 Good morning. How are you? Early in the morning for a superstar, all-star, really important panel in conversation. Thank you all for being here. My name's Felicia Wong. I am president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute. And I would not do my job if I didn't tell you 30 seconds about what Roosevelt does before we get into this. So the Roosevelt Institute works we are a New York-based think tank. And we work to make sure that our nation's most powerful people, senators, and presidential candidates understand what is at stake in the fight for our economy and are poised, ready to change the rules that have made our economy so deeply racialized. And that is a conversation we're going to have today. I am unbelievably pleased to be here with three amazing leaders in the fight for racial justice and the fight against the kind of racialized wealth we live with today. On my right is Alicia Garza. Alicia needs no introduction, but I'm going to do it anyway. She is one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter. And she is the principal of Black Futures Lab. Black Futures Lab has just conducted the Black Census, which is the largest survey of Black people in America for almost 200 years. So Alicia. Next, we have Rashad Robinson. Rashad is the president of Color of Change. And Color of Change with 1.7 million members is the largest online racial justice organization in America. And finally, to my far right, although not really politically, I don't think so, but nonetheless, to my far right, we have Rodney Foxworth. Rodney is CEO of Common Future, which is formerly known as Bali, but just rebranded. Got a Common Futures t-shirt on. It's all about brand, not really all about brand, but it's a lot about brand. So Rodney is the CEO of Common Future. And Common Future is based here in Oakland. And they work, they have, over the last five years, mobilized more than $150 million of capital into equitable community development and equitable wealth building. So as you can see, I was not lying when I said this as an all-star group. And we are also here to take on a very big topic, which is racialized wealth in America. So let me set up the conversation and then turn to my fellow panelists. So the title of today's conversation is Closing the Racial Wealth Gap, Essential Conversations for Impact Investors. And so let's start by saying just a little bit about racial wealth. Racial wealth, racialized wealth, is one of the most pernicious and terrible manifestations of today's inequality. The numbers are stark. White family median income is about 150, sorry, median wealth, not median income, median wealth, how much you hold, is about $150,000. For Black and Latinx families, that number is about $5,000. Those numbers have gotten worse, not better, worse over the last decade. And so the statistics are bad. But I would say that statistics are just one way to tell a story because really the reason we care about wealth is that wealth is crystallized history. Wealth is what has been passed down to us from our elders. And it is what we can pass on to our children. So wealth isn't just money. Wealth is a lot of things, including power relations that have been frozen in time. We're going to get into that today, too. And finally, we're also talking about racialized wealth at a moment in American history that is absolutely unprecedented in our lifetime, certainly in my political lifetime. I have never seen so much chaos, absolute chaos around American democracy, around the American economy, how to run it, how to structure it, who belongs in it. And finally, I've never seen so much conversation, so much agitation, so much realization about the central role of race and power in our ability to get where we want to be going, where we ought to be going in America. So I was talking to many of us, our friendly with friends, with colleagues of Dorian Warren, another leader in the movement for racial justice. I was talking to Dorian yesterday. And he said something that really stuck with me. He's a scholar in addition to a movement leader. And he said that one of his most powerful lessons from all of American history is that if you have no racial justice, you have no democracy. No racial justice, no democracy. I think Dorian's right. And I would add to that that if you have no equality of wealth, you also have no democracy. So let's just think about what that means in the context of where we sit today, even as Mark Zuckerberg testifies in front of Congress when we heard William Taylor yesterday, all of that is really important. But the bigger context here is that if we do not have the kind of justice that we're gonna be talking about today, we will not. And perhaps you would argue that in some ways we do not have a democracy. So with that, let's get into it. I'm gonna run the conversation in three parts. First part is gonna be visionary. We're gonna talk a little bit about transformation. I have a question for all of my fellow panelists. We were talking at breakfast about kind of the world we wanna get to, what true transformation really means. And Alicia, I'll kick it to you first. You said it's really important for all of us to understand the difference between empowerment and power. So we'll all take that question when I turn it to you first. Sure. How y'all doing? Good morning. Yes, thanks for being up early with us. So I talk a lot about the difference between empowerment and power because I think that this question is actually fundamental to the future that we're trying to build together. For me, empowerment is what happens when people feel really good about themselves. It's self-esteem. It's how I woke up this morning and I was like, yeah, I'm feeling excellent, right? But unfortunately, me feeling excellent doesn't change the conditions that I experience when I walk outside my front door, right? Power, on the other hand, is really about the ability to make decisions over your