaged in shareholder advocacy or divestment efforts targeting specific corporations. In the past, we have seen shareholder advocacy as largely something advisors did to keep making money off of investing in corporations while paying lip service to racial and economic justice. We’ve generally held the belief that there aren’t “good corporations” and “bad corporations”, but that all corporations are structurally harmful to communities and the environment. So, rather than engaging corporations directly, we’ve focused on divesting from the stock market and reinvesting in community-controlled projects that align with racial and economic justice values. That’s our bread and butter. 

flipchart notes on lessons from Palestine Divestment – image by Anj Photographer

However, over the past two years our thinking has begun to evolve, particularly because of the divestment organizing we are seeing in solidarity with Palestine. The BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) has opened our eyes to the potential of shareholder advocacy when it is truly movement-led. The organizations and firms that have worked to follow BDS calls and implement AFSC’s screens are responding directly to calls from solidarity movements, and are taking real risks that could impact their businesses and careers. We haven’t seen a movement-led divestment campaign making real material impact since the Standing Rock divestment organizing and divestment from private prisons.

Chordata may have a role to play: Though we divest our clients fully from the stock market, many of our clients have other points of leverage inside the system. Some of our clients hold only a portion of their assets with us, are part of family trusts or foundations, or are tied to institutions where divestment isn’t straightforward. In those situations, we’re excited about the potential of incorporating shareholder advocacy as a meaningful addition to the work we do with our clients. Shareholder advocacy can take individual processes around divestment and make them more collective, and do so in direct support of movements. It can also provide our community of investors with more tools to be active allies to movement leaders. 

a workshop session at the Forum – image by Anj Photographer

Shareholder advocacy can powerfully flank worker-led campaigns inside of corporations. The Forum brought us into contact with movement leaders who are deliberately choosing to resource shareholder advocacy work, and with campaigns that are using those tools in exciting ways! One inspiring example is a Palestine-solidarity campaign targeting Microsoft. The campaign is promising: it originated with worker-led organizing from within the company, and focuses on holding Microsoft accountable for how its technology is being used in ways that violate human rights. It is a potentially winnable campaign! The workers have been able to connect with established shareholder activist groups who can then flank their work. 

Shareholder advocacy campaigns can lay the groundwork for future legal fights against corporations. We learned about campaigns targeting Amazon run by groups like Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) and Majority Action. These groups have been in the game for a long time, and they are now in conversation with newer, movement-led efforts, including Amazon worker organizing. These shareholder advocacy groups aren’t likely to succeed against places like Amazon where Jeff Bezos owns the overwhelming majority of shares. However, shareholder proposals play an important role in laying the groundwork for future lawsuits against these corporations, because documentation of attempts to engage them around workers rights or human rights can be critical in these court battles. Even if the shareholder advocacy campaigns don’t win, they can set people up for these legal battles ahead.

We think Chordata’s investors are going to be seeing more shareholder activism opportunities from us in the future! 

a brainstorm about contest strategies via post-it note – image by Anj Photographer

Lessons for funders and investors about cross-class organizing

The Forum brought movement leaders together with leaders in movement-aligned finance for the sake of deepening strategy and growing our capacity for coordination. As a group, we were working across class and navigating big differentials in access to capital. Afterwards, we (Tiffany, Kate, and the Chordata investor participants) debriefed the convening through the lens of cross-class organizing, and reflected on our ongoing learnings about how to show up well in cross-class spaces as movement-aligned investors.

Inside the networks present at the Forum, we all bring different gifts and resources to the table, and what unites us is a radical spirit. When coming together across class and power, it is hard to remove the polarizing relationship that is stoked by profound inequality in our country and world. We are asking ourselves: what is needed from committed, movement-aligned funders and donors in order to set a table together where we can count on everyone bringing what we have to help build the Solidarity Economy? Here are some of our reflections and questions: 

a workshop session – image by Anj Photographer

It takes time to build relationships and trust. As anyone who’s ever participated in a coalition knows, it’s impossible to bring together diverse stakeholders and get things done without some basis of trust. And so, at the beginning stages of a huge cross-class effort like the Movement Finance Forum, building relationships and establishing trust is a primary goal. There was good groundwork laid in this area, and many relationships were created as a result of the convening.  

