September 27, 2023

As told by Annie McShiras, Investment & Fundraising Director at EB PREC

EB PREC (East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative) is a Black, Indigenous, people of color led organization that takes real estate and housing off the speculative market and puts it back in the hands of community members for community benefit. We do this by supporting residents and community members with the tools to empower them to find, vet, and work with us to finance properties that they want to live and work in. We use a participatory, deeply democratic model of community engagement for community ownership. 

We have over 740 members as part of our multi-stakeholder cooperative: Resident Owners, Community Owners, Staff Owners and Investor Owners who are part of our model and who help make it all happen. Our work is about community control for folks who have been historically displaced and continue to be displaced within their own city of Oakland. The displacement is happening along racialized lines and in ways that are predominantly displacing Black and Indigenous people, and all people of color. And so those are the folks that we focus on empowering and working with most closely and are the core to our leadership and membership. 

“We’ve counted Chordata as an ally and champion of our work since we both got started 5 years ago. Since the beginning, Chordata was wanting to figure out how they could get involved. When we launched our Esther’s Orbit Room capital campaign- our biggest campaign to date to raise the dollars we needed to acquire and rehabilitate this historic property in West Oakland- Chordata was one of the first major institutional investment advisors to come in and say “We believe in this work, and we want to bring our clients in to invest in it.”  Because of Chordata’s belief in us and the connections they helped us make, we were able to bring in other registered investment advisors. Now we have a number of advisors that have joined Chordata in having us on their platform and offering EB PREC Investor Owner shares to their clients. It’s been incredibly supportive. We’ve raised nearly 2 million dollars through those channels, about 1 million directly through Chordata clients- and counting!

To share an example of what our work together has made possible: EB PREC recently purchased Esther’s Orbit Room, a historic property that sits at the heart of the 7th St. corridor in West Oakland. We’re a part of an exciting partnership with Bay Area LISC, who we’re partnering with on 7th Street Thrives, an initiative that is spearheading a holistic development approach to supporting revitalization of the 7th St. corridor and bringing it back into community member’s hands. Esther’s is an anchor to the 7th Street Corridor, historically called Harlem of the West, and was a cultural, arts & economic hub back in the 40’s through the 90’s for the Black community in West Oakland. 

There’s a lot of danger in what’s happening throughout Oakland in terms of the forces of gentrification. Large profit-seeking developers are buying up properties, sitting on them until they increase in value, then flipping them and making as much money off them as possible. That’s what we’re worried about happening on 7th street. So we’re taking matters into our own hands, with the support of community. We’ve not only started buying property on the Corridor and getting it into community control, but we’ve been able to work with our partners to get the street lights updated by the city of Oakland, which is something the community has been asking for for decades. We’re getting trash picked up. We organized a big Black Earth Day event and brought in people from across the community, taking back the corridor and restarting and revitalizing it for community benefit. Whenever I’m at Esther’s, at least a few elders walking by on the Corridor come by and say, “Oh, I remember back in the day coming to Esther’s after work and getting a drink with my friends. When is it going to be coming back? When are we going to see it start up again?”  People are really excited just to see that there’s any kind of momentum and spirit coming back to the neighborhood.

It was a huge vote of confidence that we received from Chordata at the very beginning of our capital campaign, that made it possible for us to then say to other advisors, “Hey, Chordata invested in us, and here’s the process we went through with them. Would you like to join, too?” And it was much easier for other advisors to come in, once they saw that a peer had joined and had brought us into their portfolio. Early on, we had conversations about bringing debt capital in as a loan. Through conversations with Chordata, we came to be supported by them with investments in EB PREC equity from their clients, which is game changing for us because we actually created our own investment terms that align perfectly with what we need and the kind of capital we need. Being able to bring in investments on our own terms has been transformative for our ability to keep housing and real estate affordable for the residents and community members that we support, because of the flexible low interest capital that we were able to raise, and because it’s equity and not debt. 

Our relationship with Tiffany and Kate is one very much based on trust and support, and that’s unique amongst most grant and funding relationships because of the power differentials that all too often make that level of trust difficult to obtain. We’re really aligned in terms of our vision for the role that capital can play to make transformative change. Chordata and EBPREC share the value of being in right relationship with capital, with our 740 members, and with the investors we work with. We share that underlying foundation in both why and how we do what we do, and it’s a really important tenet of restorative economics.” 