life and the lives of other people. Power is fundamentally about the ability to make the rules and change the rules. Power is about the ability to shape the story of who we are and who we can be together. Make America Great Again is a powerful story that is advanced by powerful people to really talk about who deserves and who doesn't in this country, right? So power is the ability to shape those kinds of stories and to have people believe them and act upon them. But power, as my friend and colleague, Rashad Robinson, says a lot, and I take this all over the place, but I always credit you. Power is really about whether or not people care about disappointing you. And I know you're gonna talk a little bit more about how this manifests, but I can say that for black communities in this country, while often we are kind of moving in efforts that make us feel good about ourselves, our relative level of political power, of economic power, right? Of social power has not changed. And so the question that I think I would love to kick us off with this morning for all of us to be thinking about is what does it mean to actually build power, not just making people feel good about themselves, but what does it mean to be able to bring people together in such a way where we can change the rules and we can transform how power operates itself? I think that it's really important for us to understand that it is important to put decision-making into people's hands, but to do that in an individual way does not change the structures that keep people away from being able to make those decisions consistently, from being able to participate in the decisions that are made about them, but also it doesn't change the way that power functions. We talk a lot at the Black Futures Lab about the need for black-owned businesses, but we know that black-owned businesses is not gonna transform the economic system that keeps black people poor. It's just not. Creating more black millionaires, creating more black billionaires, even creating more black middle-class folks is not going to change an economy that fundamentally is structured to keep some people out, to keep some people without, and to allow other people to extract from each other. The economic system that we function in right now is inherently extractive. It is inherently predatory, and we have to have an honest conversation about that if we really want to advance the kinds of solutions that change that. Not just put black folks where white folks are right now, but change the system overall so that everybody has enough to live a dignified life. So we're still on the topic of transformation, where we're trying to go, what we're trying to achieve. Rashad. Yeah, so empowerment and power. First of all, hello everyone, how are you doing? Excellent. So I want to talk a bit through the theme of sort of what we do at Color of Change and how we see power and how we work to build the type of power that changes structures and rules. And so Color of Change was founded a little over 14 years ago in the aftermath of a flood, which was Hurricane Katrina that was caused by bad decision makers, which is incredibly important to remember and turn into a life-altering disaster by those same bad decision makers. And it wasn't just the flood that overtook the Gulf Coast, but it was the flood of decisions afterwards, decisions about not only who would be taken care of, but who would get to be part of the rebuilding. And like so many of the issues that will be discussed at this conference, Katrina illustrated things that we already knew, geographic segregation, generational poverty, what we've done to this planet, all the ways in which structural racism undergirds all of those things. But at the heart of Katrina, no one was nervous about disappointing black people. Government, media, corporations. And when institutions are not nervous about disappointing your community, it doesn't matter what kind of research report you have that illustrates all the facts and figures, no matter how good that research is. It doesn't matter with all due respect to my friends out here on the West Coast, what kind of technology you build. The app is not gonna solve it. It oftentimes doesn't even matter what we do in the courts if we don't have the power to supercharge and implement those changes. And so an issue like the wealth gap or Katrina are so many of the issues that animate the disparities that we see in our society cannot be solved by simply researching our way or legaling our way or coding our way or even nonprofit executive directing our way out of those problems. We actually need people power and narrative change. And those are the two things that are really at the heart of how we see our work in color of change. It is about mobilizing everyday people to force systems to have to change, to force decision makers to have to do something different. And I wanna talk a little bit about why that's important because I do think that we sometimes have the wrong indicators for when changes happen. Far too often we mistake presence for power. Presence is visibility, retweets, it's awareness. It is our stories on the front page of the newspaper. It's people being able to talk about the racial wealth gap but not actually having to do anything about it. It's about going to a conference sometimes and leaving and then still making the same set of decisions after we leave the room. It's a black president and thinking that we've gotten post-racial. It's a black pop star who now says she's pregnant and then we somehow think that America loves black people as much as they love black culture and they can hate black people and they can love black culture at the same time. All of those things are deeply important to sort of answering the question about what do we actually want to achieve? If what we want to achieve is ensuring that we get to some sort of diversity and inclusion, like we include more people