December 12, 2024

As radical investment advisors, we often get questions like:

“Why should a wealth holder with a commitment to redistribution invest some of their assets?”

“Why might projects want investment capital and not only grants?” 

One of the places these questions have arisen is in the Chordata Cohort. Our last cohort set up a $3M emergent flow fund and asked financial activists Aaron Tanaka, Jessica Norwood, and Anthony Chang to allocate that money as integrated capital. Nadav David and Jen Near then helped administrate some of that integrated capital. We recently invited Anthony, Nadav, and Jen into conversation with us, to glean learnings from this recent experience, and to share what we’ve learned over the years about the question of “why invest?”. 

Let’s start with some basic premises that guide Chordata’s work: 

• We invest in what we believe in. We only invest in tangible investments that center racial and economic justice, and we do NOT invest in the stock market. 
• We believe in integrated capital, meaning that giving and investing are powerful and interconnected tools that can both be mobilized in support of social movements and the solidarity economy. Giving and investing are not two sides of a binary. 
• We believe that wealth holders should use their surplus to both redistribute wealth as well as invest in ways that are reparative. We work with clients to develop an investment portfolio that includes both planning for the future and wealth redistribution. We then support people to build investment and redistribution strategies in relationship to those different time horizons.
• We apply the same principles and values to giving and to investing. Often with giving and investing, people are taught to hold two different sets of value systems. Someone’s giving may be beautifully aligned with racial justice values. But behind closed doors the investment thesis that money should make money off of money often reigns, and a wealth holder’s dollars might be invested in corporations that exploit communities of color. We seek to align our values and practices in giving and investing. 

So if we hold to be true that giving is an essential part of redistributing resources, why then, also invest in the solidarity economy? Here are 13 reasons we came up with in conversation with each other.

1. Because a project or a movement group asks for it. 

If you’re in consistent and meaningful relationships with partners, then partners will tell you what they need and why. If you can offer grants, and if groups say what’s best is grants, move a grant! If they ask for debt capital, either they’ve assessed that they can carry that debt because they imagine they’re going to have revenue in the future to pay it back, or they know they need it because they can use it to leverage other private and public funding, or some other reason. – Jen Near

Some groups already have an existing relationship with debt, and they’re already used to financing projects in that way. They may usually get it from a CDFI or credit union. If they’re able to get this debt at 0 or 2% instead of the 4 or 6% from the financial institution, they have more space to do the work. – Kate Poole

2. If you have money that you’re saving for future use, you can put that money to work so that other people can build resources.

Frontline groups need capital, and sometimes wealth holders have already allocated their giving dollars. But the other 90% of wealth holder’s assets can also be put to work. Folks on the ground can use that money to build the solidarity economy. – Tiffany Brown

Money is a resource that can be shared in community. Say you have $100,000 but you don’t need to use that money for 20 years. That $100,000 can be shared so that someone else, say an immigrant farmer, can acquire land. And then that resource gets returned over time, because the farmer is working that land, growing and selling food, having a livelihood for themselves. This also includes money that they would have been paying to rent that land, but now they own it instead, and have more stability. – Anthony Chang

3. Because the stock market is fundamentally extractive and exploitative and always has been. 

People often default to what is supposedly “true” in economics – that money should make money off of money. People aren’t convinced that the stock market is the scariest monster in the room, that it is absolutely about extraction, exploitation, and it always has been. It was used to finance the slave trade, that’s how far back it goes. If you peel back all of the bullshit of what people say should be true in economics, and instead do economics of your heart and your spirit, it looks really different. – Tiffany

If you look at any large public corporation that is high growth, you have to ask – how did they do that? How does a Wells Fargo or an Exxon Mobil make billions of dollars of profit? Their profit margins are obscene. They’re overcharging and exploiting people in multiple ways to be able to generate profit for their investors. It requires a lot of willingness for people to face the reality of this exploitation and to consider what their money does and how that ripples out into the economy and into the community. I hope that people are willing to go on that journey. – Anthony

4. Investing can open doors for groups to access other money. 

For many projects that are trying to build a structure for themselves that’s going to sustain them long term, some amount of debt is necessary. If they’re able to get debt in the form of patient and flexible capital from aligned funders, it opens doors for them to access public money or other private money from other sources down the line. It can be a really important stepping stone. – Nadav David

