 So, love and money. About two weeks ago, on August 20th, a despondent young man walked into the Ronald E. McNair Elementary School just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. He had an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammunition. Fortunately for everyone, the first person that he ran into was Antoinette Tuff. Despite the fact that he had already fired upon the police. She was able to convince him to surrender. In a subsequent interview, what she said was, I just explained to him that I loved him. I didn't know his name, I didn't know much about him, but I did love him. I would like to suggest that just as we look to the ledger for profit as evidence of success, we must learn with intention and rigor to look into our communities for love as evidence of success. All of us have experienced love. All of us know that love is real and love is valuable. But unlike money, love cannot be aggregated or hoarded. We can only realize love in the context of vibrant communities. Antoinette Tuff showed this with clarity. I am here to convince you, the reason why I am standing here is to convince you that we must learn to realize love with at least as much rigor and intention as we are currently realizing revenue. This is a strange and uncomfortable goal. But I don't think we can get to where we need to be unless we can teach markets to build vibrant communities. As I see it, the goal of social capital markets is to use money to build effective organizations that contribute to vibrant communities. I like the idea of vibrancy for three reasons. Originally it was two. I now have a third. And the third is that at this conference I've heard it a lot. When people talk about communities, when they want to talk about healthy communities, they say vibrant communities. It's in Mercy Housing's vision statement. The other thing I really like about vibrancy is that I believe that it's probably measurable, but not in the ways that we normally measure metrics in this space. I believe we need to think about communities as networks and we need to borrow from the other sciences, fractal mathematics, peer-to-peer networking, the network sciences and general social networking, big data. All of these disciplines have a way to look at networks and understand activity and health. I believe that we can borrow from those networks to understand community vibrancy. And third and maybe most interesting to me is that vibrancy, I can only be valued in terms of my contribution to vibrancy. I am valuable in terms of my capacity to give and my reputation for giving. That's interesting. However, building vibrant communities is absolutely not what our markets do today. Economists tell me, and I actually talk to economists, there's a couple that answer my emails. And they tell me that the purpose of economic theories is to influence policy in order to maximize social welfare. A very interesting example that I got from Deborah Satt's book that's called Something Should Not Be For Sale, which is a fantastic book, I would recommend it, is that Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, the quintessential capitalist economic theory, it was actually created as a way to encourage fairness, to decrease inequality in the context of feudalism. So it goes with our current dominant economic theory, wealth maximization. So wealth maximization has three essential tenants. First, everything, everything, everything, everything has a price. All value can be reduced to a monetary equivalent. Second, wealth comes from productivity or the job creator corollary, which is the wealthy are de facto productive. And finally, markets grow forever. I made, when I was building this, trying to put this presentation together, because this is not the kind of presentation I normally give, when I was putting this together, I made dozens of slides tearing apart what to me is a truly asinine set of tenants. And what it ultimately came down to was that wealth maximization is killing our communities and reducing our capacity to love. In our wealth maximizing economy, if you are not productive, you are lazy. If you're not a job creator, you're a welfare queen. If you're not a bootstrapping Horatio Alger, you're a drug smuggling illegal immigrant. If you're not standing your ground, you're a thug. If you are not a have, you are a have not. By focusing on the health of our communities, I actually believe another world is possible. Our communities are the context where we experience value beyond profit. Our communities are the only context where love is actually a currency. So let's talk about actual vibrant communities and actual interventions for vibrant communities. This is a remarkable person. I don't know her. She died recently. In 2009, Eleanor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize for economics. There's at least three reasons why this is extraordinary. Number one, she's the first woman ever to do so. Number two, she's not an economist. She's a political scientist. Number three, she got the prize for disproving the tragedy of the commons. So the great thing about this is that the tragedy of commons is a central tenant of the canon of the wealth maximizer. What the tragedy of the commons says is that if there are exploitable resources, if there are resources that individuals can exploit to their own short-term benefit that are owned by the community, that they will indeed exploit those resources, even if it's to their own long-term detriment and the detriment of their community. Eleanor Ostrom showed that this is actually not the case, and that it's entirely possible for communities to self-regulate, to self-organize. In this