 And welcome to the opening track of the Full Spectrum Diversity Equity and Inclusion Panel. And I feel like this topic needs no introduction. In fact, we've been talking about DEI for many SOCAPs and many years. So our hope today is really to advance the discussion. Like, I think we all know the why. So what we want to do is focus on the how and the creative ideas and strategies that are being deployed and also how to address some of the deep systemic challenges that stubbornly remain. And also, how to move beyond counting and racial equity audits to true wealth creation and justice and shared prosperity. So we have a great panel today. These are the curators who thought through and curated this DEI track this year for SOCAP. Joanna Kwong, who is a senior VP at Illumin Capital. Taj James, co-founder of Full Spectrum Capital Partners. And he is kindly filling in for his partner, Riven Hernandez, who had to be in Washington DC for a meeting of Indigenous and government leaders ahead of COP28, the big climate conference. And last but not least, we have Claude Grinitzky. He is CEO and managing partner of the Equity Alliance Fund. And he, I should mention, is filling in very kindly for Jamie Briggs of the Skoll Foundation, who had a family issue and could not be here. So one out of the three curators, not bad. And why don't you all come out? And I will ask you each to introduce yourself more fully. So why don't we start down at the end there. Joanna, and I'm going to ask each of you. Can you talk more about yourself, your work, and what brings you here today? Absolutely. I'm Joanna Kwong. I'm a senior VP at Illumin Capital. Illumin Capital is a fund of funds. We invest in private market, primarily impact funds. And our thesis is that reducing racial and gender biases can drive, may drive, greater financial outperformance. And at Illumin Capital, I lead all of our work that touches on bi-surruction, DEI, and impact. So everything from due diligence up front to supporting our portfolio fund managers, so that stewardship piece, which is really, really critical for reducing racial and gender biases, and our impact measurement and management in order to create that transparency and accountability. And my career has been in impact capital the entire time. I've worked in public equities, in special purpose vehicles, in the social impact bond space, and I'm really excited to work at Illumin, where we take that fund of funds system level change model. Great. So I'm Claude Winitzky. I run the Equity Alliance with my longtime mentor and business partner, Dick Parsons. I'm actually in my third career, because when I was in my early 20s, I was a founder. I created a media company around a magazine and a television network called Trace, which was very much focused on Black culture through popular culture, youth culture, and how Black culture intersects with other cultures. And Trace was funded by Goldman Sachs, and I was fortunate enough to sell the company in 2010, which is when I became an angel investor and also an educator and mentor to a new generation of founders. But with Equity Alliance, we are focused exclusively on investing in VC funds that are run by women or people of color. And then we also co-invest with the funds we back in some of the startups in their portfolios. And it's a great journey. We're currently raising fund two. Fund one is currently doing really, really well. So happy to be with you all. Good afternoon. I'm Taj James. I lead the Full Spectrum Group, which includes Full Spectrum Labs, Full Spectrum Capital Partners, and a number of other entities. And our work at Full Spectrum is about supporting the transition to a regenerative economy. And we do that through strengthening efforts to build community wealth. And started doing this work while I was leading an organization I started to call the Movement Strategy Center, which for many decades worked with and works with communities that are trying to solve the most challenging issues that we face. And in the course of doing that work for many years, realized that the people who have the solutions to our biggest challenges needed access to more capital and different kinds of capital to scale those solutions. And so the work we do at Full Spectrum is working with capital stewards and community stewards and what we call river keepers to get capital flowing like water. So that's what we do. Well, and I can't wait to talk more about that. But first, since this is the foundational sort of panel for the DEI track, let's talk about the state of DEI. There's been a lot of progress, but there's also been a lot of pushback and backlash. But starting with the positive, can you each talk about what you see as some of the positive progress either in your own work or in the field more broadly? Yeah, absolutely. So at Aluminum Capital, we collect both quantitative and qualitative data to understand the state of the field using our portfolio as a proxy. And so with quantitative data, that's where we're really looking at representation numbers in terms of race and gender, in terms of who works in investment firms as well as which founders are getting funded. But I wanna reflect a little bit on the qualitative data, which I think is a really important piece of context for that quantitative data and allows us to understand more things like equity and inclusion as well. So I think one great positive is that we've seen that through our qualitative data, people are really bought into this vision of DEI and why DEI matters. So we see a year over year increase in terms of both moral and financial reasons, moral reasons being I wanna do DEI because it's the right thing to do, financial reasons being I think that investing time in DEI will drive increased returns. We see that people are really bought into taking the time to do DEI work. So it's moving from buying in to what do I do now? So we're seeing that people now want advice on practical ways that they can actually implement DEI. So I think it's really great that people have that kind of foundation of buy in for doing this work and now we're able to use that motivation and a lot of intrinsic motivations to then support people in terms of, okay, how do I actually go about doing it? In our case, it really started with just a few numbers which we realize obviously the numbers don't lie and Equity Alliance really was a brainchild of my mentor that I mentioned, Dick Parsons who's probably the single most successful African-American ever to have worked in corporate America because he ran very large organizations like Time Warner back when it was