5. To do harm reduction around the assets of funders and donors. 

Many of us started doing this work because we were doing climate divestment work, and the options for reinvestment were things like Chevron’s renewable portfolio or Coca Cola. That was untenable from a movement perspective! The contradiction of 5% of assets being given to movement organizations, and 95% of assets being invested in corporations was too much to stand. We have to think about our engagement from divestment to reinvestment, and put a wedge in what is typically just a transfer of assets within the same kind of ownership structure. We want to transform ownership within our economy. – Jen

And a note from Anthony on not becoming complacent, even when we’ve done harm reduction with assets: How do we avoid institutions investing in the solidarity economy and then feeling good enough about it that they don’t meaningfully redistribute? I see this in foundations where they take a surplus pot of capital they could give away, but instead they invest it. And then this inertia can set in like, hey, if I invested in worker owned co-ops and community land trusts and Black and brown communities, then I’m having the same impact. I should keep doing that, instead of actually redistributing this wealth that I don’t need. How do we avoid people feeling good enough doing the thing that’s not actually the thing that’s needed? – Anthony

6. To expand the sphere of influence of our social movements over capital that’s being held in public trust. 

We spend a lot of time focused on how to influence funder’s and donor’s grants and giving, but our sphere of influence over grant resources is so limited. If our goal is to transform how resources are governed and who owns/benefits from our labor, land, and infrastructure in our economy, then how do we as the grassroots organizing sector and social movements actually contest for capital and power in larger ways? This question is what has led to foundation’s assets and donors’ investment portfolios becoming a target for social movements. It’s an opportunity for us to assert influence over and seek to align much the bigger forces of capital with our work and to potentially unlock some of these resources for community-owned and governed solidarity economy projects. – Jen

7. Because investing is a powerful tool in relationship with divestment. 

Divestment is a call that is most effective when it’s tied to a larger movement and a set of grassroots campaigns or demands (see the Social Movement Investing report for more context). There is the potential for narrative and material impact when we have a really clear sense of what investing looks like and can be alongside the divestment. If we’re able to move resources out of extractive systems and into solidarity economy projects, I think it can ignite much more collective energy and excitement about investment. In this moment where people and organizations are wrestling with and taking action to divest from occupation, apartheid and genocide in support of Palestine, we must actualize the ways that divestment and reinvestment are directly connected to the solidarity economy we’re trying to build in the US and globally. – Nadav

8. So that BIPOC and working class communities can reclaim productivity in service of collective wealth building. 

The phrase “productivity” is something I was politicized around by Ed Whitfield and Marnie Thompson (Seed Commons staff/board members). It’s about a community’s ability to produce and build wealth and have control of their material conditions in a meaningful way, so that they are no longer dependent on philanthropy. The investment piece is about how we work toward that goal of productivity, even while we still need to give and tend to a lot of the ways in which that’s not possible or people are struggling right now. That’s to me actually the tension between grants and investments. It’s not philosophical, it’s like, where can we actually build that productivity for communities and social movements to build wealth for themselves and have agency in that? – Jen

9. Investing can create a longer onramp towards giving. 

Say you invest $100,000 in a project for a 10 year loan. That’s 10 years of changing people’s lives. At the end of that 10 years, you have proof of concept of the power of this capital, and when the loans are set to mature, there’s an opportunity to evaluate whether you need that money back. As a wealth holder, you’ve been without that $100,000 for so long, maybe at that point you can part ways with that money. It’s like a 10 year experiment of getting comfortable not having that money. – Tiffany

10. Typical grant cycles don’t provide enough capital for major projects like land rematriation. 

Typical funders and donors, and particularly grant cycles, aren’t aligned around the really big, visionary dreams our movements have. In order to do major land transfers, rematriation, acquisition projects, we can’t just go for one grant per year. We needed a mechanism to leverage significant amounts of capital. That often looks more like the investment side of funding than the grant side. AND we really need funders and donors to shift their grantmaking practices, the level of resources they are willing to give to support projects (both grants and zero-to- low-interest loans), and the way they engage all of their resources in support of social movements.  We can look to Kataly’s Restorative Economics Fund as a powerful example of a funder moving resources that are deeply aligned both in how they structure as well as the level of resources they are moving in terms of grants and loans to land-based projects. – Jen

