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.

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”

March 28, 2024

We recently returned from Right to the City Alliance (RTTC)’s member assembly in New Orleans. We were incredibly grateful to be invited into this space and for the chance to learn directly from organizers building the solidarity economy!!! RTTC is a national alliance of more than 90 community-based organizations growing grassroots power to halt gentrification and displacement, and build democratic, just, and sustainable communities.

We’ve had a yearning since we first started with Chordata to get clear about what social movement investing looks like in our work. RTTC is developing an analysis and roadmap for coordinated national work for housing justice, including a clear analysis that Wall Street is not our friend. We loved chanting “Down, down with Corporations! Up, up with Liberation!” And are lit up to be in relationship with RTTC and mobilizing investments in line with this beautiful roadmap of what it takes to win!

We participated with groups across the country in building a shared analysis about what we’re up against. In a brilliant “State of the Movement” plenary, RTTC’s organizers described how the far right neo-fascist agenda is being developed and implemented in the US South, and how these strategies are coming for the rest of the country. They described how the rise of the far right is directly linked to the failure and devastating impacts of neoliberalism in this country. As neoliberalism stopped working for white working class people, the solution that’s been offered is neo-fascism, often couched in progressive terminology like “the elites don’t want you to have money or power”. The rallying cry at the assembly was that in order to defeat neoliberalism we have to beat back the far right, we need to focus our efforts in the South, and we need to block false solutions and build real alternatives.Towards these ends, we learned about core interventions like community controlled real estate, corporate targeting, rent strikes and tenant takeovers. One of Chordata’s investing priorities is community controlled real estate, and we felt so much alignment with RTTC’s vision! Some of our current community controlled real estate investments include EBPREC, Local Code Kansas City, Seed Commons, Cooperative Fund of the Northeast, and LEAF. 

Visiting Jane PlaceWhile at the convening we visited an amazing New Orleans-based project called Jane Place. They create permanently affordable housing, advance tenant rights, expand housing security, and uphold equitable housing patterns and land use planning. In 2016, Jane Place opened the first permanently affordable apartment building in New Orleans- the Palmyra Street Apartments- and they are currently working to develop 14 more units of permanently affordable housing.Leaders from Jane Place spoke at the conference, offering framing about the impacts of disaster capitalism on their city, as well as how the work they’re doing to create community controlled housing is tied to climate resiliency. So many houses in New Orleans are being purchased and turned into Airbnbs, leading to displacement of local people. We heard about Jane Place’s incredible organizing work to win new limits aimed at curbing short term rentals in residential neighborhoods- this means there can only be one Airbnb per square block in New Orleans! What’s beautiful about the work of Jane Place is that in the face of displacement and gentrification and super high rents, they’re able to purchase buildings and rent them at really affordable prices to local residents. 

Looking under the financial hood of tenant takeoversAlso at the convening, we heard from several groups that were able to organize tenants to take over properties!! One project with over 80 families ended up having to take on an around $12 million loan that they are paying around 8% interest on, a super extractive rate of return. That pencils out to around $1M in interest each year, which is an extra $12,500 that each of those families has to pay a year just to cover the interest! This creates a huge burden on tenants who are just trying to live in their homes. Stories go viral about beautiful tenant takeovers, as they should. But if you’re not looking under the hood and seeing what’s happening with the financing, there can still be a lot of extraction happening. We’re really curious to look at where the opportunities are to bring more values aligned, lower interest and no interest capital to tenant takeovers so that people aren’t saddled with so much interest. If we want to see more of these tenant takeovers happening all across the country it’s going to take a lot more capital. One of our major takeaways from the convening is that we need more people on the investment side of things coming in alongside this amazing organizing. We want to see those of us on the investment side of the ecosystem communicating with groups about different kinds of values-aligned capital that’s available, and mobilizing local and national capital to support these incredible projects with more favorable terms.

For those of you wondering how you can connect more to this work, here are a few places to start:Find Right to the City affiliates or other housing justice organizers in your community and figure out how to uplift that work and support renters in your region Look into your investments to see if you hold real estate investment trusts (REITs), or shares in corporations or private equity companies that are buying up apartments and houses and extracting wealth from tenants. If you’re a Chordata Client, we’re already working with you to divest from Wall Street! If you manage your own investments, consider divesting and shifting that capital into community-controlled real estate instead!

 If you’re a member of Resource Generation, get plugged in to their new national campaign on housing, in partnership with Center for Popular Democracy’s House Everyone Campaign!
 Reach out to Fernando Abarca at Right to the City to learn how to invest in their fund and move capital to support their work!