Many of us attending the forum have known each other for a long time, and have built significant trust prior to the convening. At the same time, the Forum was intentionally broadening the conversation to include more people from our organizations and networks. This meant a lot of new relationships. We left wondering: Is there a way to build together that can assume a certain level of inherent trust in each network who has been invited? What pre-work could we and others could have done to build that trust before we got into the room together? 

eating together – image by Anj Photographer

Redistributing wealth early in working together can help build trust. One of the key lessons we learned in founding Chordata is that in order to share power across class we need to share resources. If you’re a person or an institution with access to capital attempting to build trust across class, it’s crucial to engage in wealth redistribution or resource sharing. That resource sharing can be a foundation upon which you can build trust with each other. This is part of the DNA of our business, and a core value we hold dear.  

We have been in the practice of wealth redistribution from our inception – between us as cross-class business partners, inside of our cohorts and with the practitioners who’ve helped shape those programs, and we are now looking to the Forum to help us think bigger about what this looks like as a true expression of what’s possible across class, race and power. Doing this across 9 networks and 140 people is considerably more complex than inside Chordata’s business model, and we want to meet this challenge and figure out what doing this well looks like along with the rest of the Forum participants. 

It’s important to make pre-existing resource flows and collaborations visible. The Forum brought together a diverse set of networks, and people didn’t always know what others were already working on or how resources were moving currently. At times this led to assumptions and mistrust. For the sake of building a stronger foundation of trust, it may have been useful to map how resources were flowing and who is already in relationship around the work– because there were a lot of pre-existing relationships, and a lot of money moving already in powerful ways. This may have helped people relate to each other more as organizers and fellow members of the ecosystem, and serve as an example of the kind of financial activism on the investor side which could inform a shared strategy. How might we support this to happen in future convenings?

Kate studies post it notes during a session – image by Anj Photographer

As investors and funders, we need to build our muscle to sit with awkward and uncomfortable experiences. As a society, we are rarely in deep cross-class collaboration, and so there are going to be things that feel awkward or challenging. As people and/or institutions with power and privilege, we need to build the muscle of relating to others as people, while also holding the very real power differential that shapes our material realities. As investors, it’s important to stay present and notice what’s being activated in ourselves and in our bodies. We need to stay grounded in the fact that often, whatever is happening in a cross-class group is not personal, but rather a result of the larger political reality that we exist in. And, we need to take the appropriate level of accountability when we have created or contributed to dynamics that diminish or break trust. Engaging in our own ongoing healing work is critical so that we are all well positioned to build trust across class, race, and power. Affinity spaces like Resource Generation and Solidaire can help us build that muscle, as well as somatic and spiritual practices to keep ourselves grounded and self-aware. 

Here are some resources we have found helpful for doing this inner work:

• Be Present
• Resource Generation
• Solidaire  
• generative somatics
• SOM: Somatics of money

forum participants – image by Anj Photographer

Opportunities for action!

The Chordata crew that attended the Forum is exploring how we can support our larger community in understanding how divest, contest and invest levers work, possibly through mobilizing resources and organizing together. 

We want to lift up some of the amazing and powerful projects and campaigns that we connected with at the Forum! We hope you’ll take a moment to learn more and consider supporting their work:

• There are several shareholder advocacy campaigns people can plug into, such as the ICCR-led Amazon shareholder advocacy work targeting Amazon, and Racial Justice Investing’s campaign to organize one hundred Microsoft shareholders to file a resolution demanding transparency from Microsoft about the use of its products in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and war in Gaza. Or Stop Land Grabs, which is targeting TIAA. TIAA has pivoted into land as an investing strategy and is rapidly acquiring farmland in both the South of the US and the global south, particularly in Brazil.

Harvard students protesting Harvard’s role in land grabs – image from www.stoplandgrabs.org

• Divesting for Palestine: The next set of office hours for the MoveMoney4Freedom.org are now scheduled – RSVP here! MoveMoney4Freedom.org is a new website that provides accessible resources to support you and your community in divesting from genocide, apartheid and occupation, and moving money towards collective freedom. With questions, please contact info@movemoney4freedom.org. The next office hours are scheduled for Tuesday, August 12th, 2025 from 3-4 PM ET.

a student encampment demanding divestment for Palestine – image from www.movemoneyforfreedom.org

• This one isn’t a specific campaign, but an important action: The Forum emphasized the fact that organizations often have fees tied to accepting investments from investors. At Chordata, we’d like to start inviting our clients to consider covering those fees with grants, in support of the investment’s long term health. We encourage any investors to proactively cover these kinds of fees when making investments.