inside of a broken, problematic, racist structure, then we're probably on the right path. If we fundamentally believe that the reason why some people are on the bottom and some people on the top is because it's been artificially manufactured that way. That a set of choices has been made that way and that some people are not inherently disposed to being on the bottom and some people are not inherently disposed to being on the top, if we actually believe that, then we have to focus on structures. Because that's the only solution to that problem. But if we believe that some people deserve to be on the bottom because that's who they are and some people deserve to be on the top, then we should keep going down the path that we're going down and tinkering on the outsides and saying, well, maybe we'll make a little bit more opening. And so those are the questions at hand, but at the end of the day, the work that we're trying to do with color of change is about translating presence to power. And for us, power is the ability to change the rules. Sometimes they are the written rules of policy, other times they are the written rules, the unwritten rules of culture, but always recognizing that you cannot change the rules simply with ideas. We need people and we need people in motion to be able to achieve that. Thanks. Okay. Rodney. Common future, what is your vision? What's transformation for you? For us. And so before I get into that, I'm sure many of you who signed up for this were not aware that you're gonna get this Wednesday morning sermon from Rashad. So thank you for that, brother. So I think so much of this conversation, particularly because we're at SoCAP and we're having a conversation that within this context, impact investing, doing well by doing good and all those sort of things, the reality is that within that context, power really is about capital, right? Who has it, who does not? And so the figures that Felicia spoke to in the introduction, think about this. When you're talking about white households in this country having 150,000 or so in median wealth compared to about 5,000 for Latinx and African-American households, well, then we know where the power sits, right? And so we see where the concentration of power within, when we're talking about capital, when we're talking about impact investing, where that is. And I think we have an opportunity though, when we're talking about transforming that nature, moving away from capital supremacy, right? And to having what we're just talking about, people power. So I just wanna set that grounding because as an assumption within even this context of doing well by doing good, that that is simply enough, right? And so when we're having a conversation about power, then that also means you have to think about what are you giving up, right, within this context? And so I challenge my colleagues and friends in the impact investing world to really think about that as well within this conversation. When we think about what a future looks like, I think we all have shared this belief. I mean, let's step back for a moment though and look at where we might be hitting to Rashad's point, where we might be going. You know, there's data in the case if we continue on this path of economic trajectory, 2053, African-American and median household wealth would drop to zero, right? So consider that for a moment. Just a few decades after this country is supposed to become majority people of color. And so even if you're completely self-interested, even if you're not thinking about, you don't care about black communities, you don't care about Latinx communities, you don't care about immigrant communities, well, your pockets are gonna get hit. It's gonna hurt you economically if we continue around this trajectory. And so when I think about what the future holds for us, it's actually about making sure that does not occur no matter what your interests are, right? Now, from that perspective already, there's data that indicates that because of bias and racism within the capital markets and decision-making in terms of who gets invested into and whatnot that we're already losing $300 billion in national income, $300 billion. So there's an economic cost obviously that we see happening in communities of color and other marginalized groups that have been impacted by injustice and also that's impacting a broader set of stakeholders as well. That's impacting all of us, right? That means if we're losing out on that type of income as a nation, that's impacting local work, that's impacting New Orleans, right? That's impacting a number of communities to have access to the type of capital that's required to be successful and dignified. And so when I think about what that future might look like, it's actually a future in which we're not overly concerned about and I know there's a conversation later today about even investigating return on investment and looking at that as sort of a concept that is very much within anti-black racism, right? As for example, and so what are the opportunities for us to unpack and unravel those things? Because I know we're gonna get into a deeper conversation about this, but just kind of kicking it off. When you think about the future, you have to think about the past, right? And so the reason why some have more and some have less than others, those are a set of actions, policies, individual actions, institutional responses that allow for that to happen, Jim Crow, slavery, et cetera. So those are things that happened in the past and yet we're continually doing things today that also impact the economic livelihoods of individuals in this country and families in this country, right? So when we look toward the future, the question has to be, how do we actually unpack and unravel all of those historical contexts? How do we interrogate the things that we're doing today? So for example, it probably does not make a lot of sense if you're trying to