November 15, 2023

5 years ago in Fall 2018, with a dream in our hearts, we announced that Chordata was open for business. We’ll be real – the success of this project is beyond our wildest dreams, and we are in awe of everything this community has accomplished.

To celebrate, we’re thrilled to share Chordata’s 5-year Anniversary Impact Report. Relationships have always been at the heart of our work, and we offer this report as a collage of stories of some of the incredible people and projects who have traveled with us on this path. 

We hope you’ll snuggle up with a cozy sweater and cup of tea and take some time to absorb the power of what we’ve all been able to do together. Especially in these devastating times, we hope that these stories of power-building, repair, and economic self-determination can bring you hope for what’s possible, and a glimpse of the world to come. 

“We see this as the Age of Repair: the age in which we start to act in a way that takes into account everything we’ve learned. Together with wealth holders and with financial activists, we are choosing something different than what we have inherited.” – Tiffany Brown

June 21, 2021

by Kate Poole

I am really grateful and honored to be here. I was invited to share about the work that I’ve done in my life around racial justice, reparations, and supporting black sovereignty. My family has been a part of this congregation for generations for 6 generations. My great-great-great-great grandfather Michael Simon Levy was a founder, so it’s a powerful and vulnerable moment for me to be sharing my life’s work with you today.

When the Rabbi invited me to speak on Black Sovereignty I was moved, because I think that is such a powerful framework to bring to discussions of racial justice. It also might be a phrase that’s unfamiliar to some of you. You might be wondering, how can we support black sovereignty? Is there a difference between doing work that benefits local black community members (say tutoring or street clean-ups) and supporting black sovereignty?

Yes. Sovereignty is about who decides what’s needed and how resources are allocated. Supporting black sovereignty is about giving both resources (money, time, expertise) and power (the decision-making power over how those resources are spent).

As an example, even though our congregation is full of brilliant minds, no one knows what is best for someone else. We can’t decide what another community needs.

Women are the real experts on women’s rights, black activists are experts on anti-black racism, and any attempt to solve a social problem must be shaped and led by those affected.

I often draw on the Jewish framework of Teshuvah to anchor my work supporting Black Sovereignty. I find Jewish support for reparations in Teshuvah.

You’re probably most familiar with Teshuvah in the context of Yom Kippur. Literally meaning to turn or return, Teshuvah is a process of self-examination, asking forgiveness, and making things right by repairing the damage. The responsibility to make Teshuvah is both individual and collective — which is one reason why much of the liturgy of Yom Kippur asks forgiveness for the sins that we have committed. There is a balancing of specific ways you haven’t measured up, and there is an acknowledgement of collective and systemic harm we’re working towards transforming. There is a balance of looking at our personal shortcomings, and there is an acknowledgement of the need to think, talk and act collectively towards addressing systemic harm.

Massive harm created the current disparities in our economy. Racism and white supremacy have shaped who has access to wealth. The practice of Teshuvah offers us clues and a framework for what it looks like to work towards repair and return.

This has been a long learning journey for me. When I was growing up, when we would drive from Pikesville to Shul, I didn’t have a strong historical sense of why we were traveling from a Jewish neighborhood to a Black Neighborhood to go to synagogue. I knew that when we parked on Linden Ave and walked over, I felt out of place, but I also knew that my great-great-grandmother had an apartment at Eutaw Place a stone’s throw from here.

I was raised to be generous, to seek justice, to be kind. But in doing that I looked outside of myself — tutoring young black students in city schools, interning at a domestic violence legal aid program, building a school in Costa Rica — seeing poverty and racism out there, and wanting deeply to help. I didn’t learn to ask how am I implicated.

I didn’t understand how my privilege and opportunities were connected to the poverty and violence I saw locally and globally.

I didn’t see how the lack of resources in city schools and court systems were connected to bigger patterns of white flight and redlining. I didn’t see how racism was connected to who has access to wealth and whose wealth is stolen.

My politics shifted in college, and again in showing up for Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter movement. During Occupy Wall Street I learned about how the 1% owns over half of global wealth. I learned how the accumulation of wealth has always been connected to racial discrimination.

The accumulation of wealth in this country is based on the theft of land from native peoples, the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, and policies and practices created by governments and financial institutions — like the Homestead Acts, the GI Bill, redlining, racist deed covenants, discriminatory lending practices — that built wealth for some at the expense of others.*

If we look at all of this harm, and look at the racial wealth divide in our country, we can see a deep wound that needs healing. Apply the concept of Teshuvah to contemporary economic and racial injustice, and we can make the case for reparations. This includes pushing our country and local governments to pay reparations to historically oppressed and economically exploited communities, by supporting legislation like HR 40 and S. 1083. In my own work, I focus on supporting individual and institutional inheritors in bringing a reparations lens to their giving and investing.