• Action St. Louis and ArchCity Defenders, two Black-led racial justice organizations in St. Louis, have come together to establish the Northside Movement Center. The 36,000-square-foot center will open in early 2026 in North St. Louis, a historically Black community that has suffered decades of systematic disinvestment. In addition to housing the multifaceted advocacy and organizing work of these two organizations, it will serve as a community center, convening and coworking space, and resiliency hub. If you are interested in learning more or supporting, please contact executive directors Blake Strode (bstrode@archcitydefenders.org) or Kayla Reed (kayla@actionstl.org).

an illustration of the future Northside Movement Center – image by Trivers

• Boston Neighborhood Community Land Trust (BNCLT) builds community power, neighborhood stability, and an alternative model for social housing by taking properties off the speculative market. BNCLT is one of few organizations that focus on acquiring smaller, scattered-site buildings – properties that are most prone to purchase by speculative buyers, resulting in the displacement of BIPOC, low and extremely low-income families. BNCLT is currently seeking to replace a $3 Million short-term loan that allowed the organization to purchase 5 buildings (17 units), which are now community-controlled and permanently affordable rental units. We invite solidarity investors to make a 0-2% interest, 10-year term investment in BNCLT’s Loan Pilot – a needed alternative to existing high-debt lending options. More info here!

Boston row houses – image from www.bnclt.org

May 6, 2025

In 2024 Chordata invested in Communities In Partnership (CIP) after being connected to the organization through Lina, a client local to Durham NC. In March, Tiffany and Lina spent two days visiting CIP’s many projects in East Durham and getting to know their dedicated leadership. Our team member Sarah sat down with Tiffany and Lina to debrief their visit. 

CIP is a Black women led, predominantly Black women founded, community accountability organization that is nationally recognized for its work addressing all five social determinants of health. CIP supports interconnected programs addressing food sovereignty, entrepreneurship and workforce development, affordable housing, and leadership development. CIP envisions East Durham and the surrounding area as a vibrant place where all residents have an exceptional quality of life with the economic and political power to impact decision making that affects their community. If you’re interested in supporting CIP’s work, please do so here!

Sarah: Lina, how did you first hear about Communities in Partnership? 

Lina: I heard about Communities in Partnership in 2018 through the Triangle Community Foundation. I started giving a monthly donation but I hadn’t met any of the team there. In early 2019, through alternative education circles in Durham, I met Valine Zeigler who’s the founder and director of Empowered Minds Academy, an incredible Montessori and self-directed learning school in Durham. I didn’t know at the time but Valine was connected personally and professionally with CIP.

After I’d been supporting Empowered Minds for a couple of years, the building they were in came up for sale and they were trying to figure out if it would be possible to buy it. I wanted to be supportive of EMA through whatever happened. CIP was interested in buying the building, because part of their vision is around Black ownership of business and property in downtown Durham, which is rapidly gentrifying and becoming unaffordable.

So we worked together, and I ended up donating the biggest gift that I’ve ever given to help, and CIP actually bought the building! Now CIP owns the building and Empowered Minds is the first Black-owned Black-led business that’s occupying that space, with the idea that ownership will remain in the community’s hands.

The beautiful building that houses Empowered Minds Academy

I saw a lot of natural alignment between what CIP is doing and what Chordata invests in, so I connected them with Tiffany and Kate, and that first conversation has evolved now into this current investment in CIP.

Sarah: Tiffany, how was your trip to Durham?

Tiffany: It was such a great trip. We first heard about CIP from Lina, then learned that they are a part of Equitable Food Oriented Development, a project our friend and colleague Anthony Chang supports. I already knew CIP’s work was amazing, but seeing the work and meeting their leaders was very impactful.

I was really moved by the story of how Communities in Partnership was created. CIP started in 2011 after there was a shooting in the East Durham neighborhood, and the community was frustrated by an inadequate and uninformed response from city officials. Community members started gathering for the sake of building relationships and asking, “What’s going on? How do we address the violence that’s happening in our neighborhood?” They were mostly parents, so this was really high stakes. The first arm of their work was around food justice, and they started a food cooperative. Now – flash forward – they have a very strategic approach to addressing interlocking systems of oppression, aimed at transforming their neighborhoods. 

Inside the East Durham Market. Pictured is Lina, Cassie (staff member at CIP), and Justin (Tiffany’s partner).

During our tour I got to see the food cooperative’s Impact Hub, where they give out food boxes. They talked about lines down the street of people coming to get food boxes. Then I got to see the East Durham community market, which is a grocery store that can help meet basic food needs of community members. 

There’s another arm of CIP’s work focused on entrepreneurship that supports the Culinary Femme Collective, a group of femmes of color who all have food businesses and share a commissary, and are getting their food wares out in front of people, including at the East Durham market. Oh my God – they had the best crackers!! Part of our investment is going toward supporting the Collective’s entrepreneurial ventures.