impact racial equity to be overly concerned on having a 20% year-over-year return on investment for your institution. It's unlikely that you can actually pair those up, right? Because we know who is investing, who has the opportunity to invest and so it's likely that those resources will not trickle into African American, Latinx households. I wanna just quickly also point out, particularly in this conversation, because I know there's a lot of dialogue around opportunity zones and while I'm introducing this because it's a concept of power, right? And this is not a critique of overarching of opportunity zones, but I do wanna give a context. Although you could, you could make that quick. Not right now, we could get into it. But what I will say is that when you think about the context of how that occurred, I mean, that was a power conversation, right? It's not as though black and brown communities have not had ideas in which, you know, capital can come into the community and be owned by the community. There was a shaping for opportunity zones that came from a current of an idea. One, you have to have capital gains and so if you have capital gains, we already know what type of person you might be and they would have that. And secondly, just the policy itself was constructed within the context. I mean, Sean Parker and formerly of Facebook was a part of that conversation and I just named that because when we were talking about power, who has it and who can make those decisions, typically you're gonna have much more capital at the table. And so that whole framing for opportunity zones as an example, that did not come from black and brown communities and that's the reason for that, right? So for Sean's point, because folks do not care about, do not get nervous about the ideas that black and brown folks have in this country. And so it really makes it very visible, even within our own sector of impact investing, how decisions get made based on power. So I mean, one of the things that you had been saying at breakfast Rodney is like, we really need to think about, and I think you basically just said it again here, but I wanna put a point on it. We need to think about the return on investment to whiteness, to think what you're really pointing out. Okay, so I wanna turn now to the second part of the conversation, which is okay, these are a lot of big things on the table here. So how do we get there? How do we take real steps toward the transformation that you all have really talked about? And I think one path clearly has to be the path of power building through politics. So let's talk about politics and power just for a second. This next question is gonna go to you Rashad. You have written a lot about corporate power, the power of large firms as a major threat to racial justice, and you've said pretty bluntly that corporations profit from racial exclusion, from racism, so talk about that and talk about how you gotta fight that. Yeah, and so I do think that sometimes when you say corporations profit from racism, there's a thing that sometimes people bristle at it, or sometimes folks, even in a room like this, can say, oh wow, that's not me. I am not a big corporation, and so my idea about how to help people deal with bail reform through an app, and I'm helped to deal with the issue of bail, money bail, through an app is not actually profiting off of racism. And so every month I get someone to come to my office that has an idea about how they are going to, about how they are going to help us deal with, from a charitable perspective, one of a deep systemic issue that is rooted in racism. And I wanna say that I am not in any way against charity, but when charity is our only strategy, and we don't have a strategy for actually undoing the reasons why we need charity, then charity is about profiting off of racism. When we believe, when we stop at the sort of solutions of giving water bottles to Flint instead of cleaning up the pipes, or developing mentorship programs in inner city schools instead of changing public education, or stop at dealing with programs for reentry without ending mass incarceration, we don't actually have a vision for how do we undo the systems and structures, but to a larger extent, right? If we think about all the ways in which poverty is manufactured, and I say poverty is manufactured because far too often it's sort of talked about like it's a car accident, like it's sort of just happened and that people like are just poor. And some people are just rich. But when we talk about poverty as being manufactured, and then we think about all the folks that are involved in the manufacturing that also get to be involved in the sort of problem solving for dealing with it, everything from distributing benefits in major cities to tracking and lobbying to take away those benefits in major cities. We recognize that we have built all these systems that are rooted around keeping structures exactly the way they are right now. And I think that is the thing I just wanna invite all of you into, right? Invite all of you into this room about what does it mean to, yes, let's have our charity work, but what does it mean to fundamentally believe that this is not okay? What does it mean to believe, and then what do we do with it to believe that something else is possible? Then what type of decisions do we make about where we put our resources and our time and our energy? What does it mean in terms of who we vote for and who we support in elections? What does it mean in terms of who we hold accountable and who we push back on? If we believe that the systems and structures, the way they are, are good enough, then we just keep going on the road that we're on. So when I talk about corporations profiting from racism, of course they profit from racism because racism is baked into the DNA of our country. But the answer, right, is not for us to think about how we solve that by not talking about race