the world's largest media company, Citigroup, looking to steward 300,000 employees during the midst of the financial crisis and when he called me, he was the chair of the Rockefeller Foundation, very large foundation. He's like, I'm seeing these numbers about asset management around the fact that white men get 98% of the funding and then if you go deeper into VC, you look at African-American women getting 0.1% of the funding. The latest numbers just came out last week in this last quarter, African-American founders just got 0.13% of the funding. So these numbers were very real and it was about, okay, now that these numbers are very real, we need to raise awareness of these numbers and actually do something about it. So the Equity Alliance was just the result of having noticed that the very dismal state of asset management in America and finding ways to focus on people who actually need capital in order to help to democratize access to capital. And so initially what was interesting is we launched in 2021, a lot of people were really open to hearing the story because they were also discovering these numbers and how bad it actually was. But what's interesting now, raising fund two, two years later, it's a very different environment because I feel that there's a bit of a backlash to our whole DEI mandate. I'm sure we're gonna get into that now but all I'll say for now is what a difference two years made. One of the things I have the opportunity to do is serve on the selection committee for a prize called the Transformer of 25, which is an award given to funds that are doing really innovative work in impact investing. And I think what that experience has helped me to see is just how much innovation there's happening in the field of impact investing and in particular it's an affirmation of this notion that if we put, as my good friend Kat Taylor from Beneficial Bank says, new and different people in charge, we will get new and different outcomes. Resources will flow to places that they have not flown before and that will produce outcomes that we've not seen before. So the basic floor premise that if we change who's making the decisions about where resources flow, new, interesting and good things will happen. And I think we did a pitch session for investors recently with the funds in the T25 that we're all raising and what was interesting in that pitch session was just the consistency with which I would say this field of practice is maturing because what we're finding is when you put new and different people in charge, what they bring is not just this different set of experiences and identities, but a different set of values and a different way of looking at creating value and distributing value. And there's consistency in those values and there's a method to those values. So one of the things we're grappling with in the sort of very identity based backlash against identity based flow of resources is that as the state of California had to do when affirmative action was banned in this state for many years, what you find is underneath identity are a consistent set of experiences, perspectives and values. And it is possible to change the way things are done whether you name the identities or not because there's something underneath it of substance and systematic substance. And I think the upside of the challenge to DEI is that it sort of forces a certain kind of rigor in naming exactly how do things change when we have more women making investments. Exactly how and why do things change when we have more people of color making investments? And I think that the articulation of that rigor is a good thing in the long run. Can I, Amy, just interject a little bit because Tash, what you said about new and different people in charge, I think our single biggest hurdle and why sometimes it feels like a herculean task is because of what I'll just call homophily, right? It's very difficult for people to actually reach out to people who are not like them because the mental models, the way we're wired were actually identifying shared affinities with people who look like us. You look like me, I like you. You remind me of a younger version of me, I'm gonna hire you and you'll be my protege. And what I find is there's so much education in this process of getting people to reach out to people who are not in their circles, academic circles, racial circles, and identify people, true talent that is outside of the immediate circle that you're just comfortable in because you all have the same codes. Yeah, very, very good points. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the positive. So one sign of success is pushback, right? And we are seeing that in spades. So you mentioned, somebody mentioned the Supreme Court affirmative action decision that has opened up a Pandora's box and just emboldened the forces that were all ready to working on rolling back some of the hard won gains that we've made in this industry, most notably the lawsuit against the Fearless Fund. And so it's really a part of a full scale coordinated attack against racial equity. And there have been challenges against SBA loans that use race and diversity fellowship programs and corporate DEI initiatives. So this is not going away. So what I wanted to ask, how is the backlash impacting your own work and how are you responding and how can we as a field counter those attacks and protect some of the gains that we've made? Yeah, I think what Claude just shared is so real and that's exactly how we define bias. It's a set of shortcuts that are triggered in situations where you feel fear because you're different from somebody or you have a sense of urgency which we're constantly experiencing. And I think counter to situational triggers of bias is really creating ways to, through processes, slow down to counteract some of those triggers and introduce friction. And the reason I'm saying this is I think that a lot of these attacks are really focused on kind of that end result of diversity. And so we aren't changing anything we're doing but we're really focused on how do you ensure that these processes continue to be equitable? So rather than encouraging people to just jump ahead and invest in diversity or for us having targets around just investing in diversity for the sake of it from a representation perspective, it's really around how do we ensure that investment processes are equitable. For example, how do we enable better cold outreach that's actually looked at and doesn't just lean on only people who can get a warm introduction through their networks to get a chance to even pitch or be in