Delicious crackers created by a member of the Culinary Femme Collective! The Collective works to advance food businesses owned by femmes of color dedicated to creating a more equitable and just local food economy in Durham.

We also saw the Empowered Minds Academy building that CIP purchased. The pedagogy is amazing – the kids really lead and it’s predominantly Black and Brown children. CIP is also working with a developer who’s building housing, including a modern day boarding house, and the Culinary Femme Collective is going to have a cafe there to sell their wares. Everything we saw was connected and part of a bigger plan. 

Chordata’s investment is primarily in support of acquisitions of real estate, because gentrification is actively pushing Black and Brown people out of their community. Their neighborhood is only half a mile from downtown Durham and in order to keep community members in place they’re purchasing buildings and offering affordable rent to community members. 

Cassie, Tiffany & Lina outside the East Durham Market

A lot of the folks involved in the project from early on have taken on major leadership roles. Camryn Smith, who is CIP’s Executive Director, and her husband Ernest Smith are both trained in Community-Based Asset Development. They intentionally moved into the East Durham community upon returning from mission work in Eastern Europe, and Ernest earned his law degree late career to be able to address key needs voiced by the community. DeDreana Freeman is a mother, a nonprofit leader, and has been a City Councilwoman since 2017. Aliyah Abdur-Rahman, a founding member and leader of the CIP Innovation portfolio, has built a visionary collective strategy across multiple Black-led and Black-accountable organizations in the East Durham community. This is what organizing looks like!

A living library exhibit in the Impact Hub, where CIP runs their food program. The Impact Hub also has drumming lessons, step classes, and other community programming.

It was a pretty emotional trip. Throughout my travels around the country I’m seeing a repeated theme of systemic disinvestment. What I saw reminded me of my visit to West Jackson, where there were potholes in the street so big that you couldn’t drive straight. In East Durham, there were dirt roads, and you’re just half a mile from the city. You would see a house with a $1M value that is part of gentrification, right next to a house that looked like it was condemned, but it was really being rented out by a slumlord who wasn’t investing any money in it. A lot of those houses were going for something like $10,000 just 15 years ago. The racist red lining in East Durham meant that nobody in the community was able to get a loan to buy houses, and purchasers would need to pay in cash. Gentrifiers were just buying up the houses with hopes of making a big return because they’re so close to Duke and downtown. 

That’s where CIP’s strategy to buy real estate comes in. One of CIP’s recently purchased properties we visited was four duplexes. They are in the process of fixing these up and making them nice for people. They’ll then offer them to the community at prices that people can afford. It’s really powerful work.

Community In Partnership’s Impact Hub

Sarah: Lina, what do you love about CIP?

Lina: I love the enormity of the heart and vision and the real commitment to the people who are in Durham. They have this real clarity that everyone deserves to have enough to eat, a safe place to live, time to pursue whatever it is that they are passionate about, and that everyone deserves basic human dignity. 

For CIP, it’s not only about survival and people being able to continue to afford to live in Durham, but beyond that, they believe that people also need to heal from the harm that has persisted for a long time. They have the vision, and also the dedication and determination to figure out how to make that real. 

Tiffany, Cassie, Lina inside the Impact Hub, with food boxes in the background

Sarah: Tiffany, how was it for you to collaborate with Lina on this?

Tiffany: This was the first time we have worked alongside a client in this way. Lina is committed to racial justice and economic justice and made the bold move to support the purchase of this school building. She saw the values alignment and brought CIP to our attention. As we started meeting with CIP, we realized this was a project that our other clients would be excited about. I love that we got to lean into a model of collective action within the Chordata community by supporting our client’s badass contributions, and that it led to an opportunity for the whole community to invest.

Sarah: Lina, is there anything else you want to share with the Chordata community? 

Lina: I just want to convey how good it feels to me to be working with Kate and Tiffany. Especially with all the craziness of the world and the stock market. I have money held in trust for my benefit over which I have very little control. It is invested in the stock market because the trustees insist it is their fiduciary responsibility and that anything else would be irresponsible. Those investments have nosedived in the past weeks. And my personal money that I have been able to invest with Chordata, it’s invested in places like CIP, like East Bay PREC, and all the other places Kate and Tiffany have put it. All of that money is, for now, holding steady. AND, even if the scenario was flipped, I would still feel good about my Chordata investments because my money is not just at the whims of this crazy stock market machine.