or not centering race. Racial justice, in my opinion, is the only clear driver for actually solving that. You know, I hear a lot of questions, and I'll end here, a lot of questions about, you know, when we get a true democracy, we will end up with racial justice. We will end up with gender justice. We will end up with all of these sort of things because people will be able to participate, and I actually think that's the wrong sort of question, the wrong premise. The right premise is, what does it actually take to get a true democracy? And if we are going to undo all of the norms, all of the racial and gender norms that have gotten us into the position that we are in right now, then we actually have to center racial and gender justice as the driver for our work. We actually have to center it for the driver for our investments. We have to center it for the drivers of what we amplify and what we prioritize and what we center because then and only then can we actually build sort of new structures that undo the norms that created the old structures. Anything short of that is us doing work that legitimizes the structures that we already are, that tinkers around the systems and allows them to be strong up against people and projects that are working to undo them. In fact, in many ways, working against the movements of everyday people that are trying to fight those systems that have far too often held them back. And so the question for all of us in the room is what side do we wanna be on, right? Five, 10, 15, 30 years, 40 years from now, the world will look different one way or the other and we just have an opportunity to determine what does doing good and making money actually look like? Yeah. Well, it's my job to try to make segues between. There's no segues. And so there is a segue here. So Alicia, in your work with the Black Census project, you have learned a lot about what thousands and thousands of black people, black Americans think we need to do something about it. And so I think we need to do, to take more politics and to take more power and to make sure that we're on, as Rashad suggests, the right side of history. So what have we learned from all of that data? Oh yeah. So just for some quick context, the Black Futures Lab works to make black communities powerful in politics. And one of the things that we know has to happen in order for black people to be powerful in politics is for us to have a different story about who black people are in this country. We conducted the largest survey of black people in America in 154 years. We surveyed more than 30,000 black people in all 50 states, asking folks what it is that we experience every day in the economy, in our democracy, in our society. And then we asked a really important question, which is what is it that you wanna see for your future? And if you're like me, you know that people are always talking about black people, talking at black people, but rarely are people actually asking us what it is that we experience and what it is that we want. And so what happens is that it leads to false narratives not only about what we experience, but also false narratives about the alternatives we envision for our futures. I can say that one of the things I found really, really interesting from the project is that by and large, black communities actually support raising taxes on people with wealth, knowing that we are locked out of it, and so understanding that to redistribute wealth, you gotta tax the people who got it. Black folks are largely in favor of raising taxes on corporations, and black folks are largely in favor of making sure that black people can participate actively in an economy that works not just for us, but for everybody. And the thing that I think is a little bit of a contradiction in that kind of discussion around black-owned businesses is that again, as we talked about earlier, we do have to do some work from moving people to, I just wanna be a part of what exists, and that's a hard conversation for black folks to have because we are structurally locked out, right, from access to wealth. And so wealth becomes one of the major things that keeps us up at night, but it's also a major part of our biggest dreams for ourselves, our families, and our futures, and yet at the same time, as I said earlier, nothing about this economic system as it's constructed right now has a pathway for black people to be powerful in it. And that's the hard conversation that we have to have together as we're talking about investing to do good. We can and we should invest in things that allow people to have, and black folks in particular, to have more access to wealth, but we also have to have a conversation about the ways in which wealth is attached to power and the ways in which wealth shapes the decisions that get made about us, our communities, our futures, and our families. And one of the things that I know Rashad and I talk a lot about that I just wanna put on the table is that one of the contradictions that we face as black communities is that we do look to black people with wealth as drivers of solutions for how to change the economy. And as successful, right? Like the epitome of success. Yeah, it's like I gotta get like Jay-Z. He's got a lot of money, and he obviously knows, right? He's got a path towards how to make my life better. He's doing it for himself, so if I can do what he's doing, then I could be better. But here's the thing, that's not actually how things function. We wouldn't have wealth if some people didn't have it, right? Like let's just kind of sit with that for a minute. What is the interest that exists for people who have wealth and entities that have wealth to really give enough of it away so that they don't have wealth anymore? In our democracy, money makes decisions, based point blank, and so you cannot, right? Change people being locked out of the economy when people who have wealth are making all the decisions