11. Investment dollars can allow groups to build the muscle of collective governance. 

There are increasing numbers of community controlled funds that have collective governance by folks that are directly in the community or folks in deep relationship to frontline communities of color. Boston Ujima Fund, Climate Justice Alliance, Right To The City Alliance, and many others are exercising the muscles of building the new, alongside fighting the bad. To do that, we need to be able to govern, and we need to have the room to learn and try things and make mistakes, and then adapt from those mistakes. Folks that are willing to put non extractive capital into these kinds of projects are providing a runway for groups to be able to practice governance, and we are going to need that in the economy we want. – Anthony

12. Because there is no simple answer or approach, and the tensions we’re working within are historical, massive, and coming from movement tensions. 

For instance, a core tension in the reparations movement right now in the US is that a lot of folks are urgently wanting to redistribute wealth as part of reparations. And within the movement, there are solidarity economy practitioners advocating for an approach that actually makes those assets and resources productive over time, an approach that goes beyond providing a $25,000 boost in income or payment toward individual home ownership to one that seeks to build collective wealth and ownership. These long-standing historical tensions feel very connected and present in some of the conversations that feel thorny and hard with funders and donors about redistributing their wealth. There is an opportunity for a deeper assessment of how we redistribute wealth in ways that build new regenerative economic structures. – Jen

13. Because “give vs. invest” is a false binary.

Given the complex conditions we live in, there’s no one size fits all solution to these questions. I think the question is “what are the conditions or the types of structures in which investment capital can be useful alongside grants, and thereby, how do we organize funders to be in alignment with those needs?” – Nadav

Investing in Community Movement Commons

The story of Community Movement Commons in Boston illustrates some of the learnings we’ve been in together. A recent Chordata Cohort decided they wanted to create a $3M flow fund. They worked with three financial activists- Anthony Chang, Aaron Tanaka and Jessica Norwood- to distribute the funds. Aaron’s portion was earmarked to go to Community Movement Commons in Boston, which was about $885K in investment and $356K in grants. CMC is a visionary space in Roxbury, a Black working class neighborhood, that will house social movement organizations, a Black-led birth center that will provide a full spectrum of gender-affirming reproductive care, and a space for neighbors to gather, organize and build community. 

The future Community Movement Commons in Roxbury, MA

The cohort’s contribution was originally made as an integrated capital investment, with a portion of it as grants and a portion as loans. The loan terms were as friendly as possible. When the project leaders took the design to the neighborhood and to community members, they got feedback that the footprint was too big and that it took up too much green space, and they felt strongly that the footprint of the building needed to be reduced. That meant that some of the uses of the building- a cultural space, a music space, some rentable office spaces- had to go. Given that these uses would have generated revenue, the opportunity for revenue decreased.

An image depicting the future birth center at Community Movement Commons

The organizers of the project spoke with the cohort and shared what was happening. They explained that debt totally made sense at the beginning, and that now the operating model was completely different upon getting the community’s feedback. The fact that the cohort agreed to give the project debt capital led to the project leveraging an additional loan, and also helped the project to get closer to their capital stack for a new market tax credit (a federal program that supports community development projects). It was a great commitment from the cohort, and so helpful! And, because of the changing plans for the building, it was now more difficult for the project to carry and pay back that debt. The organizers asked the cohort if they would be able to forgive the debt or turn it into a concessionary loan or a grant. And the cohort did!

The future site of Community Movement Commons

Jen, who was one of the people working on the project, shared: “Those of us doing the on-the-ground work of these projects, like organizing in neighborhoods, getting things figured out in terms of the design on the land and running the capital campaigns, we have to do a ton of work to align all those pieces in a values aligned way. And then we really need the funders and donors to stand with us and be in the same kind of relationship. It was so beautiful and powerful that this actually happened in this instance!”

Nadav is also involved in the project. He shared: “Initially in the project, having debt was a tool to organize other funders along the way. Funders who came to us and said, “We want to talk about debt with you”. We were able to say, “We’ll only talk to you about debt if it’s zero percent and patient, like Chordata is doing.” That was an important intervention. Chordata’s belief in the project and willingness to bring integrated capital made that possible. The more that we have real relationships between funders, investors, and the projects, the better, because we’re able to adjust and be flexible and ask for things that we need and to do it in a much more authentic way than the traditional relationships that funders have with grantees. This felt like a really beautiful example of how we could move together.”