the room. How do we ensure that there are processes in place where it's not up to the luck of the draw of which investor you meet with and instead we're ensuring that every investor on an investment team is running the process in the same way. So are there a few standardized questions that you can ask? Is there a way to ensure that those processes are equitable rather than just aiming for the end result? So I think that that's a way to counteract a lot of these attacks on the kind of end result of aiming for diversity and embedding more equity and inclusion into processes because that's also what will be sustained over a longer period of time. I'm glad you mentioned the word fear and I'm glad you mentioned the Fearless Fund because equity lines, we are early investors in the Fearless Fund so we work really closely with them and obviously the lawsuit that was brought by Bloom has been topic A in our circles since the summer, really since the mid-summer. And what was really interesting about that is I mentioned earlier that African-American women gets this 0.1% of the funding in VC, right? 0.1%. And yet the Fearless Fund is being questioned for its bias towards black women. And the reason I feel like this gonna be an existential fight for many of us is because I was contrasting what we're experiencing here with the Fearless Fund with what I experienced growing up in France. So I'm one of those people, I carry three passports. I'm a citizen of France, I'm a citizen of Togo where I was born and I'm also a citizen of the US and I try to be objective when I compare experiences, formative experiences on all three continents. And I was just in Paris last week trying to raise money for our second fund around our whole kind of DEI mandate investing in women and people of color and one investor said to me, well, why do you have this bias towards people of color and women? Everybody's the same. And then it brought me back to this very core principle in French democracy, which is that the French Republic is quote unquote indivisible. So in France, it's illegal to identify citizens according to any sort of racial or religious affiliation. So you can never have statistics that are kind of race-based in that sense. And as a result, it reminded me why I left Paris when I was 20 years old because I had never seen any black people in positions of power. There was no Dick Parsons. There still aren't. And all these years later, there's still very few women in positions of power. If you look at the top 40 companies in France that are the caccahont, which would be like the Fortune 100, there's only one woman CEO, right? There is not a single black minister in the government. The sole black minister was fired in August. And so because we're not ever talking about it because it's not supposed to be an issue and affirmative action is illegal, things end up staying the same. And it's almost like what my dad used to say, well, there is no solution because there's no problem, right? And if there's no problem, then there's never gonna be a solution. So yeah, that fearless fund, I'm glad you brought that up. That's extremely important. We have to devote resources to making sure they prevail. I think what this moment reveals is a fundamental vulnerability in the way in which this conversation has been happening because for those who are in the conversation about how do we help money do more good in the world, generally the way that we approach that question is from the capital down. What capital is available? What does it want? You go and you say, hey, I can deliver you this based on what you want and then we're gonna deliver this and then that's gonna produce the outcome. So we are vulnerable because we don't start with an impact first approach that says, well, what kind of world do we wanna live in? What kind of economy do we have? We have an economy that produces a set of outcomes. If we wanted an economy that produces a different set of outcomes, what kind of economic activity is necessary to produce those outcomes? So outcomes and impact first. Economic activity produce those outcomes second. Who has the relationship to that economic activity to deliver capital into it and where's the source capital? So if we were constructing our strategies from the impact up, it would be a different conversation because we're starting in the middle which is who's delivering the capital and who are they delivering the capital to? I'm less interested in that question. I'm interested in the specificity of the impact. And if we were actually having a conversation there, starting there, we'd be much less vulnerable to the attack that we're currently facing because the other part of it is, okay, the question of history, the capital that has been accumulated, how was it accumulated? And can we actually talk about where the money came from and where it needs to return to, right? Which is the very conversation that no one wants to have because there are people who would rather burn every book in the library than have a conversation about how this capital was accumulated. So the people who are in a tremendous amount of time in this position of power in this system are asset holders because regardless of anything that's happening on the legal or political front, capital dictates if you are sitting on a pool of assets, you get to make the rules. You get to decide where and how that capital flows. You get to set the policy and no one and nothing can stop you because that is basically how this whole economic system is organized. It's organized around capital supremacy, right? So what that means is if there are asset holders who have a genuine interest in living in a world that works, living on a planet that works, then they have to make the decision to allocate assets towards those outcomes. That could be a meaningful counterforce to those who are asking the kind of questions that you're asking. Wondering why we're trying to do things in the way we're trying to do them. So I think that we have, there's a certain incrementalism in DEI because it's missing and SDG. They're all missing the O, which is ownership and the structure of ownership, which is what structures the economy and structures the outcome. And the outcomes that we get are built into the terms of capital itself. If we want different outcomes, we have to structure capital differently. And that starts with the terms set by LPs and then it flows down into everything else. But we're essentially saying, hey, we're gonna create a different world by just changing who invests and we're gonna deliver you the same set of financial