— Annie McShiras, Investment & Fundraising Director, EB PREC

September 27, 2023

Manzanita Capital Collective is A-dae Romero-Briones, Mariela Cedeño, and Anthony Chang, three practitioners who have come together around the north star of the redistribution of land, money and power to tribes, to farmers of color and to other folks working on food and land justice. Their work is to shift capital and to shift power, and they collaborate with Chordata on both of these levels. Tiffany sat down with Anthony Chang to discuss the evolution of their work, and their recent collaboration on Rancho Corralitos / the Watsonville Land Project. 

Tiffany: Hi Anthony! I’ve known you for a while now, and I’m excited to highlight our beautiful friendship and collaboration as part of the story of 5 years of Chordata. Will you start by telling us a little bit about what Manzanita Capital Collective is up to these days?

Anthony: Definitely. There’s three main areas in which we do work. There’s our work directly with tribes, farmers of color, and nonprofits working on food and land justice. We are helping mobilize resources for land-based projects, typically in the form of a combination of grants and 0% interest loans or non-extractive finance. So for example, our colleague A-dae, who leads all of our work with tribes and indigenous land stewards, has been coordinating our work with a group of tribal members in Lake County right now to reacquire 20+ acres of ancestral lands for them to re-wild. Or, there’s a farmer of color that we’re working with in Sonoma County whose been farming for 10+ years, that is about to acquire a property that will be the home base for their regenerative farm and seed saving campus. A second bucket is that we support a bunch of community-controlled funds- basically, funds that are often combinations of grants and loans where the folks that are making the decisions are generally people of color coming from and/or accountable to frontline communities. One example is our colleague Mariela has been part of the EFOD (Equitable Food Oriented Development) collaborative since its beginning when she was at Mandela Partners, and where a group of on-the-ground POC food justice practitioners from all over the country – Oakland, El Paso, New Orleans, Durham, Cleveland and more – govern and steward funds to support projects that center community ownership, racial and economic justice, healthy food access, and more.  And then the third part is that we partner with family offices, family foundations and other wealth holders to move money when we have aligned goals and objectives. That’s where our work with Chordata most comes in. 

Tiffany: I feel like our relationship since the beginning was two-fold. I remember that we started having conversations about decentralized leadership, when you were looking to move (Kitchen Table Advisors) to a more flat organization. Our relationship then deepened when you stepped off a board because of a lot of the racism that you were experiencing and witnessing, and we were in relationship with that organization as well and ended up divesting from them. It was this real point of shared activation of “oh my gosh” even in these kind of woo-woo, economic intervention-y looking spaces, there’s still a hotbed of racism, and it was really cool to be in that fight with you.

Anthony: Absolutely. I feel like there’s like a values connection and there’s also like an energetic piece and an imagining piece that feels really uncommon and special to my relationship to you, Tiffany, and to Chordata. That it was clear that we’re not going to spend time with the status quo. There’s the inside game of, you tinker and you try to reform and then there’s the outside game where you just build your own shit and you do something new. And I feel like that connection of, let’s imagine the new things and do that, that is at the core of how we’ve connected over the years. And our collaboration has really evolved over time. With you, Tiffany, and with Chordata, we were just in relationship for a number of years, not knowing what specific pieces of work might be, but knowing that, well, maybe it’ll be now, maybe it’ll be next month, maybe it’ll be five years from now. We were imagining and staying connected and leaving ourselves open to what kind of exciting work we might do together. And I really appreciate that openness. 

Tiffany: My friend and mentor Lillie who I know through Be Present work, she has said that so much of the work is actually that time in between things of cultivating the relationship. Over the pandemic you, Anthony, were coming over and we were going for walks and we were sounding boards for each other about different things. And so it just makes me think of Lillie in that way, that when it comes time to actually do the work, like the People’s Land Fund or like the Manzanita Capital Collective, there’s all of the different beautiful investments that are going to manifest from these waterways that are in your midst. It will just be so easy for us to come in and support at whatever kind of level is needed, because we’ve been putting in that work all the way up until this point.

Anthony: Right. And so recently, that resulted in the very tangible piece of working together on Rancho Corralitos, or what we were calling the Watsonville Land Project, which is collaboration between People’s Land Fund, Kitchen Table Advisors and Dirt Capital Partners to buy a $11.5 million dollar property of organic farmland in Watsonville CA, with the explicit goal of transferring ownership of that land to a group of Latino immigrant organic farmers for around $8 million, recognizing the racial wealth gap, lack of access to capital, all the things. An important piece in that $11.5 million capital stack was $6.5 million of mostly 0% interest debt and some debt that was 1-2% interest. We helped raise the capital for the project. Chordata Capital played an integral role in making the land acquisition happen because something like 30% of the debt came through Chordata Capital clients, which is amazing. We were able to go to other lenders and say, “Hey, this $1.8 million is at 0% interest. Do you want to come in at 0% interest too?”, with the parenthetical “or do you want to be *that person* where the interest you earn – and that you probably don’t need – is basically taking the money out of the pockets of Latino immigrant organic farmers?” 