case, it's lobster fishing in Maine, where the fishermen were able to self-organize to find a way to fish sustainably over time. They now evidently actually have too many lobsters. Another great example is the transition network. So transition network describes itself as a quiet revolution unfolding around the world where people like you and I see crisis as the opportunity for doing something different, something extraordinary. The transition network has several different towns around the world, several cities around the world that are building self-reliance. A favorite example for me is Brixton. In Brixton, the mayor is paid in Brixton bucks. They have a local currency, and that's how the mayor gets his paycheck. In Brixton, they have cooperative food production, they have a cooperative brewery. And the picture here shows they have a cooperative energy nonprofit, where individuals buy into solar panels that are placed on local businesses that provide power to local residents. That's so blindingly simple. Why isn't that happening everywhere? This gentleman is a banana farmer in the Uroba province of Colombia. We work at Grameen Foundation inside of global supply chains, and we work at the source of the supply chain with the smallholder farmer, and we work at the other end of the supply chain with multinational buyers, suppliers, and consumer companies. What we're trying to do at the source of the supply chain is build agencies for the farmers, give them standing in the market so that they can negotiate price for their goods. What we're trying to do at the other end of the market is to convince large multinational corporations that poverty alleviation is good for their business. What keeps me up at night is not that argument, because I think that argument, if you can cast yourself out past a quarterly report, is not very hard to make. What keeps me up at night is that I don't know how to convince a corporation that they shouldn't just aim for sustainably poor, that they should aim for vibrancy in the communities that serve the planet's food. In a few moments, we'll see Van Jones talk about Rebuild the Dream. Van Jones is a wonderful native son. We're lucky to have him. Our world needs new models for advocacy, new models for community organization, and I'm very excited to hear what he'll be talking about as well. I just heard Todd Johnson talk about a virus. I agree completely. I think of it more. I'm a tech guy as a disruptive innovation. So how can we, the social enterprise and impact investing ecosystem, encourage vibrancy and resilience in our communities? I believe we must indeed embrace this fact that we are a disruptive innovation. Last year there was a conversation around whether or not this was an asset class. I'd say no, that this is a better way. While we intend to leverage the power of the market to bring great ideas to scale, we reject the exploitation inherent in the market as it is implemented today. So let's start acting like a disruptive innovation. In the early days, we built a handful of slogans to advertise ourselves as legitimate financial services. I think that worked well, but I now think it's time for us to pivot, for us to be more aggressive about the better world that we know is possible. We used to have the slogan, and sometimes unfortunately still do, do well by doing good. What this really means is make money, then tell a story about it. It needs to become do good over time, because that's what money is for, the overtime part. Social return on investment. It's about the muddiest meaningless phrase that you'll ever hear. And what it really means is measuring social outcomes is really hard, and people only actually care about money anyway, so let's reduce social return to dollars to make everyone more comfortable. What it needs to become is effective solutions to real problems, because that's actually valuable. And finally, my all-time favorite, the double bottom line, or the triple bottom line. Sometimes the quadruple bottom line. Which really means we're really serious about this social stuff, and you know we're serious because we're letting it share the most valuable space on the ledger, the bottom line. However, we can't actually measure a social bottom line, so it's not really on the ledger. But we're working hard to make social a part of everything we do. What it needs to become is no mission, no margin. There's a reason why we're here, there's a reason why we do the work. If you don't, if it doesn't matter, then get out to review. We need money to build effective organizations to contribute to vibrant communities. Commercial markets are, I believe, the most powerful and likely the most impartial engine available to us today to create the change that we need. I truly believe this on this point, I am indeed a capitalist. I don't shy away from building businesses to make money to do things. Where the wealth maximizers have it all wrong is that profit has no more inherent moral value than does a hammer or even a gun. Profit is neither good nor bad. It is, however, very, very useful. The purpose of profit is to build effective organizations because effective organizations solve meaningful problems. Engaged people and effective organizations are the constituent parts of vibrant communities. Communities are the context in which we live our lives and our communities are where we regularly realize value beyond profit. It's where love exists. Antoinette Tuft's stunning act of grace was realized by many members of her community. How can I as an individual, how can I as an entrepreneur, how can we bring that to scale? How can we build communities where Antoinette Tuft is ordinary? Thank you.