returns that you're gonna get investing in conventional ways. I think that that has set us up, that has made us vulnerable because we haven't really been honest cause we're not talking about where the resources came from and why they need to be returned to specific people and specific places to address the harm of the economic system that has evolved over the last 500 years. Not a conversation that many people wanna have but I think we have to become more willing to have that conversation or the modest efforts that we are making will be undermined and scuttled and you will be lost at sea. We're gonna have that conversation today. But first I wanna stick on this fearless fund issue because it is such a big issue that is reverberating throughout the industry but this full spectrum DEI panel it's really broadened the tent, right? We've got sessions on disability and aging and child lens and that's wonderful but to be clear the attacks are coming for specific race-based solutions and strategies. So my question to you all and you've touched on some of this but how do you respond? Do you double down on the race-based solutions or do you kind of broaden it or talk about economically disadvantaged communities to kind of skirt some of the legal attacks that are coming? So yeah, in our case it's not just race-based solutions it's also gender-based solutions because the inequities that we look at are both race-based and gender-based which is why we invest in women and people of color because I said it, the numbers don't lie. White men get 98% of the assets that they manage, right? So we're focused on the 2% and if that 2% can become 3% that's already a huge victory for us, right? And it sounds crazy but moving the needle from two to three is gonna create wealth in these communities in a way that will hopefully level the playing field to avoid Taj what you were saying around the accumulation of capital which is just a very real thing. I mean, I have friends who have never worked a day in their life because they've never had to because the capital that has been accumulated, I mean, for them what they define as work is writing screenplays for films that never get made but because the capital from generational wealth has accumulated so much that they don't actually ever have to get a job, right? Don't mind PKT wrote a best-selling book about this on accumulation of capital. So in our case, if we're gonna be successful in defending the fearless fund and protecting these kind of race-based and gender-based solutions, we're gonna need allies and the allies that we're gonna need are people who are the beneficiaries of this huge accumulation of wealth that is taking place in the white community and for them to look at potential outcomes that will be better for greater society or the greater good. And I don't wanna just make it an issue around the fearless fund and black women. I want us to look holistically at why America is such an in-balance place when it's really supposed to be reinventing capitalism and creating a model for others to follow and not just say, oh, we're gonna solve this at the level of the black community, we are gonna have to work with other communities. And it almost reminds me of the work that I was doing with my media company Trace. I was very much focused on black culture and hip-hop, but I was also looking at, wow, how come 70% of the people who actually consume hip-hop are white? That's why the subculture became so mainstream and I feel like by building bridges, we can actually achieve a lot more versus retreating into this mindset where we're wallowing on our own sawers and we feel like we're constantly being attacked. Yeah, I agree with that mindset shift element. I think when we think about reducing racial and gender biases, those are things that people have attitudes and opinions on that drives their behavior. That's why we have a partnership with the Social Psychology Center and the foundation of our firm was an experiment with real-life asset allocators that showed that when you keep everything in the same track record, educational history and only change the race of a photo on a one-pager, investors are more likely to and more comfortable investing in white fund managers than black fund managers. So that shows that people through their own biases, their own mindsets are clouding their ability to exercise great investor judgment and so thus they're leaving returns on the table and so for us, I think it's really continuing to invest in one collaboration, continuing to build a community of practitioners who can support each other in the elements that Taj was talking about, changing power dynamics, changing what those norms are. For example, I lead all of our work supporting, coaching our portfolio fund managers through a proprietary bias reduction toolkit that we've created but also having that human interaction that's really gonna change people's mindset. So one of the topics that we've talked about is how is investment committee traditionally run and how can you change that? That's one small thing but that's where the decision gets made. That's where those dollars go out the door. Not only who's in the room but how are those conversations actually being facilitated? Are there ways that we're only leaning on verbal communication and could have other methods of communication because we know that there are cultural differences in terms of how people prefer to communicate. Small things that can really change and move around those power dynamics in terms of the process to get to the outcomes north star that we want of undoing systems and policies that have been historically entrenched around both racial and gender bias and inequities. And I think also that piece around understanding context is also extremely critical. It's important to understand how we got here to know where we're going. And so for us, a large part of our work is also partnering with a place-based organization that brings people to the deep south to understand more about our racialized history and racial terror in this particular country so that we can use learning from history to move forward and then measure data to understand whether or not we're actually achieving that north star of changing how systems operate rather than just changing numbers in terms of what it looks like. And that's a good segue to a topic that I wanted to bring up on our prep call. There was one of the things that came out as the intersectionality of DEI to so many other things in particular like climate and biodiversity and indigenous communities and place-based approaches