Some white Jewish Americans have a complicated relationship to their whiteness and the history of whiteness in this country. This country has discriminated against Jews historically, and there’s a real threat of violence today from anti-semitic white nationalists. And also, many white Jewish Americans have been able to accumulate wealth, and accumulating wealth in this country means benefitting from racist systems.

In my own journey of reparations, I’ve looked to move the money I’ve inherited to organizations and businesses that are building economic self-determination for Black communities.

Around this time last year, a colleague introduced me to Cole and Aisha Pew of Dovecote Cafe. I had been giving to Black-led organizing and activism in Baltimore, and investing in local community finance institutions, but I was looking to invest in work that was explicitly building Black Sovereignty. Cole and Aisha are building Black Economic Power — and when we pulled up to their joyful, gorgeous cafe, I was surprised to find they are doing that work in the footprint of the neighborhood where my family first starting accumulating wealth before moving to the county. I was shocked and delighted that the hub of their work is just one block from Beth Am, where I was batmitzvah-ed! I was moved by their model, and made the largest financial commitment of my life, with the wire going through last year on Juneteenth. I felt deeply grounded in the healing work of investing in Black Sovereignty, and in building Black-Jewish solidarity.

In addition to investing in businesses that are closing the racial wealth divide by building black economic power, I also support wealthy white investors in redistributing their wealth and integrating their giving and investing practices. I help inheritors trace the history of wealth accumulation in their families and look for opportunities for repair. I do this work through Chordata Capital, an investment advisory firm I co-founded with Tiffany Brown. Together work as investment advisors with investors who are committed to racial justice, wealth redistribution and reparations. Part of my accountability practice as a wealthy white woman is being in partnership with Tiffany, a Black mixed-race working class woman. I was moved to hear that Beth Am has developed a similar model of accountability in their work with the community, to have the board of In For Of to be half Jews from the shul and half Black community members.

When I started my work with Tiffany, we realized that in order for us to step into an equitable partnership, we needed to share resources. I had enough money to put my full time and attention into our business, and if I didn’t financially support Tiffany to put her full time into our work, there would be a warped power dynamic from the start. We saw that our work of racial and economic justice had to start at home, and a foundation where we were equitably sharing resources would set the tone for the integrity we would bring to our work with partners and clients. Supporting Black Sovereignty includes financially supporting Black leadership.

As the racial wealth divide grows (with the average Black family’s median net wealth set to hit zero by 2053**), we need to take greater risks to bring justice, connection and financial resources to support the self-determination of Black Communities.

I’m grateful that Judaism has a solid framework for repentance. Teshuvah, Tfillah, Tzedakah: to repair, to pray, to share resources.

We need each other. Beth Am is lucky to be working in relationship with local Black leaders in the community. Our work is more powerful and grounded when it is anchored in loving, accountable relationships. As we continue to grow by being in relationship, I hope we can also grow in the way we share resources. I’d love to continue to be a part of that work with you all. Shabbat Shalom.

*****************
Kate delivered this sermon and participated in a Q&A with Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg at Beth Am’s Juneteenth Shabbat on June 15th, 2019. She also compiled a learning document for the congregation on these themes, that’s available here. 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.

*United for a Fair Economy: Government Boosts and Blocks of Building Wealth http://www.faireconomy.org/boostsandblocks

**Institute for Policy Studies report The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide is Hollowing out the Middle Class

June 12, 2020

By Tiffany Brown

We have been in a loving warrior stance. The weeks that built up to the murder of George Floyd, with the horrific backdrop of the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, we were already in the midst of yet another fight against the white supremacy and patriarchy that is entrenched in our financial system.

I have found myself playing back and grieving many of the past racist experiences that I’ve had as a Black woman. Sometimes they would just sneak up on me. We were in the final stages of coordinating a divestment letter and action in response to institutionalized racism, sexism and white male supremacy and it was bringing up so many memories. Then on May 27th, the letter for our divestment action was half way crafted, and we learned that yet another Black person was taken down violently by racism.

After we sent off our divestment letter and pulled over $3M in investments, I spent the next four days, as protests erupted across the country, feeling sick, trying to recuperate from the pain of what it is to always be fighting. The loving warrior stance doesn’t always give room for the tremendous grief and horror unravelling before us.

As I was stuck in bed, trying to regain strength, it dawned on me that this is all the same beast. I had just listened to Jessica Norwood’s powerful post on Facebook about her response to white people asking her about what to do in this moment. The punchline is that white people need to listen to Black people, and if they have to ask now, they aren’t ready to take the stand and act for the kind of justice that’s needed. Black people have been saying for decades and decades what’s needed. That’s why so many of us are tired, sick, or dying by the hands of police or white vigilantes.