One thing I want to note about our relationship with Chordata overall, that we see in the Watsonville Land Project, is a willingness to experiment and a willingness to come in on something that is beautiful but emergent and figuring things out as we go. There were plenty of folks that said to us “that looks too weird, that looks too complicated, we don’t understand the collaboration, we don’t understand the capital stack”, et cetera. But you and Kate and your clients were just like “cool, land for farmers of color in ways that address the racial wealth gap? Cool, let’s figure it out.”

The way that this project is set up, every dollar of interest that this project pays to lenders comes out of the farmers’ pockets in terms of what they’re going to pay for this land. I just did the quick math on $6.5 million of debt. If it was all at 2% interest, that’s $130,000 a year, and this project will be over four or five years. That’s over half a million dollars that the farmers would pay more for this land. If all of it came at 0%, that’s half a million dollars cheaper to acquire this land. So I think about the importance of the question that we’re asking all of the lenders: “What do you want to happen here? Do you need that money?” If you’re a billion dollar foundation, for example, do you really need these tens of thousands of dollars in interest? And for what?

Tiffany: That is so fucked up. And here’s the other thing that came into my mind, from hearing from these farmers about their median income. It’s between maybe $35,000 annually to, if they are owning their own land they might be bringing in more like $60,000. But then you divide that $130,000 of “low interest” payments divided amongst seven farmers, that’s something like $18,000 in payments a year per person! That’s significantly cutting into what their annual income is. And then you think of, who is receiving this money? It’s the investor class. It’s people or foundations with millions of dollars that don’t need that money. It’s literally wild. Literally taking it out of the mouths of their children that they’re trying to send to college.

Anthony: There’s plenty of folks that we talk to and are in relationship with, especially on the institutional philanthropy side, that just scoff at the idea of 0% interest loans. They scoff like, “What are you talking about? Of course we’re entitled to this financial return.” And to be able to point to these, literally dozens of people who are saying, “No, we are not taking a financial return. We’re getting our principal back, and we’re wanting to support this incredible project.” To be able to have that, is really powerful. To be able to tell other people and really put a mirror to them.

We often talk about “all of our work is in partnership.” All of our work is a collective effort, and we’re all playing our role. And so, all of our work is in support of tribes, land stewards, farmers that are doing this incredible work on the ground. And it’s really important for us to be able to have partners like you, Tiffany, and Kate at Chordata so that we can move together with wealth holders towards this north star. And we’re not only partners, but really values-aligned, like we’re working towards the same goal. I feel like a bunch of folks we work with, we’re like, okay, we’ll work with you because we’re 70% aligned, aligned enough to work on a thing. But I feel like it’s best when we’re 100% aligned on what we’re working towards and the analysis that we have around race, around class, around capitalism, extractive economy and all of these things are shared. 

And that reminds me of something else, about the Chordata Cohort, related to the roles that we all play and the trust that can come from relationship. It was really beautiful to get the invitation to join you all at a Chordata Capital cohort gathering and into a space that we could trust would be held well. I think that bringing together a group of wealth holders that are on their journey, in most other cases I’d be skeptical, like “that seems fraught, that could be really harmful in a lot of ways.” But it just felt really different. To come to Boonville for the Chordata Cohort and trust that you and Kate were holding the space in a particular way. And to land in a beautiful place with delicious food and with a group of people that was so warm and to know that you all were doing the work of helping these folks on their journey. And that me and Jessica [Norwood, from Runway] and Aaron [Tanaka, from Center for Economic Democracy] could just come in and be ourselves, share our perspective and experience. Know that you all had done the work to hold the container for these folks, to receive that and to be able to build from there. 

Tiffany: It feels so amazing to be able to grow alongside you, Anthony. Both personally and professionally. I’m so grateful for the depth of relationship we have. One of my values is to not have a very firm line between my personal life and my professional life, and I’m just so grateful for these five solid years that we’ve been in business, to be like, cool, we’ve built this with that depth of relationship. Thank you, friend.