My money is not just extracting with the point of benefiting only me, it’s really going to work in ways that are building something amazing. It’s experimenting with building a new world instead of experimenting with extraction and suffering. It’s so powerful for me to be part of the Chordata community in that way. And I feel so grateful to the other Chordata clients who have thrown in with me here in Durham!

We hope you’ll support CIP’s work! Learn how to do so here.

November 10, 2023

Allison has been a Chordata client for 3 years, and we have been so inspired and moved by her story of walking the path of repair. We asked Allison to share more about her journey as a white wealth holder and as a descendant of enslavers. Her story illustrates the ethic of repair that we are guided by at Chordata, and we are grateful to walk this path with her as collaborators. 

Tell us a little bit about how you came into access to wealth and what your journey has been thus far around redistribution. What drives you in this work? 

I came into wealth late in life due to the sale of several family homes through my divorce and the death of my father. When you sell real estate a lot of capital is freed up. I descend from enslavers in colonial Virginia on my father’s side, which means that my wealth is rooted in enslavement and the legacy of white supremacy today, even though we no longer own a plantation or other assets from enslavement. We are beneficiaries of that system, the legacy of which we still struggle with today. Part of repairing the harm committed by my enslaver ancestors requires that I make personal financial reparations to the extent that I can. I began by taking an alumni praxis with Resource Generation in 2020. Wrestling with my wealth and responsibilities was emotional and draining. Of course, it was not as draining as worrying about how to make rent or put food on the table. I gradually learned to accept and be honest about my wealth. I overcame my inclination to only give away what was tax deductible, and made a commitment to spend down my wealth. Along the way I attended a webinar that featured Kate and Tiffany.

What first drew you to Chordata? What were you seeking, and why? 

I learned through the RG program that philanthropy was an insufficient way to redistribute my wealth, so Chordata was a natural next step for me. Kate and Tiffany educated me about investing in the solidarity economy which had immediate appeal for me. I have a high tolerance for risk due to my early career in the tech industry, and encouraged them to find opportunities where my investment horizon of ten years would be helpful. It has been transformative for me to find a team that I can trust to guide me to solidarity economy investments that I would never have found on my own.

How do you connect your radical genealogy work with your investing work?

There are two ways: geographical and issue based. Because my family history traces back to Virginia, I had hoped to concentrate my solidarity economy investments in that state, but there are simply not enough opportunities yet. I hope that many of the innovative programs/financing mechanisms that Chordata has introduced to me will spread to the rest of the country. I’d like to be able to do more of this kind of investing in Virginia, where my ancestors committed the most harm. Above all, I am interested in putting my wealth to work rather than having it sit somewhere earning interest.

In terms of issue-based reparations, I am deeply interested in investing in Black entrepreneurship, housing, worker-owned ventures and land reclamation projects.

Tell us about your work with linked descendants and Gwynn’s Island. How has it changed over time? How are you relating to it now?

My work excavating my family history of enslavement continues to evolve today. I began working with descendants of people my family enslaved in Mathews County, Virginia in 2016, and ended up spending four years uncovering why the Black community was run off Gwynn’s Island (in that county) in 1916. As a form of repair and healing, my family and I worked with descendants of the Black Gwynn’s Island community on a website to restore the true history of the community, a series of articles and talks (in NonProfit Quarterly, and Reparations4Slavery), a revised history now distributed in the local museum, and family reunions to reconnect ties broken by the exodus. Our third reunion will take place in early October, and we have 150 RSVPs. We did a quick and dirty documentary based on the second reunion you can watch here. We are also working with the State of Virginia to install a historic marker restoring the history of this vibrant community. 

I have also embarked on a justice genealogy project related to my 7th great-grandfather who signed the Declaration of Independence. Oral history in the Black community claims that Braxton fathered a child with an enslaved woman, and that he freed both. In 2022, I teamed with two Black linked descendants of Carter Braxton, one who descends from Carter’s illegitimate son, and another who descends from a man enslaved by Braxton, and enlisted the help of my white Braxton cousins to reconstruct this family across racial lines. To prove the legacy of sexual exploitation, we are gathering DNA from Black and white Braxtons. The three of us have launched a Facebook page, spoken to the Richmond Free Press, and spoke at the 13th Annual Lemon Project Symposium at William and Mary. 

Justice genealogy requires community, both for mentoring and emotional support. I am active with Coming to the Table, founded by descendants of enslavers and enslaved people, especially in their Linked Descendants group, and I recommend that descendants of enslavers join this group when they are ready to dig deeply into their ancestry. 

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