about the rules of the economy. And there is not an incentive for more people to be making decisions about how the rules happen. So I think it's important for us to understand and we learn this as a result of the data, it's important for us to do investing that does good, but we have to also understand that doing good is not the end goal, change is the end goal. And what change means, right, is that some of our companies and some of our entities probably wouldn't exist. That's a hard conversation for us to have. And it's not pie in the sky ideas, it's like actually think about it. If we are really changing the way that wealth is distributed, yes, we are investing in people so that they can have micro enterprises, that's important, right? But that in and of itself is not going to change how the rules are unfair for those varied communities. Are we investing in micro enterprises and also investing in people's ability to change the rules and make the rules? Oftentimes we just stop at the micro enterprises because not only do we think that it empowers people and it does on some level, but it's comfortable to stop there because we can say, okay, now that person can get up and feel really good about themselves today. But feeling good about yourself is not enough. Changing the rules has to be a part of changing people's everyday living conditions and you cannot have one without the other. Finally, I just wanna say in terms of the survey results, one of the top issues, 90% of the people that we surveyed said that what keeps them up at night is low wages that are not enough to support a family. And so how do we solve for that? Part of how we solve for that is making sure that people are in a position to make the rules about how the economy functions and to develop a new economy where nobody gets left behind. Our contradiction that we have to take on today and for the future if we really wanna see change is what are the consequences, right? What are the consequences of really making sure that people are powerful? If the people that we are doing good for are really powerful, it also means that some of us lose power, we lose access, we lose influence and that's not a bad thing, right? But we have to kind of solve for that. We have to solve for, if you're going to build power in communities that don't have it, it means that the communities that do have it right now and have a lock on it are fundamentally not going to be the ones who are making decisions about how structures happen. They're not going to be the ones who are making decisions about what happens in communities, for communities on behalf of communities. It means that power is going to be distributed differently and are we actually okay with that? One way to think about that on the wage side is very concrete, very concrete. Union power, labor power, working power, which as I know is something that Alicia in one of your past professional lives, you had worked a tremendous amount on but this is a very real thing. Union power, you see a 20% wage premium, no matter how much union density, no matter what sector we're talking about. Unions bring people 20% higher wages. That is a real thing and I think we are starting to see, it feels kind of not Bay Area, not San Francisco. I grew up here so I feel like I can say that. To really talk about labor, but here's the thing, labor power really, really, really matters and we got to figure out a way to do it for the very fishered and fractured economy that we live in today. Talk more about that after this if you want to. Got a lot of thoughts about it but let's now actually go to the investing side and Rodney I want to ask you. So we talked about the importance of politics, the importance of power straight up but this is also a conference about investing and the power of capital. This is another path for how we get there and part of what we are talking about here is how to invest in entrepreneurs of color and businesses that actually address racialized wealth. So what should we be looking for to see that our work in investing really does move that needle? And in particular you've talked a lot about being good with concessionary capital. So what's that mean, what's that about? So one of the things I was thinking about before this panel started, thinking about the even title of it, closing the wealth gap, racial wealth gap. And it made me think because that's really not what we're talking about. We're actually talking about undoing a racialized and extractive economy, right? Because there are a number of things that have been discussed that if we continue to do we might exacerbate things, right? So again, it's not about creating more black billionaires or Latinx billionaires. That's not actually what the goal is. And so just to reframe things to think about that context that's not the conversation we've been having. There's a conversation that we could have about closing the racial wealth gap in a different type of way but that's not the dialogue we're having. And so one of the things I think about and I'll start with again tying it back to power. So when we talk about concessionary returns and I know this is always a big topic at impact investing circles. But if we're talking about, even if we're talking about closing the racial wealth gap the reality is we have to be very cognizant of the past and the contemporary decisions that are getting made, right? And so even looking at it from that perspective I like to think about it as restorative capital, maybe reparative capital. I mean rather than concessionary. Rather than concessionary. The concessionary feels like ooh. Rather than concessionary. The normative feels like ah. Right? Yeah, okay. Because the reality of it is is that we are who we are today because of a set of actions that have been done and continued to happen. And so to me it seems like the math is a little fuzzy that you can both increase your own wealth and this was just