September 27, 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!

September 27, 2023

Chordata is an investor in RUNWAY and in the process of investing in REAL People’s Fund, and has most recently been involved in co-investing in the small businesses that RUNWAY and REAL People’s Fund fund and support. 

RUNWAY is a financial innovation firm committed to dismantling systemic barriers and reimagining financial policies and practices–all in the name of Black liberation. Their work helps build Black community wealth through early-stage funding, holistic business support and innovative financial products and partnerships.

REAL People’s Fund (Revolutionizing Our Economy for All People) is a democratically-governed & community-controlled loan fund that is leveling the playing field for entrepreneurs who have been blocked from opportunities to build wealth and are harmed by unjust economic systems. Through deep partnership, RPF partners with entrepreneurs to co-create an equitable and inclusive economy that celebrates their power, prosperity, joy, and liberation. RUNWAY is a key partner in underwriting and technical assistance for REAL People’s Fund.

Tiffany Brown and Nina Robinson sat down to discuss the co-evolution of Chordata, RUNWAY, and REAL People’s Fund, co-investment, and why this work is spirit work. Nina is the Fund Director at RUNWAY and has been a key thought partner and consultant as we’ve begun our co-investment journey. 

Tiffany: Chordata is a deeply relational business, and as I think about this milestone of our 5 years, I’m like “Oh, my gosh, Nina, I’ve known you for 6 years!”. You were there from the very beginning of Chordata. The evolution of our personal relationship has been so connected to the evolution of the business.

Nina: Absolutely. Chordata and RUNWAY have been on a similar trajectory, having launched around the same time and we’ve been learning and experimenting together ever since. I feel like everything we’ve done, Chordata has been there. Our first fund RUNWAY did was a certificate of deposit program, and when we expanded it to Boston, Chordata was there. Then it evolved into the REAL People’s Fund, which is a deep partnership with community-led activists and organizations that are doing power building work in the East Bay. Chordata was one of our first commitments. When they do that, it conveys their trust & belief in us, and then other investors follow. 

Tiffany: I want to talk about our relationships and how they started, because I love the story it tells about our co-evolution over time. 

Nina: Yes, so Tiffany, Kate and I were all in this wild ride together of what is now called the Just Economy Institute fellowship, and there were a bunch of us who had ideas about how capital should be flowing. It was through that experience that Tiffany and Kate birthed Chordata, and it was around that time that the Runway team was forming and launching our pilot fund.

Tiffany: In the first fellowship gathering in October, you, me and Kate were in a small group together and we were all being like “man, what I’m doing right now, like my paid work is not it”. A few months later, our whole paths had completely changed. I think about starting from where we both were, with a curiosity of what the future holds and knowing that we needed to change, and your zest for figuring out what’s next. And then being here with you now. 

And it’s been so fun with REAL People’s Fund! Especially recently with getting to practice co-investment, which is a thing that we’ve been really hungry to do. We’re seeing co-investment as a model, a template of how we’d like to move with other investors. We have such a trusting relationship with y’all that with co-investment, it feels like an honor to take this leap of faith and do it together. 

Nina: Chordata is invested in RUNWAY and in REAL People’s Fund. They’re there all along the way, moving money to Black entrepreneurs in the early stages of a business. We call it “believe in you money”- that money that oftentimes you can’t get from a bank, but that people typically get from informal networks and family members. Because of the racial wealth gap, that type of money just doesn’t flow in the Black community like that. And so we created a way to move money like you would to a family member. We have a trust-based underwriting process that’s based on relationship. It doesn’t overly rely on credit scores and collateral and things that we know because of racist banking practices just really disqualify a lot of black entrepreneurs. Instead, we do a lot of hands-on really heart-centered business advising, trauma-informed, acknowledging that people come in with a lot of shit related to money and finances, and that starting a business is really hard and stressful. We have this relationship where we’re providing the entrepreneurs the emotional support, but also the technical skills through our partnership with Uptima, to develop their business plan, their financials, all of that. 

And, what we were seeing is a lot of times these businesses need to raise more money than REAL People’s Fund is able to offer. We’re trying to get them funding from all the different CDFI’s out there, but there is often a gap on top of that where they need non-extractive growth capital. Let’s say they need a million dollars to expand their business, hire, and buy equipment, and they’ve raised maybe half of that through the existing community finance players. Well, where are they going to get that gap from? 