as you just mentioned. So it really presents an opportunity to approach some of these issues like in a much more holistic way. So I'd love to hear your views on the intersectionality and how you're approaching that in that work. I know you hit like all of those things I just mentioned, Taj, so maybe we start with you here. Yeah, I think, I mean, to me, there's the question of intersectionality, but there's the question of how do we understand how disadvantage and an inequality was produced through specific processes that impacted specific people in specific places in specific ways. So I think there's a way sometimes when we talk about these concepts of intersectionality, there's a notion that sort of everyone's different and all of our issues are connected and yes, we are all interdependent, we are all interconnected and we all deserve dignity and support and the ability to thrive. And the world that we live in was produced and manufactured and these inequalities were manufactured in very specific ways through very specific processes. And it's not unreasonable for me to think that, well, that specificity is important because if we want to create more equity and equality, we have to engage in an approach that it's about targeted universalism. It's about addressing the specific and individual harms and impacts in ways that make life better for everyone. And so in some of the work we do at Full Spectrum, part of how we're doing this is saying, okay, if we're building a new financial system for a regenerative economy, to get to a regenerative economy, you first have to repair the harm of the extractive economy. So if you're making an investment, are you making an investment into a context, a sector, a population, a place where harm extraction occurred? And are you investing in solutions that are reparative, that repair the historical impact of that harm and give us the possibility of getting to a regenerative future, right? So in that kind of model of finance, the entrepreneurs and the general partners and the funds that we invest in through our fund of funds, because we have, our fund too is a community wealth fund focused on the kind of communities that I'm talking about, the kind of solutions that I'm talking about, where folks have specific strategies that build community wealth, that address energy, that address a number of sectors, but all of the strategies have a community wealth building component. And all of the entrepreneurs themselves have already essentially talked about the important E and DEI, which is enough. What is enough? Because we live in an investment system and a capital system in which endless accumulation is what you are supposed to do. And if, in working with asset allocators, if those asset allocators don't have a sense of what enough is, then additional capital cannot be reallocated for impact and reparative purposes. So the entrepreneurs that we're investing and they already know what enough is, they've created community wealth charters that say, if I have a business and it's gonna create $10 billion of value over the next 10 years, this is all I need. And all of that extra value is gonna recirculate back into creating more reparative and regenerative economic processes. And so we structure the funds so that a third of the value created in the funds go back to the communities that we're investing in. And Ruben, who was gonna be here in this conversation, he's in DC right now, as you mentioned, because our third fund is being launched in partnership with Conservation International and it's focused on indigenous communities across Latin America, Africa and Asia who are doing work to strengthen indigenous sovereignty, advance climate solutions and biodiversity. And the way in which that fund is structured, and I think this is one of the places where there are some opportunities, the global understanding that the climate crisis is a global issue, that we all need to play a role in addressing, I think creates an arena in which some of these very unfortunate, and it's not just happening in the US, but in the US we're having these conversations outside of this global context. And by putting our strategies into that global context, we align ourselves with pools of capital that have a committed interest in addressing the climate crisis. And guess what? The people who are the focus of DEI are the people who have the solution to the climate crisis. Indigenous people in particular, right? So you talk to the climate scientists that Project Drawdown and they got a long list of the things you can objectively do to address the climate crisis and we were at Nexus Global earlier this year and someone asked the question, well, if you could do one thing, what would you do? And he said, well, you would invest in the strengthening of indigenous sovereignty. That's the one thing you can do, the one most important thing you can do to address the climate crisis because the people are the solution. The people are the solution. And that's not a, that is a statement with historical specificity. It's not an identity statement. It's a statement of material reality and the accumulation of historical disadvantage. So I think those are some of the things I think we can do to, again, get really specific about what solutions need investment and why and who are the people who are holding those solutions. And if we can talk about the solutions themselves and talk about the other factors, if we're in a context in which we can't name the identity, we don't have to name it and the capital can still flow accordingly. And if we're in a global context in which there are not the restrictions on that, we can name it. And I think we have to sort of leverage the power of global capital that's aligned with real climate solutions against what is happening, this nonsense that we're dealing with. It's interesting that we're so much on the same page. I actually just launched my new, I'm also a film producer, so my new film which launched last week was also funded by Conservation International and also deals with indigenous communities around the world and some of their solutions to the climate crisis. But to go back to your question, Amy, it has to do with what you said around having different people in the driver's seat. And we're a fund of funds, we're also a direct investor alongside the funds we back. Our fund managers are very much focused on the same big, big mega topics of our time, whether it's climate tech or health tech, which is full of inequities or fintech, for instance. And by having different people making decisions, you do get to different