 For those of you who've been at SoCAP in the past, this closing session is always about where we're going, whereas the opening plenary, as you might recall, if you were with us, was more about where we've come from. And so I'm going to do the best job I can of moderating a really wonderful group of individuals, each of whom are going to help us contribute to that conversation. The other thing that I want to forewarn you about is that we don't really decide about this group until about three hours before we're on stage, because we really want ourselves, Kevin and I and Rosalie and others, to think about how we're going to frame this conversation and then we try to invite some people to join us. So I also know that at least a couple of the people on stage with me are not shy. And so as usual, I'm going to be doing my best to moderate, but also have a conversation. So without any further ado, let me try to make some introductions here. To my immediate left is Vinit Rai. You may have met him last year as well. He's the founder and chairman of IntelliCap and Abishkar. To his left is Catherine Hoek, who's the founder of Defy Ventures. Some of you might have heard her speak earlier in the week. To her left is Lisa Sharon Harper, who's the senior director of mobilizing for Sojourner. And I don't need to introduce that guy over there. That's right. But I'm going to let each of these individuals give a little bit more color to the introduction I just gave. And what I've asked them each to do is tell you not so much about their organizations, but what drove them to do the work they do. So I'm actually going to mix this up a little bit. Catherine, I'm going to start with you. What has driven you to do the work that you do with Defy? So the work that we do at Defy is to transform the hustle of formerly incarcerated drug dealers and gang leaders. And the way that I got into this, I used to work in venture capital and private equity. And after a prison visit at the age of 26, I was exposed for nearly the first time to real injustice. And so what fires me up to do this work is a hatred of injustice. I see it's called the criminal justice system that I work in. It's so incredibly unjust. I also have a real passion for fatherhood. And in the communities that we serve, which I think are some of the most impoverished communities, there's a real lack of positive male role models. And so I have a passion for fatherhood. And so we equip men and women, but predominantly men, to be all that they can be, to make sure that they're changing the legacies. That's some of what inspires me. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm actually going to let Kevin go next, because I sort of see a thread here about fatherhood. About fatherhood. Yeah, well, that's a good point. I got into this. I cashed out of the dot com at a good time when it was my seventh business. This is the eighth. And I was starting another one and I was kind of becoming obsessed. My daughter said, you know, dad, you know, you had business career in Mississippi and then became moved here and it worked to be international. And she said, dad, you know, you don't need the money and you've proved your point. You know, what's your life about? I just hadn't asked that question since, you know, a long time before. And then did some things very badly become a really bad member of a nonprofit board that works slowly for consensus. And then I said, well, I'm gonna go, you know, solve a direct problem. And it turned out I'm, it worked a couple of years on malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa and it turned out I'm almost the exact wrong person to solve that problem. So I failed at that. And then at that time, I figured out what to do and my grandson was born. I said, well, damn, you know, he's gonna inherit a bad world. I need to do something. So I started doing this stuff. Thank you. Lisa, how about you? Could you tell us briefly about your work but most importantly, what's driven you to your work? Absolutely. Well, I work with Sojourners. Sojourners is about 43 years old. We started in Chicago with Jim Wallace and company. And it started in the midst of the Vietnam War era, the tail end of the civil rights movement, beginning of the women's liberation movement. And what they were looking around at the world and saying, why is the church not speaking to these issues? And we're still doing that. Our mission is to articulate the call to biblical justice for the world and for the church and really to shape the conversation both in the church and also in Capitol Hill and in the White House. So the work that I do is actually to mobilize the church to engage these issues of social justice, multiple issues of social justice. And what motivates me to do that, as somebody else actually asked me that once, and it was like being like a light bulb went off in it, I got it, I knew it. It is the reality that the church, generally speaking, across the board, there are always exceptions and there actually are great pockets of wonderful activity. But the church is struggling, and especially my arm of the church, which is the evangelical arm of the church, is struggling to be worthy of the moniker ride of Christ, which is what it claims from scripture. So I live and I do what I do in order to help the church to become worthy of that moniker. Thank you so much. And Vendit. I thought, why are you keeping me at the last? Probably you noticed that I dread this question. I dread this question simply because I never could figure out why I do what I do. So I can give you a quick history. I founded Intellica Bhavishkar in 2001 and 2002. So it's been quite some time. Before that, I used to live in a forest. So one thing that always strikes me is probably I got bored of the forest and wanted to do something else. So getting bored was one reason. The second part was I