We already know that the racial wealth divide was intentional, and it intentionally created poverty and dependence. Black people weren’t allowed to thrive, weren’t allowed access to home loans through the GI bill, were systematically denied access to other lines of lending for business due to credit (a racist system in and of itself), weren’t allowed to vote, have been blocked from voting in many ways after the Voting Rights Act, were criminalized through violations of Black Codes that penalized/jailed you for not having a job (which would be for a white employer in Jim Crow), Blacks were forced into labor in Jim Crow through their incarceration, then the “Justice System” found myriad other ways to criminalize Black bodies with “Black Crime,” building a free labor force through the imprisonment of Black people, not to mention all of the laws that block felons from reentering society with jobs, voting and housing. The blowback from all of this has been trauma! I think of the consequences of poverty: diets that don’t help one thrive, substance abuse, mental health issues. And again, personally, I’ve seen this in my family. There are many ways to kill a people.

So this racism conversation that we are now having nationally, rooted in the senseless killing of Black people, that’s the tip of the iceberg. I think that many of us Black people are feeling depressed, lethargic, and a deep sense of grief. We’ve already been trying to fight the violence of racism that we have felt in so many different ways. The killing of all of our Black sisters and brothers is senseless, but it’s been coordinated. And so when I hear of another Black person killed, I want to see it for what it is: this is structural racism that will not stop until we build systems that actually love Black and Brown bodies (again, Jessica Norwood — her words).

We wanted to offer our community some ways of resourcing systems that love Black and Brown people, and some ways for white and non-Black people of color to step into deeper antiracist practice. We want to invite you into six core practices of Chordata Capital. This backbone of strategies can support investment in Black liberation. We invite you to center the leadership of Black women, shift your investments, divest from wall street, give more money, work towards repair and come into community.

6 ways to Invest in Black Liberation

1: Center the leadership of Black women who embody the loving warrior stance and are building the Solidarity Economy.

• Follow the visionary leadership of Jessica Norwood, Nwamaka Agbo, Lillie Allen, Nia Umoja, Erin Dale Byrd, Anasa Troutman, Konda Mason and Nina Robinson!

2 : Move money, through grants or investments or integrated capital strategies, to Black-led solidarity economy projects, mutual aid networks, and financial institutions.

• Invest in Hope Credit Union in the Mississippi Delta, which has a Transformational Certificate of Deposit
• Give to Highlander Research and Education Center, they are a part of a Black-led coalition that is raising a $10 million Southern Power Fund
• Give and invest in Higher Purpose Co
• Give and invest in Runway Project
• Give and invest in local Black-led businesses, coops, individuals and organizations. Give to mutual aid projects that support Black communities — check out New Economy Coalition and A People’s Orientation to a Regenerative Economy.

3: Give and give more!

• Make multi-year (at least 3 year) commitments to funding Black-led organizing for justice. Let organizations know who you are and how long they can count on your support. Check out the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) network, Solidaire’s Aligned Giving Strategy, and social justice community foundations.

4: Divest entirely from Wall Street. Wealth accumulation on Wall Street is dependent on the use of extreme violence to extract resources from poor communities and communities of color. Move as much money as possible out of the stock market.

5: Get clear about where your money comes from and what repair could look like!

• Learn about the history of wealth accumulation in this country. Learn from United for a Fair Economy’s Boosts and Blocks timeline, Peoples Hub, and the 400 years of Inequality timeline.
• Locate your own story and your family’s story in these histories. Where was your family able to access land, wealth or power at the expense of others? Where is there opportunity for repair?
• Come out of isolation, and talk about these histories with your family and people in your life.
• Part of the work of repair is coming in to community. You cannot do the work of repair by yourself in isolation. A crucial part of the repair is building relationships.

6: Build real relationships, break out of isolation

• Commit to personal practices so you can stay accountable and stay in relationship through difficulty and discomfort. Explore journaling, meditation, prayer, ritual, and building altars. For more ideas, check out the work of Be Present, Yeye Luisah Teish, adrienne maree brown, Irresistible Podcast, and Generative Somatics.
• As Beth Pickens says, anger isn’t action and misery isn’t solidarity. Real relationships create an opportunity for ongoing accountability. The internet is not going to hold you accountable. Posting on social media is a start but it is not going to redistribute wealth and power. Building real connections with people and communities organizing for justice will support you in showing up for movements in the years to come. These relationships can offer loving accountability. You do not need to do this work alone! And you cannot do this work alone. Build real relationships and join organizing for justice.
• If you’re a white person looking to deepen your anti-racist practices join SURJ, Catalyst Project, or local organizing for racial justice.
• If you’re a wealthy person join Resource Generation or Solidaire.
• For people of color and white folks check out local groups building the solidarity economy, like New Economy Coalition and the Solidarity Economy US map.
• If you are a Black person, we are sending you love and solidarity. If you’re looking for community you can check out M4BL, BOLD and Resources for Black Healing.

If you are a person with wealth and ready to shift over $2 million to investments in racial and economic justice, reach out to us at team@chordatacapital.com or find a time with us using this link. If you’re looking to shift between $500k and $2 million please fill out this form.

This article should not be construed as investment advice, please talk with a financial professional to make sure these recommendations work for you and your own individual financial situation.