Our most recent Chordata Cohort!

One of Chordata’s core invitations for wealth holders is to step into a practice of shared risk and accountability. We have to ask ourselves “What’s it gonna take to get to where we want to go?” It takes both a bet with your investment capital, it takes having skin in the game with your philanthropic capital, and it takes being in partnership over a long time horizon. 

Thank you to our friends Anthony Change, Nadav David, and Jennifer Near for lending your brilliant thoughts to this blog post!

Blessings posted at the Community Movement Commons. One reads “We are midwifing a future where families are cared for, connected and free. Bless this place <3”

June 10, 2019

by Tiffany Brown

Kate and I are clear that our core focus for Chordata Capital is to address the racial wealth divide. How could we not?! Kate and I first crossed paths at Resource Generation, when I was the Retreat Director. Nearly every Resource Generation conference begins with some form of a timeline activity of the racist history of wealth accumulation in this country, where people walk the room locating points of where their family accumulated wealth adjacent to a counterpoint of a racist law (like the Homestead Act). It’s only natural that we would build an investment advisory practice that is rooted in a commitment to racial and economic justice. Our work with our clients seeks to repair the damage done (actively or passively) by the accumulation of wealth, through divestment from the extractive economy and then reinvestment into more restorative options. We are shifting the orientation of investment from transactional to relational. I know using words like “relational” or “restorative” can be performative tools to exhibit woke-ness, but I want to peel back the veneer, and tell you about how we roll out investment as relationship: We took a trip to the deep South, and did it in community.

I flew down to Mobile, AL in late April to do a tour of the South with my dear friends, Jessica Norwood (Runway Project) & Lynne Hoey (Candide Group). I’ve known Jessica for over a decade, and the three of us were RSF Integrated Capital Fellows 2017/2018. Each of us address the racial wealth divide through finance. One of our primary goals was to strengthen our relationship with Hope Federal Credit Union, which services the unbanked and underbanked in the Mississippi Delta.

Our plan was to start in Africatown, a neighborhood near Jessica’s hometown of Mobile, and then continue on to Jackson, MS. We’d end with a tour of the Mississippi Delta led by our colleagues at Hope Credit Union. Through one lens, we were 3 women in finance (Black, mixed-race, and white), doing due diligence on a financial institution, Hope Credit Union. The spirit of our trip was more about 3 women in finance working collaboratively to further our longer term vision, which is to partner with institutions that are working for racial and economic justice to address the U.S.’s racial wealth divide. To work towards repair. This doesn’t happen every day in finance.

AFRICATOWN

The first stop was Africatown, a community of descendants of current day Benin, who were brought over on the slave ship Clotilda in 1860, 52 years after the slave trade was outlawed. The illegal operation was financed by Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile landowner, whose family still owns land and businesses in the Mobile region under various names. The people of Africatown are so close to their diasporic roots. The church has a marker outside that notes the founders’ English names, followed by their tribal names, and which tribe they came from. The Africatown cemetery is scattered with offerings from their practice of Vodou, another line of connection to a Mother Land. The descendants of Africatown remember the home they were stolen from.

Jessica and her father organized a ritual for us along the riverbank, which is now dominated by timber and paper mill buildings, whose smoke stacks have poisoned the Africatown community for decades. On a little section of land, we stood together and sent out prayers for the souls of Africatown to find their way back home to Benin. Jessica shared with us that the people of Africatown, once emancipated, fought for repatriation to Benin but were foiled in their attempts, namely by Meaher withholding earnings.

The experience I had in my body was that I was walking through the timeline activity, in real time, on the soil where the violence took place. I was witnessing the consequences of institutionalized exploitation, but also the resistance, and all under the guidance of our ancestors.