wanted, I had no money, so I wanted to actually find out how rich people look. So I started a venture capital fund. Discovered over the last 14 years, it's a pretty tough and challenging activity. To find them is easy probably, getting the money out of them is very difficult. And the third part that probably inspired me is I always was looking for something new and Intellica probably satisfies that part of it. So not as inspirational as my co-panelists, but this is the best I can come up with. Wonderful answer. So for all of you who can't see what's happening in front of us, our countdown clock just changed about five minutes ago. We have five minutes less time than we thought we did unless I can secretly angle for extra time. So we're gonna have to move really quickly to the questions that we talked about briefly backstage. So the way I wanna frame this is I wanna start with community. I wanna go to community of practice and then I wanna talk about systems. And Lisa, I think you're the perfect person to tell us a little bit about what you think needs to, what you think is absolutely essential that this audience knows about what has to change in terms of what's happening in place. What I need to say about Lisa, she's most recently been in Ferguson, Missouri, doing a lot of work. So I know you're gonna have about two minutes to tell us this, but go for it. So this fan is a fan that was given to me by an usher at the funeral of Michael Brown. And I was sitting in the second overflow room where of a packed church full of people who had streamed to this church from across the city of St. Louis because they had a trauma that had happened in their city, not only the death of a young man, but also the realization and the clarity from that death and the response of the police officers of a great, great disparity of the power structures in the city of Ferguson. And in local neighborhoods throughout the city of St. Louis. So what I would say to the people of Socap is that when you think about Ferguson, when you watch the news, when you think about other cities who are suffering from the same kinds of inequity of leadership and power, one of the things that made that happen or made it possible to happen is because the people of Ferguson were not able to actually exercise ownership over the leadership of their lives. They were disenfranchised in a major way in almost every decision-making corner of that city. Now, social impact, impact investing. If you, I would say yes, Ferguson needs you, but what does it look like for you to go to the city, talk to the leaders and ask them, what is it that we can do to help you? They need help with schools, they need help with parks. There are parks that used to have thriving green spaces that have been since shut down because they just don't care about that area in Ferguson. So social impact can make a huge difference, but ownership by the people of Ferguson and surrounding areas is gonna be essential. So when you think about this group of entrepreneurs and investors and you think about the critical importance of what happens in a place, which is so important to our work. You can't do it without being focused on place and place-based innovation and the story of a place. What gives you hope about what's happening in the impact investing arena? So what gives, honestly what gives me hope is I've had so many conversations here with people. Just a couple of days ago I was sitting in the hub and literally sitting in one place and five separate people came up at one point and we started talking and I learned about what they're doing. And the thing that's so special about impact investing is that it's so specific. I mean, the things that people are doing are so niche, so specific, but they really are meeting a real need. So when you think about the purpose of an economy in the first place, right? The purpose of an economy is for the flourishing of the people, for the common good. That's the power of impact investing. It actually gives us the ability to put money specifically towards things that help to meet a need in a community. So that's why I say, hey, we need you in Ferguson. We need you in Harlem. We need you in the Northwest Quadrant of DC. We need you here in Oakland and other places, but when we talk about the need and we talk about flourishing, it's essential, even scripturally, and I'm a Christian, that we look and we make sure we understand that the leadership has to actually come from the community. Otherwise, it won't be owned by them. Thank you so much. This is a great segue. Thank you for that. I'm gonna turn to Catherine. In the context of telling us a little more about DeFi, what I'd like you to sort of help us do is sort of see where we're going. When we try to tie what happens in place-based work to communities of practice, how do you start to develop a community of practice and how do you draw on a community of entrepreneurs, a community of stakeholders to do the best work you can and move it forward? And tell us how that matters to us, really, as we think about the next year's work. Sure, so we started our work in New York City and we just recently scaled it to the Bay Area and as we engage a community, it's not just people in those two cities there. It's when getting to be here at SoCAP and getting this exposure, even after this, people are like, okay, great, I wanna be involved. And so we have provided relevant opportunities for people to get involved. We're not like, will you come and serve in the soup kitchen? If you are a business person, with the work that we do, we say, come roll up your sleeves and teach one of our guys how to work a financial model. And then they can provide mentoring and pro bono services in their area of expertise. So we've been drawing on communities. We have 2,000 volunteers in just over two years who have been able to participate and draw