outcomes sometimes. And I'll just share a success story based on an investment that we made out of our fund one. These two founders that we met via our network of founders, one of them, Samir Goel, was born in Delhi and came to the United States as an immigrant. The other one, Wimimo Abbey, came from Lagos, Nigeria to the United States as a child, and they created Isuzu, you know, Nigerian-American, Indian-American founders tackling fintech by really coming up with a very, very simple solution around the fact that a lot of renters are not able to build a solid credit score in order to become owners. So by helping renters to become owners, they're helping to solve part of the racial wealth gap, right, a very, very simple solution. But the reason I mentioned that within the context of what you said about intersectionality is the fact that growing up, they, as immigrants before they became American citizens, had to deal with these predatory loans and these issues that affected their community, their livelihood, their own family stability, it just gives them a different perspective to solving these issues. Of course, somebody else could have thought of the Isuzu model, but the reason they grew so fast, I mean, we invested in their series A and six months later, they became a unicorn. They really had a $1 billion valuation six months later and we got a 10, 15X return. But the reason I invested is so I could just see that they really truly understood these communities and the stress that certain people feel and found a solution that was highly, highly scalable, but also partnering with the US government in order to grow their business and actually they're operating in all 50 states now. Now, your question around intersectionality, I'll stop there because I could give many, many examples. I'll give Joanna perhaps an example, you know, an up chance to share an example. Well, also let me just say we are coming close to time. So I think there are cards on the tables if people have questions. Do you not have cards? I know we had a volunteer in the back, forgot her name. Okay, yes. We will check some questions but yeah, let's go to Joanna. Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. I mean, the reason I do this work is I lived and taught in the Mississippi Delta at a freedom school and I think for me it's, you know, people, women of color and rural communities have a very different lived experience that can inform what kinds of products and services they want. And I think that piece around financial capital but also social capital is extremely important. And I think to kind of preview I guess what the DEI curating council wanted to get out of this like very big topic and what DEI sessions are to come for the next few days at Socap, we really wanted to think about, okay, one, what are people doing that's working as we move from building the case for DEI to actually like let's get into it and figure out what's working. We wanted to think about what are the evolving standards of how to measure this work, how to prove that it's working so that you're not just talking the talk or making commitments upfront to DEI initiatives but you're actually measuring what works and then hopefully scaling that. But I think the third piece is around inclusive norms. So where are there norms that are so deeply entrenched that we're not able to tap into the power of having people with these lived experiences rise to a place where they're even heard or even able to receive funding or be able to scale their products and services. So I think those three themes that we've touched upon will kind of be embedded throughout the rest of the DEI sessions to come throughout Socap. Okay, and while we're waiting for the question cards, does anyone have any final thoughts they want to bring up? I know Joanna, you wanted to talk about standards. You're doing such great work with ownership and embedding ownership and justice like in every level of the fund structure, Claude. So just final remarks that you might want to make before we take a few questions. Yeah, I think when we're talking about DEI and SDG, just to say again, talking about ownership is really important, both in terms of the ways in which the strategies that we use to deploy capital shift who has ownership, how ownership is structured and distributed and with asset allocators. One of the communities that we launched is called the Good Life Pledge and it is a community of asset allocators who have done the work to figure out what's enough, like how much do we need for what we need to thrive and then how do we commit 30% of whatever's left towards asset transfer, reparations and land back because that came out of a recognition that Kat Taylor and other folks had that when we're trying to, if we think about in the DEI context, the question of extreme wealth inequality and the ways in which wealth is distributed and organized from the global north to the global south and within populations between different groups of people and within different regions, within countries. If we look at the distribution of wealth and the impact of wealth inequality on all the rest of our SDG goals, that there is a recognition that the only way to address wealth inequality is you cannot grow your way out of it. There has to be some significant asset transfer, asset shift in order to close the gap so that we can grow together, but when an investor is investing in a community that has not had the opportunity to build wealth, the wealth of that community grows, but the wealth of the investor grows as well. So without asset transfer, there's no way to close the wealth gap and I would say it is a good shorthand for many of the identity based questions we wanna talk about because when we say the California Endowment had a whole campaign about how your zip code could predict your life outcome. Your zip code predicts your life outcome. Why? Because zip codes predict racialized, historical and racialized wealth inequality. It is the product of generations of what we could call redlining, right? These people have access to economic opportunity on the basis of identity. These people don't have access to the economic opportunity on the basis of identity. You do that for a few hundred years and guess what? Where you live predicts how long you live. Wealth and ownership is a good shorthand for many of our SDG goals and so it is a thing we should focus on and when we can't talk about the other things, we can and should talk about that. I feel like we, and to dovetail on what you just said, we've done a pretty good job of measuring