We drove past a smaller part of Africatown, called Lewis Quarters. It felt like a last stronghold of community amidst the timber and paper mills. We saw the school Africatown established, called the “Mobile County Training School.” They weren’t allowed to simply call it a school, it had to be qualified with “training” because that would legitimize that they were receiving the same caliber of education as white students. What I was synthesizing was that people were illegally stolen from their home with no consequence. Then they were legally enslaved in the U.S. for 3 years, and unofficially for longer. They worked on plantations for meager wages, that could never amass to the amount of wealth needed to get back home. To add insult to injury, their new home became a dumping ground for toxins from the paper industry, so they were (and currently are) poisoned by the primary industry that could offer jobs. And then their children attend a “training school,” to cement that they could only go so far in a country that stole them, wouldn’t let them go home, and definitely wouldn’t let them succeed here. In fact, the white powers that be would still like to figure out how to steal their labor and life as the nation amasses wealth at their expense.

MONTGOMERY

The next day we went to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, which told the same story, but covering a greater period of time and geographic area. It was the story of stolen people, enslavement for free labor, the premature withdrawal of federal troops after emancipation and lack of enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Then it was Black Codes that could arrest and punish Blacks who didn’t have proof of employment, which led to convict leasing. In 1898, 73% of Alabama state revenue came from convict leasing to the lumber mills and for road maintenance. Even after 35 years of a supposed emancipation, Blacks were still forced into free labor, especially in the South.

The museum illustrated the reign of informal and institutional terror after Emancipation to keep Black people in their place: There were 4,000 documented lynchings between 1880 and 1940. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has an exhibit of gallon size glass jars filled with soil, varying in shades from a light cocoa to a clay red, collected from the grounds of each lynching site. There is also a deeply moving lynching memorial down the street that EJI spearheaded, where coffin-sized rectangular iron blocks hang from the ceiling. Both the museum and the memorial are truthful and tragic assertions of sanctioned violence, which is hardly nationally acknowledged and for which there has not been an apology.

In the museum, I learned of several laws that sought to block Blacks out of the economic and political systems, and this is on top of all of the ones we already know of like segregation of schools (which didn’t end until1954), or preventing Blacks from voting until 1965. There was Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) that barred state enforcement of the 14th Amendment, legalizing discriminatory practices and preventing African American homeownership. Banks and racist deed covenants also worked against Blacks to prevent Black homeownership (this practice of redlining still happens). There was the attempt in 1939 with Lane v. Wilson to allow a 12 day one-time voter registration window for black citizens, and if you didn’t register in that window you’d be permanently barred, and then Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1963) attempted to deprive Blacks of political power by shady boundary creation for electoral districts.

The museum ended with a video installation where you could pick up a phone and see the video of a Black prisoner sharing their story with you about why they were incarcerated. The development of the prison industrial complex helped the nation move from convict leasing under the guise of a “war on drugs” or being “tough on crime,” and still profits from free Black labor. The start of the story was stolen people, and the end was their incarceration, all under the Constitution and a promise of equality and freedom.

In finance, particularly in working with people with inherited wealth, you see the product of compounding returns. This is how the wealth was amassed, and white people had a serious head start: A white ancestor invested in a company or multiple companies and those increased in value over time, and the gains from sales were used to buy more companies and assets, and the market has gone up and up and up.

But this trip had me thinking about compounding negative returns, and the toll this takes on individuals, on community, on spirit.

What happens when you can’t buy into an economic system that governs your existence, and you are foiled at every attempt to participate, through laws or theft or terror (like the Burning of Black Wall Street)?

JACKSON AND THE DELTA

In Jackson we experienced these compounding negative returns, physically and anecdotally. The predominantly Black parts of town, like West Jackson, have such disinvestment that you can’t drive in a straight line on roads covered in threatening potholes. The schools are F-rated, and the community conversation is about the elimination of blighted homes. As an outsider, these all felt like signs of deeper issues that bred this level of systemic disrepair.

We headed into the Mississippi Delta and saw this lack of investment in ghost towns, that clearly still have inhabitants, but no longer have a “main street.” We saw the shells of old business districts. These are towns that have unemployment rates in the teens, as compared to a national average which is now about 3.6%. We heard stories of slum lords renting houses with such unsafe electrical wiring that a woman’s house burned to the ground on 3 occasions. Each time the slum lord would just move her to another negligently-wired home. And there was no recourse. I felt like I was seeing the blowback from a white South not getting its way. First it was Emancipation and then integration and then the Voting Rights Act. The white South is engaged in an energetic game of chicken with the Black population, but waiting for us to swerve into extinction.