on their networks as well. So tell us a little more about both the networks of those that are the stakeholders in your work and also the networks of those you need to draw into your work. Just give us a little more color on that. So what are the three or four different communities that you really need to continue to grow? Sure, so most of our volunteers are business professionals, they're predominantly CEOs and investors, venture capitalists. We host these shark tank style competitions and they come in to offer business feedback and mentoring. We have drawn heavily from the faith-based community and we would love to get more engaged in faith-based communities as well. We need to get more penetrated into ethnic minorities as well into these communities because we serve people, most of the people that we serve are ethnic minorities and so we would love to engage people who come from similar backgrounds and we need people, I mean, most of the people that we serve are African-Americans so if we can get African-American men to also serve as mentors and as the investors, that's where we really start to win. Okay, so Kevin, you're listening to these two fabulous women talk about the importance of place-based innovation and then beginning to draw on the idea of a community of practice but what you and I've been talking a lot about this week is sort of what needs to happen at the systemic level and where do we need to provide ourselves more rigor, more honesty, more whatever and where do you actually see the best opportunities for systems change to occur that will help people who are working in communities of practice and place, not just in the US of course but around the world so where are you focused? It's like the higher altitude, you know? Yeah, I think cultural literacy is a really big thing because you know, folks who are trying to help usually don't come from the places where the people need help come from and so I see that as a real interesting critical need. There is, so figure out what the cultural context of who you're trying to help is. There was a particular accelerator program working in Sub-Saharan Africa and it was trying to get this technology, it's a roller-barrel kind of thing and it's like oh it'll save all these women all this time going to get water. Well actually when they found out going to get water was the only time they got to be together, the only time they got to be unsupervised, the only time they had community and so the technology was a really good idea but they hadn't talked to the people about what they were losing when they did that and so I think some of the smartest investors, I think there's huge opportunities around financial inclusion, but you have to figure out how to talk to those folks and many of those folks don't make decisions individually. There's a matriarch or a gatekeeper and it's different in each community. I mean in San Francisco Ben Mangum was one of my mentors in this place and he figured out who the gatekeepers were in the Hmong that are in Little Saigon which is completely different than the Filipinos at 6th and Mission and so finding out who the gatekeepers are and that you're not selling individuals, often you're selling communities who have people who say it's okay to deal with you so all those kinds of things and then around this particular opportunity of financial inclusion and Obamacare means in health because of that the technologists need to learn to listen respectfully to poor folks in their cultural context which is oddly enough not what they teach you at MBA schools anywhere because the path to wealth in these two niches is based on listening respectfully to poor folks and that's not a skill that affluent MBAs who went to exclusive camps have ever really picked up. You were, it's interesting, I don't know if anybody in the room was with us in the fantastic discussion we had just before I ran over here which was around mentoring and what is the promise of mentoring and can technology be an important tool in scaling kind of mentoring systems but one of the most fascinating and important parts of the conversation which I really appreciated so much participation in was on exactly the same topic which is we can make systemic change and technology's gonna help us do that but cultural literacy is critical and so a lot of the people in that room were drawing out culturally there's so much difference between how across the globe we ask for or don't feel comfortable asking for the kind of mentoring or human capital that we need and so where I was going in my mind while I was listening to you is there's a lot of systemic work we can do but we've got to continue to pay attention to how we translate that to culture you know how does it remain so place-based at the same time that we do this kind of movement towards systemic change. Vinit, you and I were talking behind stage and you were saying there's some things that I really, really want us to expose and one of the words that you used quite a bit was honesty and you were talking a little bit about the need to sort of get really out in front of some important things that I think maybe we presume or needle shifting things that have already taken place or networks that have already kind of proven themselves can you talk a little bit about what you were saying to me about what needs to change and about the honesty factor? And so what I was saying is impact investing depending on how you see its origin is 14 years to eight years old right now. Eight years because roughly around 2007 or eight the term got coined and some of us started around 2001, 2002 so 14 years, so it's early teens to very early age. Depending on the maturity level I actually believe that we did a lot to create hype and Socap, Sankal and a lot of us have been a co-contributor with that hype. I think we are reaching a stage where inside these