wealth, right? And we've done a pretty good job of quantifying health, right? But in the DEI world that we operate in, there's so many kind of intangibles around social capital and all the other in-betweens that are very, very difficult to quantify. And I feel like we need to do a better job of measuring what I'll just call impact for the sake of this conversation. And I say that because we could be considered part of the broader kind of ESG movement. And it's just very difficult to measure the S part of the ESG. How do you really measure societal change? What are the outcomes that are really changing trajectories for people that are from the wrong zip codes, right? And how do people from the best zip codes collaborate and become part of the solution? And I feel like that's the next frontier in terms of measuring this impact that we're all focused on. At least certainly people in this room, I would imagine that you're here because you care about the impact that we all can collectively have. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I was, I think there's a big opportunity for those standards. And standards is not very exciting, but it's more, are we all moving in the same direction? What is our collaborative North Star? When we talk about DEI, what are we really striving for? And then is that actually happening? Are we all measuring even the same thing or defining diversity, but also equity the same way? I think there's a really big opportunity for us as a fund of funds, we work with our portfolio funds in terms of how do you improve your data measurement processes and infrastructure to better collect that data. But then also we use a theory of change or logic model to inform how we are trying to drive at least the funds in our portfolio in the same direction. So are we actually collaborating and on the same page about what it means to undo barriers, to access to financial and social capital for more diverse communities, but also just more people with different lived experiences? Great, so I'm gonna jump into some of the questions here because I see a bunch more waiting in the wings. First, I know there's so much interest in the Fearless Fund situation. One question is, are there clear next steps related to the Fearless Fund case? I would say there are clear next steps because it's not looking good, right? So there is an injunction on the Fearless Fund's ability to give out grants to black women so they currently can't do it. And Edward Bloom, I've asked this question 12 Ways to Sunday, I still don't know who's funding him but he's got very, very deep pockets, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to get all the way to the Supreme Court and prevail in the broader kind of affirmative action case against Harvard and University of North Carolina. So I would say that we need to make sure that the Fearless Fund is well capitalized from a legal perspective so that they can actually fight the fight because it's truly David and Goliath and their victory is extremely important. As I said earlier, I mean, this thing is obviously gonna drag on for years, but the symbolism of them putting up a good fight, I believe, is extremely important for the future of America, quite frankly, not just for our DEI space. Yeah, and someone in the audience is wondering how you all are holding up given all of these attacks. So, you okay? The attacks are not what get me down. I mean, there are people that literally don't want us to exist and it's the same people who have felt that way for a very long time. What is heartbreaking is when our friends show up and say, hey, we wanna help, but don't do so boldly because that's what hurts. It's in a moment in which, as you've said, like our communities are under attack and there are people who are in a position to be helpful, but they haven't really changed the way they're thinking about things. So, they're asking the same old questions in the same old way. Instead of just showing up and saying, what do you need and how can we help? And that, I think, is where I worry. So, and I think on us, I would say again, like when we say bold and unreasonable things, like, you know, you shouldn't be able to just kill black people and have there be no consequence. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. Really bold statement. And people say, oh well, we just saw this person get sort of ritually executed in front of us. And we think there might be something to that. So, I feel bad watching that and now I feel like I should do something. And as we've seen, like after people started feeling bad about that, what they said they were going to do, most of that has not happened, right? And now we're in the backlash against that. And it's a good time to show up. Ooh, that was specific about what? Oh, I was referring to the execution of Mr. George Floyd. That's what I was referring to. Because that was a moment in which for many of us who've seen that happen many times in many ways for a very long time, we're not terribly, always heartbroken, but not terribly surprised. And it was a moment in which for some people, it was a revelation. Oh my goodness, this is the country that I live in. This is the place that I live and we should probably do something about that. And yes, we should. And so, yeah, many, many, many billions of dollars of financial resources were made by many large institutions to try to address this historical injustice. And most of those resources have not flowed. Most of those commitments have not been fulfilled. And we're in the backlash. Because, and the failure to fulfill those commitments fed to the backlash and the failure to show up boldly in this moment reinforces the backlash. It's not the people who hate us that I'm heartbroken about. It's the people who could do more, but are not doing very much. Not doing very much. And they're looking to see what we're going to do and how we're going to respond. Yeah, and I think to be honest, this is everyone sitting up here, like this is a part of our lived experience. So the way to move forward is to keep kind of working towards survival in a hopeful way. I'm, my parents are Chinese immigrants. I'm Chinese American with the rise of like anti-Asian hate crimes because people are blaming or blaming COVID on Chinese folks. There's nowhere for me to go, right? This is the work that we're doing and this is the financial system that we have. And so I think it's necessary to stay hopeful and to keep driving towards changing that number of 98.3% of capital is managed by white men because that's the only way we're going to see ourselves using