RESISTANCE

The South really drives the point home that we have a past that we need to face. I appreciate that they don’t sugar coat it like they do in the North. But what I appreciate even more is the multi-prong resistance I was able to see in the South through the work of the Cooperative Community of New West Jackson (CO-OP NWJ), Cooperation Jackson, Hope Credit Union, Higher Purpose, Co and the Hawkin’s Project in Shaw, MS.

CO-OP NWJ

We stayed in West Jackson and learned about CO-OP NWJ through two hours of sharing stories with its co-founder Nia Umoja. Their work started in Jackson 5 years ago, and they have dozens of houses on 8 contiguous blocks. Nia and her community entered into Jackson at a politically ripe moment, and used grassroots organizing to build relationship and trust, in order to start to develop a Black sovereign community that could resource itself. The community identified 3 priority needs 1) to make money 2) to clean up (people couldn’t even get property insurance due to overgrowth of trees and lots were literal dumping grounds because of lack of services to their community) 3) to have something for the youth to do. Now they have a few thriving Air bnb rentals, which resource the community and the cooperative. They also have a garden, a CSA, and a fiber arts studio. A bookstore filled with DIY books, a grocery for staples, and a cafe run by the neighborhood youth are all in the works. CO-OP NWJ came out of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s Jackson-Kush Plan, a strategic coordinated push to build Black political power in Jackson. While we didn’t have the opportunity to spend time with them, Kali Akuno, who authored the Jackson-Kush plan, leads Cooperation Jackson, another organization building the Solidarity Economy in Jackson.

HOPE FEDERAL CREDIT UNION

We were able to meet many of the staff at Hope Credit Union, including their founding CEO, Bill Bynum. Hope opens branches in otherwise neglected towns in the Delta so that people can deposit their paychecks and avoid the services of predatory check cashing businesses. They invest in thoughtful development projects to get communities into safe and affordable housing, help members achieve homeownership through mortgage lending, address food insecurity, and are even helping Hope members in Shaw, MS with their strategic plan for economic development. Hope has also partnered with a local high school to open a branch on campus and offer an academy style training program, where youth get financial literacy and mentorship. Hope coordinated our tour of the Delta from Jackson, to Itta Bena through Indianola and up to Shaw. They are doing the typical work of a CDFI using new market tax credits and private public partnerships, but they are doing it in an a-typical way. We got to see the strength of relationships that Hope has in the community, and the depth of their commitment to meet the needs of their constituency.

HIGHER PURPOSE, CO.

Higher Purpose, Co gave us a mini tour of their work in Clarksdale, MS. You could tell there were more resources in the town as compared to some of the other Delta towns we saw, namely Clarksdale’s downtown. There were brightly colored flags with the faces of famous bluesmen attached to light posts. An international obsession with the Blues, and blues fanatic’s fantasies of finding their inner bluesmen in the Delta led to a strange influx of foreign investment. Cultural appropriation brought money into Clarksdale. Now, how can the community build and control their own wealth? Higher Purpose, Co. addresses the racial wealth gap and the need for building community wealth through supporting entrepreneurship, affordable housing/real estate acquisition and buying land. Right now over 80% of the entrepreneurs they fund through small business loans are Black women.

HAWKINS PROJECT

It was so powerful to spend time with the numerous people who generously shared their time and stories with us. I have a call this week with one of the women we met from Shaw, MS. I’m getting an update on how their project is going, and to check dates for Homecoming so I can hopefully return. They recently got their local highway named the “Hawkins Memorial Highway” to commemorate Andrew Hawkins. Hawkins was a Black man who illuminated the discriminatory practices in the allocation of resources, such as sewers, sidewalks, streetlights and paving in the town of Shaw. The white side of town was well-resourced while the Black side was not. Hawkins took the case all the way up to the Supreme Court. In the aftermath, 3 of his family members were killed, without any justice. Now the town wants to share this story of resistance, and is rolling out a series of panel discussions, a play, and a number of historical markers around the town. They want to have all the plans laid in time for Homecoming so that the community can celebrate the acknowledgement of Mr. Hawkins and this win. Spending time with the community of Shaw was the energetic bookend to our trip in the Delta. This Supreme Court case was less than 50 years ago — a past that’s still close.