gatherings we need to start getting a little bit honest about ourselves. Whether that hype that we have created which as a child we needed to actually reach the teenage that we are in now should we be held more accountable for that? So I think the question that we have is do we have a parent and is the parent going to regulate us or are we going to regulate ourselves? And this honesty should actually come from the definition itself. So one of the big question that we have been grappling with and I think there is an acceptable definition that has been presented now whether you look at Jin or you look at the new report that's going to come out of the G7. We are talking about an intent and output and outcome as two different parts. The problem is there is no way in the world I know what my intent is. I guess I may know you might not know. So the question is therefore all accountability right now is moving to the output leaving the intent aside. Simply because people assume if you are claiming to be an impact investor your intent is good and I think that's where the challenge starts. So how do you, if we define ourselves in a very obfuscated manner there is no way we will be ever held accountable. That actually boils down to us claiming that we have $10 billion of impact investing and I can tell you with 14 years of fundraising exercise that that $10 billion is really very elusive. So I don't know where it is hiding but it surely is somewhere there because it has been documented. But and I can tell you I'm a very good fundraiser I'm a very good chaser but it's very very difficult to find that $10 billion. So it's good to say we are $10 billion when we were actually children but now since we are in teenage we might have to start asking ourselves it is $10 billion or five or one or maybe much lesser. And the second part is what is that money doing? Is that money really participating in somebody else's creation much later and then consoling ourselves that we are making a difference which I think majority of us are doing and a few of us who are actually really trying to take the martyr syndrome far too far and trying to commit suicide doing things which they should not be doing or somebody else should be doing. So I think we have two extremes probably a very small percentage doing the very high risk very difficult work and 80% of us just participating in the bandwagon called impact investing because some of us sitting here have created the hype and I think these are the gatherings which have to actually get away from pleasing and congratulating each other on what we have achieved and start asking some hard questions about are we really doing the right things and what are the outcomes, the long-term outcomes of these short-term outputs which largely have been focused on counting the number of lives we touched and remember that whether we are selling a LED lamp or giving a microfinance loan it's not going to, if we touch the life of the individual it's not going to transform the life and ultimately the objective with which we have gone out to the world is we are trying to transform and I think that's really the challenge. So the honesty has to come on this ocean. We must celebrate that we have actually come some distance but we must keep asking ourselves is that the distance that are the, is the hype really justified for the distance we have covered? So I'm going to challenge all of us to take Vinit's question and I'd like each of us in the five minutes or so we have remaining to, and you can just signal to me where you want to go in order because this is going to take a little thought but what can each of us do ourselves and what would we like the audience to do to create more honesty is my question. So in other words, let's respond to Vinit's question with the time that we have left. It's not exactly where I thought we were going but this is where I think we should go. So when you're ready just let me know and I'll let you speak to that. Yes. So I went to Ferguson with sojourners not to go and try to say Ferguson. In fact, I have a very, very strong obviously value for indigenous leadership, the leadership on the ground. So I didn't go for a long time. It's kept talking with people asking what, where is the need? And it turned out the need was actually to help the white community to engage particularly white evangelicals and multi-ethnic evangelical churches. So that's why I went. And I ended up speaking in three different major forums to evangelical pastors and faith leaders in Ferguson. And the first one is what strikes me and this is where we get to honesty. We had a time at a bar, a grill and bar and grill where I ended up preaching. And afterwards we talked about the need for leadership to come from the community and I asked the pastors to reflect amongst themselves and choose. How does their gut feel? Let's be real. How do they feel when they imagine themselves going to Ferguson and not doing anything but actually just sitting at the feet of the people in Ferguson and listening and being led by them? What does it look like for them to be led by them? And two white pastors stood up and said, one of them, the first one said, as a white man, I have been taught my whole life that I'm supposed to lead everyone else. That blew my mind. I was like, whoa, we just got deep up in here. And then the second one confessed that it had never even occurred to him that the people of Ferguson would actually have to lead him. And the thing is, these are Christians and then biblically there's the scripture Isaiah 61 that says that the salvation of the cities will actually come from the ones who are weeping. It'll come from the ones who are imprisoned right now. It'll come from the ones who are oppressed. So they were really challenged by that and it was one of those transformative moments. And so. Very honest. Which who wants