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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July 25, 2023

RUNWAY is one of Chordata’s core partners in the work of repair. Led by an incredible leaderfull team of creative Black women, RUNWAY is a financial innovation firm working nationally to support Black economic power building. Chordata is invested in their work in a variety of ways: In their CD program in partnership with Berkshire Bank, in Something Better Foods, a company run by RUNWAY entrepreneur Chef GW Chew, and we are in the process of investing in REAL People’s Fund, a community-governed fund in the Bay Area that RUNWAY leads.

Excitingly for all of us, RUNWAY just launched ROOTED, a 10-year commitment to investing in the South, which will include a national fund that can support Black creatives and entrepreneurs across the country. The project is led by our friend and colleague, Jessica Norwood, the Founder and CEO of RUNWAY and a frequent guest in our cohort programs, sharing stories and examples of repair.

In May of 2023, RUNWAY hosted a delegation to visit Alabama! It was a learning trip with the full RUNWAY team and their allied funders, to visit with several Black communities in Alabama to explore what it would be like to build an economy in Alabama that loves Black people.

I felt so lucky to be invited and to attend! I felt really lit up by this trip. It was really special for me as a white, wealthy inheritor to be welcomed into Black-led work and Black-owned spaces in the South. I felt deeply moved when trusted colleagues would name me and name the importance of Chordata’s work in their presentations to these communities. 

We started in Mobile, where Jessica grew up. Her father was the mayor of Pritchard, a Black town right outside of Mobile. It was so powerful to hear Jessica in conversation with her father about what it takes to build and sustain Black political and economic power. We traveled to neighboring Africatown, and visited the graves of survivors of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship that landed in the Mobile delta in 1860. There’s an incredible film, Descendant, that documents the story and includes film footage of Cudjoe Lewis, one of the oldest survivors, taken by Zora Neale Hurston in 1927 (she tells his story in his own dialect in Baracoon). 

Next we traveled to Gee’s Bend. My mom was obsessed with these gorgeous quilts when I was growing up, so the art was familiar to me. There’s been so much work done to lift up these artists and their art, and interrupt legacies of Black artists’ work being stolen, and some quilters have built some wealth. But it’s wild to see how this success has not translated into community wealth or infrastructure–there’s no sanitation system, no gas station, no grocery store, no cell service, no internet, no place to stay, in Boykin, Alabama. There’s a ferry across the river, or a 45 minute drive to the nearest town. They are building a beautiful visitor center, hosting an annual “Airing of the Quilts” festival and reviving the Freedom Quilting Bee, a Black women’s cooperative founded in 1966. But there’s still so much need for investment.

Our journey had so many special moments including a mardi gras band and farm-to-table dinner at the historic Black-owned Jenkins Farm, and a visit to Michelle Browder’s visionary project Mothers of Gynecology. And we ended in Montgomery, Alabama, where we heard from Black artists and creatives at a hip Black-owned gallery and event space. Throughout the trip, the RUNWAY team centered Black artists and Black art. During a panel Nina moderated with Black artists in Pritchard, she proclaimed: “Art and creativity is what makes life worth living.” Even in our side conversations, we found ourselves talking about the art we make, the art we dream of making, and how much creativity is required to be in this work of reimagining the economy. How finance itself is an art, and not a science. In Montgomery, I remember Jessica saying “What does it mean to be a creative entrepreneur? All Black Entrepreneurs have to be creative to survive and thrive.” 

And on our last day we visited Erica Washington at Clarke Street Fund. She sat us all down under a huge tree, and as I was enjoying the shade and wondering if it was a walnut, she shared that we were on the land of her Great-Grandfather and gathered under a more than 100 year old pecan tree, that still offered a bumper crop every other year. We were able to help weed some garden beds, and get our hands in the soil, and they offered us gorgeous refreshing watermelon juice. Across the street is an empty lot that used to house a grocery store run by her family. Now Erica and her sister are continuing that legacy and working to feed the community. 

On our first night in Mobile, Nwamaka Agbo shared: “We have to be clear that we too are trying to be transformed in doing this work.” It was not that we were trying to bring our ideas or strategies and impose them on these communities, where there is such a history of trust being broken and outsiders coming in to try to “fix” and ultimately abandon them. The trip was intended to change us, to reshape how we as investors were imagining returning resources to the South. I’m excited to return to Alabama as RUNWAY builds out more infrastructure to support Black creatives and entrepreneurs in the South, and I hope members of the Chordata community will come with me!