REPAIR, REPARATIONS

I’ve had this feeling that when we talk about reparations, it’s like making the case that someone should address this, and I think the fingers are pointed at our government. But let’s get real, we’ve never seen anything lasting to support healing or any kind of retribution from this fresh racist history, and we’ve been told this history forever! In fact, it seems like we learn new horrible details and systemic racist adaptations all the time. The more we talk about reparations, the more we seem to distance ourselves from our individual agency. The language used to talk about reparations can feel so performative these days, and while I’m glad these conversations are happening, I find myself impatient. Heady arguments about the “why” are important, but they seem to stay in the realm of the head and not manifest. We need to connect to the heart, and to engage with our outrage at what this country and economy has done and continues to do. We must find tangible steps to address repair. Black people and the South have been waiting way too long.

One of my mentors told me that “the universe responds to passionate intent and unconflicted behavior.” We operate at this crossroads, where we can be a bunch of do-gooders telling each other what we want to hear or take a leap for alignment to shift the universe. I’m lucky to know a number of incredible people who give a lot, and yet their investment portfolios continue to grow because of the traditional investment approach. What if the mass accumulation of wealth, quantified in the value of all those ticker symbols (of a bunch of corporations that don’t further the wellbeing of Black people), was actually channeled into direct placement investments to support the self determination of Black entrepreneurs who are rooted in community? I don’t believe that corporations are going to solve the racial wealth gap, or do much of anything except continue to try to make profits and grow. People who have more than “enough” are well-positioned to take the risk and press pause on wealth accumulation for the greater good. Let’s not wait for the government to roll out its take on reparations. I want to see accredited investors who believe in the concept of reparations express this desire through investing in Black and Native communities. It’s projected that the median net wealth of Blacks will hit zero by 2053. My fear is the risk of what will happen if we don’t start to address the racial wealth divide and the spiritual repair needed in this country. It is within our control to create a demand for repair through our actions.

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To learn more about investing with a reparations lens, you can sign up for Chordata Capital’s Newsletter or attend our webinar on July 2nd.

July 11, 2018

by Tiffany Brown

When I was in college at UC Santa Cruz, my area of focus was Community Studies with an emphasis on race and racism in the U.S. As a mixed race, working-middle class woman, who grew up in a predominantly white, wealthy neighborhood in Marin County, California, I was no stranger to either: race (and being different) or racism (as I was fine to keep as a friend, but my white friends had family mandates to not ever date a Black person…). I became a natural spokesperson for the racial moments of the 90s. There was the OJ Simpson trial, there was the Rodney King beating, and history class was always the kicker with the mandatory 25 pages on slavery in the US.

My life’s mission was to address racial challenges. The hard part was that every conversation about the issue led to a divide. I would speak up, and others would become defensive and shut down. The whole situation felt impossible. I was on a search to find a way to talk about race that created an opening instead of exacerbating a divide.

In 2002, after completing my 6-month internship with the Southeast Regional NAACP’s Prison Project in Atlanta, I flew back to Atlanta to participate in a conference organized by Be Present on Race, Gender, Power and Class. During my time with the NAACP, I met a participant in Be Present’s 18-month institute who encouraged me to attend their final conference that brought together a diverse community of women and girls to share the learnings of their cohort. I was hungry to learn about a model that would support me on my journey, and was absolutely nourished by the experience.

The format of that conference allowed for small groups to come up in front of the 100-person conference to introduce themselves. The model encourages sharing from the heart, and the heart is wild and free. One white, wealthy woman (seemed to go off script and) shared about an experience in her office, where she was a witness to racism against some Black women co-workers. She was feeling guilty about not having intervened. The founder, and lead facilitator, Lillie Allen, slowed down this moment and asked for a Black woman to volunteer to come up to the front of the room. Now this happened more than 16 years ago, but I still remember the conviction of my college-aged self. I raised my hand and went up to the front of the room. Lillie asked me to say how this all made me feel. I fancied myself a wizard with race theory, so I began to spout off all the key words and phrases. Lillie stopped me. She asked me to say what I was feeling. I was just 3–4 feet from this white woman, who had done nothing in the face of racism, and I looked at her, breathed, and shared from my heart. My heart was broken. I hated that I felt I had no choice as a Black woman in the U.S. as to whether or not I wanted to combat racism, and this white woman did. And as I looked at that white woman, I saw that her heart was broken too. I saw that racism is dehumanizing for all of us, and it always has been.