to go next? What are you gonna think about now that you think can help this audience us, the movement to be more honest? Kevin? Catherine? Benit? My answer is totally different. I mean, this is my first exposure to SoCAP and being here with everyone talking about creating change and getting honest, I appreciate it when people are like, nope, we can't help you and we don't have anything to offer. And I like that fast answer because it can help me to stay focused. And then when people do have something to offer when they just tell me straight up. So that honesty and getting to the point very quickly instead of saying, yeah, I'm interested and I'm never following up. I think that's a really great point to make because I think at the level of the personal interaction, I still believe we maintain a great deal of honesty. I think it's when we're starting to think, my own view is when we start to think about the larger picture, it's when we see some of the need to be more honest. Kevin? Yeah. I think when I started SoCAP, I wanted to prove there was a market here, somewhere between giving and investing. And I think, okay, that's kind of proved. It's a, you know, it's a phantom $10 billion market or whatever somebody's come up with. But I think now that we're really on base, it's like it's a movement and you use the market. The market's a tool and the market's not the point. And that's what I've come to start thinking about. Yeah, I'm kind of, I'm thinking very much about some of those things too. Vinit? So I think I was actually coming from Polo Alto and there was a debate going on in my car with somebody who's actually running an angel network, trying to convince me to make an investment which is a very impactful investment. And I was giving her 300 reasons of why I can't make that investment because the profit is 210, the model is too complicated. And the more I tried to explain, the more convinced I got that all my explanations are wrong. So, and by the way, I know about that company for three years and I've been watching it, doing nothing about it. The guy has been struggling. It's a guy engineer from Oracle who's trying to do a mobile clinic in West Bengal. And the lady who was trying to convince me I did this somewhere around. She tried for one hour and she's been trying for three years with no... So somewhere I started with a very different belief that belief has moved on because my investors asked me to return the money at 20% return. And I know while this guy needs money more than anybody else that I'm going to give but the constraints of what I want to do with him is not allowing me. So, what I try to do is connected with why am I here? So I'm here because Socap is celebrating something and you want to be celebrated. The same thing we do at Sankalp and both of us are private institutions, I mean. Sankalp is owned by IntelliCap and Socap is also a private institution. And while we talk about sharing we basically are very protective of our daughters. So I told Kevin that time has come for us to actually start telling people and showing to people that we can collaborate and not just be protective about our daughters. So we have taken a couple of decisions which I think Kevin, if you can go ahead and share a little bit. Okay, great. So we are going to merge our marketing databases. We'll reach out for Sankalp through our connections and he'll do the same thing. I'm going to be on the advisory board with some of our folks on Sankalp and they're the two largest impact investing conferences other than here. And he'll be on the, and his people at Parajeta also will be on our advisory board. So we'll be listening to each other, agreeing on, you know, I'll be providing my input as a, you know, white straight guy from the West and or the North, whichever, you know, we think West he calls us North South. And so it will create this structural learning thing. We agreed to do it last year and then we had to realize we have to put things in place. So we'll do those two things. We're also saying that impact is risk, you know, it's not reclassifying some CDFI loans and CRA stuff. It's the risk stuff. It's the new stuff. And we'll probably come up with a much smaller figure and we just have to deal with, you know, sometimes size doesn't matter. And well, we'll do those three things anyway to say the real stuff is the risky stuff. We're going to figure out how to merge the databases. Also his event, he'll sell our event. We'll do the same thing. And then I'll learn how they think and they will probably learn how we think. What a wonderful example of getting more honest. And I just learned about this myself from Kevin that Vinit and Kevin had reached this agreement to really share all of this information and really become honest about really being a partnership and not just talking about it. And I guess it's time for us to close but the theme that I sort of heard across all of this was something again that Vinit said I think first backstage but I guess I'll take the privilege of repeating it which is that when you think about impact and you think about what each of us personally can do, it's taking the risk, I think is what you said that really proves that you have impact. And all this intense stuff, that's not impact. And so thanks for letting me borrow your thought but I think that's a really important way to encourage us all both at the sort of systems level taking on the political systems, the policy work that needs to be done, the networking and technology that we need to improve, et cetera, but I think we all need to remind ourselves that if we're going to have impact, we need to be honest about the risk we're prepared to take and we need to take the risk. So thank you all very much. And thanks for being with me on stage and for collaborating so quickly to do this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.