our lived experiences to change those power dynamics in the current system that we operate in. We just want to add just really briefly, I know that we're perhaps a time, but I just wanted to add maybe just something quickly to answer your question more directly. I'm actually feeling really emboldened and holding up really well because I feel like we needed to have this debate. I keep contrasting that with what I experienced growing up in France and even just now what's happening in France. I don't know if you followed news, but there were major riots all over France in early July because a lot of people just cannot deal with this kind of systemic racism that is never actually addressed. And I want to assist there last week. People don't talk about it anymore, but it just reminds me of James Baldwin, the fire next time. We're just going to keep getting worse and worse because people don't want to confront the issue head on. And one of the reasons I love America is that at least we can have a debate about these topics and recognize that there is a problem. And if we are going to collectively strive towards a more perfect union then we have to talk about it as opposed to just paying lip service to kind of false democracy promises. As my friend Monique Akin said when I was talking to her about this panel, she called it the duality of joy and pain. That is racial equity work. So, stay well. Do I have to? Okay. Good for one more? Okay, really briefly. What are some of the bold changes we need to advocate for to make more than incremental progress on equity? I think we've talked about some of that, but if you want to end with some concrete actions, thoughts, advice, that'd be great. Briefly. I'll keep it really brief. I think one, just obviously changing how dollars go out the door. I think with regards to research, people believe data and so changing that number, but also for us continuing to generate research that shifts people who are data oriented to show that not only is it a problem for many people in the room, including us that the field looks how it looks right now, but that things aren't going to change unless we all collectively kind of do something about it. And I think in terms of a bold change, my vision would be that a woman of color in the Mississippi Delta is able to see a contraceptive service or something that is for rural education be taken seriously and be funded by people who have capital, which is coastal folks, very few people who have spent time somewhere like the Mississippi Delta. And so that requires getting people in the room who think differently, but also getting people to think differently when they're in a power position. And a lot of that is small incremental changes that are not going to be glamorous, but it's going to be setting aside more time to debrief when you weren't heard in a room and you were hired to be the diverse perspective and no one's listening to you and having all those changes at the institutional LP level and really people who have kind of these big pools of capital changing how they think and how they actually operate day to day for those dollars to go out the door fundamentally differently. Claude, bold changes. Yeah, for me, it's not even about capital allocators because if we're going to really believe in this promise of democracy in America, to me the biggest boldest change is what actually happens in the White House. We could collect $10 million to fund the fearless front lawsuit, to fight the lawsuit, but if the Supreme Court is the Supreme Court, then that's going to be the ultimate decision maker. So I feel like a lot of these conversations we're having, let's go back to basics and really look at how this country is run from Washington because I feel like that is really the ultimate decision-making power. And I worry about the Justice 40 Initiative, which is like the most remarkable thing we've seen a US government do in a long time. You're marking 40% of federal funds, including from the IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law, to disadvantaged communities that have borne the brunt of the harm. They go after that, like that is worrisome. Yeah, we're working a lot on helping get federal resources into the hands of communities and entrepreneurs who are supposed to get access to it. And often there's a capital gap and a bridge to access those public resources. And the only thing that can really fill that gap is private philanthropical and impact investing capital. And so there's a big opportunity to deploy that capital in ways that unlock access to those federal resources. And if private capital doesn't step in in the right way, then it's not gonna get where it needs to go. That's a fundamental issue. In terms of just the future of DEI, let's make ownership the center of DEI and STG work. And let's make a commitment that for asset holders, either 30% of assets should go towards building wealth for those who've been denied access to it. And for entrepreneurs and fund managers, how do we structure the economic growth that we're helping to contribute so that at least 30% of that wealth that is generated goes towards and builds wealth with the people who haven't been able to access it. And all of our funds are structured that way. And there's a lot of other really innovative initiatives out there in this sector of folks who are building fund strategies that do that, not 1%, not 2%, 30%, for four and two, the communities and places that have been, had their land, labor and capital extracted and stolen for a very long time. And the fact that we're not the only ones doing that, there are a lot of others doing that as well, is part of what gives me hope. And there are more and more asset allocators who are realizing that that's essential if we wanna achieve our climate goals. If we wanna create an economy that creates the kind of political and democratic stability to confront this growing rise of authoritarianism and polarization, which is ripping the world apart. We can't have functioning democracies without functioning economies. And extreme inequality makes functioning democracies almost impossible. So the investment community has a really specific stake in allocating assets in ways that reduce income equality and create belonging and beloved community. So those are the two things, ownership and belonging. Like we have to come together as a human family or the challenges that we're facing right now are only gonna become more difficult to face. Well, that is a wonderful note to end on. And thank you all for sharing your really deep experience and thinking on this.