I entered into a deep relationship with this work of Be Present and Lillie. It helped me to navigate my early 20s as an employee of an organization, YES!, which had adopted the Be Present Empowerment Model in its journey around race. The Co-Directors (a husband and wife team, and only other staff besides myself) were white, and one was the son of John Robbins of the Baskin Robbins ice cream family. Not only were we navigating race, but we were also unpacking the exceptional privilege of an inheritor, who’d founded a non-profit. So we were also talking about power.

The story of my time with YES! doesn’t exactly have a happy ending, but that’s not the point here… Over the course of my 20s, I learned about a model that centered the importance of weaving together our stories and how we impact one another. With the support of this model, I found my voice again, and rose to co-leadership of YES!. During this time at YES!, one of our major areas of programming was called Leveraging Privilege for Social Change, which brought together young people with “exceptional wealth or fame” for a week of skills sharing and movement building. It began as a collaboration with Resource Generation, Grassroots Leadership, and Changemakers. The constituency of YES! expanded to include powerful leaders of non-profit organizations. This was the beginning of a life-long journey to sit in circles with people with wealth and other movement leaders. The work was and continues to be about how we bridge the increasing divide, and unite under the power of a collective vision. The hard part is that we’ve all been so traumatized by this social and economic system with messages about what our (or others) race, power, class and gender mean, that it can be hard to come together to do what we say we are about! But Be Present opened my eyes to a path and tool box to help us to come together.

When I left YES!, I stayed connected to the work of Be Present, but drifted a bit. I did bring the tools, and an acknowledgement of the work with me everywhere I went. I brought it to my organizing with Resource Generation to strengthen our commitment and transparency about the power of cross-class, multi-racial leadership. I used it to hold space for young people with wealth to talk about their pain and their path. Be Present helped me to hold the clarity that our economic system isn’t working for anyone. If the American Dream is to accumulate wealth, but then even the wealthy aren’t happy, something is off! The work of Be Present helped me to stay true to myself, to see and to create space for the light in others, and to build effective relationships and alliances as I make my way through this world.

One of the first steps of the Be Present Empowerment Model is to “know yourself outside the distress of oppression.” This work started over 35 years ago as the Black Women’s Health Project. Lillie was involved in public health work in the south, and she saw that disease was plaguing Black women. We were internalizing racist messages, and suffering in silence, so Lillie developed a model that centered the individual to have a community of support to discharge and work on the messages and stories that weren’t serving us. The oppression was causing disease, and she was determined to support other Black women in stepping outside of this. The next step is to listen to others in a clear and present state, which is largely understanding the importance of the quality of attention we give one another. If we aren’t giving that, it tends to be due to a trigger that is getting in the way of us interrelating. This is where a lot of transformation in work across difference can happen. We’ve been so divided that it is essentially rewiring and humanizing one another so that we can BE together. And shorthand, being together and staying in relationship is the final step.

It’s important for me to lay out the history and the steps to presence the leadership and brilliance of Black women.

It seeps into so many other areas of work. I carry it with me now as I step into a cross-class, multi-racial leadership team with my business partner as we center love and humanity in finance. I draw upon the teachings and the diverse community of supporters as I find a new kind of voice as I speak the language of finance. There are not many Black women in this sector, and not many investments that look to lift up our people, yet here I am (and here we are), building this financial advisory firm rooted in racial and economic justice. We are turning our attention to this area of work, with all the tools we can muster in our toolbox, to bridge the racial and economic divide. For this, I call upon the great source of strength: Be Present.

People speak of political homes, and Be Present is one of mine. A couple weeks ago, I went to Be Present’s conference celebrating 35 years of Black Women’s Leadership in Building Inclusive Movements for Social Justice. There were over 115 participants. It was the most diverse conference I have ever experienced. Poor folks, middle-class, rich folks (as Be Present has done a lot of work with the Threshold community), Black folks, Native folks, white, Latinx, men, women, non-binary… And we all came together to honor Black women in this community of practice, which looks so much like the kind of world we want to be in. In Be Present, the people are the agenda, and the outcome of the conference felt like the brightest expression of our collective spirit and intention to work towards a world that suits all of us.

This work speaks to the depths of my spirit. And my soul’s prayer is that I may presence it always.