Chordata is basically coming in as angel investors, but in what should be the true definition of the word angel investor. Like true guardian angels that are swooping in and taking a chance and leaning on relationships. Angel investment is usually family members or colleagues or alumni networks or people that are saying, “Hey, I believe in your idea. I believe you can do this, and I’m gonna put in money in that early stage when no one else is willing to do it.” 

Typically, if someone wants to get this type of capital, they have to give up a lot to get it. They’re gonna have these really extractive terms. And so REAL People’s Fund developed really innovative terms. So I think Chordata is a network of folks that are really leaning on the relationship, that really trust that RUNWAY and Uptima are providing the advising and acting as a risk mitigant. They’re trusting that we’re doing the heavy lifting of due diligence, and that we’re able to share what’s happening and keep it real about what’s hard, and what are the successes.

And by the way, these are businesses that are just doing really phenomenal things. I think about Reem’s, one of the businesses that we are working on co-investing in. It’s an Arab style bakery and the founder Reem is a former activist. She wanted to create a bakery that was also a community space. Over the evolution she decided that she wants to convert the business into a cooperative model and share the ownership with workers. And you know that’s not a decision that you can make lightly. She has developed this really robust training program where everyone in the company is getting trained on everything from business skills, financial skills, leadership, decision making- all the things that someone might need to know to decide if they want to be a business owner or a cooperative member. And she’s doing this alongside touring the country with her beautiful cookbook & baking bread! 

So many of the businesses that we work with are healing communities, straight up. They’re in business, but they’re also creating all this amazing impact without making a big to-do about it- they’re just doing it because it’s the right thing to do. 

Tiffany: One thing that came to mind as you were talking, Nina, was how co-investing and investing in individual companies was until recently a totally new thing for us at Chordata. We had traditionally invested in funds where the risk was diversified, a portfolio of many different companies instead of just one company. Before this co-investment with REAL People’s Fund, we had a little bit of experience of investing in individual companies, but we realized we were bringing a lot of fear and insecurity with learning a new thing. But then we took it back to “what are the guiding principles of our business”, and invited in greater transparency with our clients, so that we were like, “Hey, y’all, this is an absolute need and would you be willing to take an outsized risk?” We were able to offer framing that identifies the mechanics of how capitalism has fucked over Black people, and this beautiful opportunity to come in alongside a trusted partner, and also naming all the different places that we’re mitigating risk. But it’s still scary to support our clients in taking big risks and also we’re also really clear about the value of taking those risks. 

It’s beautiful to be in the evolution of what it means for our businesses to continue to level up together. And we’re bringing our clients into the mechanics of how we question the way that capitalism has worked, and how we’re going to support Black and brown folks to get ahead. That feels really exciting.

Nina: It’s also unlocked a lot for us at RUNWAY.  We’ve always felt like the whole pitch space can feel really yucky and extractive for people. We did a webinar together with Chordata’s clients that was so beautiful, and I was like, “yes, this is what it has to feel like if we’re gonna do this work”, you know. As RUNWAY gets ready to launch our National Fund and is thinking about supporting entrepreneurs around the country, my imagination around what is possible is really based on what we’ve done together, on how we move non-extractive capital in ways that aren’t like shark tank. Like, what’s the non-extractive shark tank co-investment?

Tiffany: With REAL People’s Fund and RUNWAY, it feels like it’s the beginning. I’m thinking about Kate’s recent trip to the South with the RUNWAY delegation. We’re really clear that a lot of our work feels like spirit work, both for the healing of our ancestral lines like me and Kate together, as well as going and doing that trip to the South myself with RUNWAY, that felt like spirit, ancestral work. There’s this way to rise to the occasion of something that feels kind of terrifying, like skilling up on investing in individual companies, and knowing I can’t turn back. There’s too much on the line to make our own fear central when we’re talking about trying to heal and bridge the racial wealth gap. 

Nina: Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing that you’re reminding me of is how Chordata has set the standard and has made it so that we’re able to illustrate what right relationship looks like, especially when you have a dynamic between white wealth holders and moving money to BIPOC communities. How joyful it could be when people are doing their work and when they show up in that way. You all have primed your folks, and we’ve had the opportunity to come and sit and vibe, and meet the cohorts and connect on a human level. And it’s just made the work so beautiful. Because it is healing work, it absolutely is. We’re just undoing so much of the pain, we’re acknowledging so much that has led to these racial wealth gap statistics that we talk about, and our lived experiences inside them. So yeah, I think that’s absolutely right, Tiffany. It does feel like really, really, really special and magical work.