discussed. You can both increase your own wealth in a substantial way and hoard that wealth over time and also build power in communities that have been unjustly impacted by systems. So that to me seems like a conversation we don't oftentimes have. And so to me I think about it as reparative, right? What set of capital is required to actually recognize all the things that have occurred? It reminds me of the Malcolm X quote, right? Stabbing the back, pull it out of six inches and call it progress, right? And have not worked to heal it, the wound. You haven't worked to heal the wound, but you're calling it progress because you took the knife out of my back. And so I think about that from this context and I think I know it's a challenging thing to wrestle with when you're saying, hey, I'm an investor. That's not my job, right? My job is to allocate and stewarded capital, whether for myself or for client institutions that have you. But the reality of it is is that in the long term, and Michelle was talking, the conversation was talking about corporations profiting off of racism. Well, you can't profit off it forever, right? And that's sort of, again, it's unsustainable at the end of the day. And so even again, just thinking about your own self-interest with those of your clients or whomever you're working for, making that connection is essential, right? And so I think about it from that context and also think about it from the perspective of, again, we were talking about where power is held in this entire dialogue. I think about it from the fact that if we were to look at, say, the venture capital industry, and I think venture capital is a great thing. I think venture capital industry has perverted itself. That said, we're looking at a $100 billion industry in the US alone. There's indication that about 75% of venture-back businesses don't even return capital back to their investors, right? We also know the makeup demographically of venture-backed companies, for the most part, are about 80% white men. Now, this is not a critique of white males, but at no point has anyone said we should stop investing in white men, right? That's never been said. And so on the other side of it, we think of, wow, it's too tricky investing in a black community in Boston or a black community in New Orleans or East Bay. It's really challenging. We can't think about it that way. There's so much risk at stake, right? And so I think about what is the risk that when you don't do it, what's an action occurs? So there's a lot of risk embedded into that. And so I think about it from that perspective as well, that we, even in terms of narrative, in terms of how we think about risk, you look at the VC numbers, you might say, maybe I shouldn't invest in white men, maybe I should give black women a chance. But that's not actually happening. If you look at the data, that's actually what you would do because black women are actually outperforming, among the highest performing entrepreneurs. And yet we don't see the capital going to black women, right? And so really rethinking that whole perspective of what is risk, who deserves capital. The other thing that I would think about as well is, you know, investors, and I brought up the example of opportunity zones, there's other types of power that can be leveraged, right? Because the reality of it is that if you're sitting on capital, there's opportunities for you to engage in policy conversations and political conversations that you're likely not doing right now, right? And so when I think about the folks in our network at Common Future and many folks outside that are at this conference right now, they really, I think, embody the type of things that we want to see in a deracialized economy. You think about like the Eugema Project in Boston, right? That's doing really remarkable work to center communities to ensure that one, that if you invest $10, you have as much power as a person investing $100,000. Remarkable. Why haven't we thought about that before? It's probably because we thought of capital as this key driver of power, right? But Eugema Project has been working very authentically and deliberately over several years building the kind of relationships to ensure that communities are actually centered and actually have control of their economy. And you can invest in that type of opportunity. You can do that today, all of us can do that today, right? It's something that exists already. You know, think about some of the work that's happened at Seed Commons, which is a national cooperative or cooperative of financial institutions that are really concerned about and advancing worker ownership in this country. And work cooperatively, so they have shared infrastructure, right? In which they can support each other and assume that someone in New York can't make a decision about something happening in Clarksdale, Mississippi. And so let's actually build the infrastructure and work in folks in Clarksdale or Cincinnati or have you in which they are empowered and have the power to actually make the decisions for what's best for them. And so those are kind of the examples. Which is why Common Future focuses so much on local and local decision-making, right? Local decision-making and also, I mean, local and community, right? Yeah, right. And ensuring that we're talking about really getting into and centering folks who are most directly impacted by decisions that have historically happened. So one of the things I hear you all saying then, if you imagined a grid of like 100 blocks, 98 of those blocks might actually be straight-up capital. One of those blocks might be kind of political rules, rule-making. Another one of those blocks might be philanthropy, actual charity. And one of the opportunities we have is to think about those two blocks, especially like the political power block as a lever for those other 98. And so how do we do that? Because political capital, literally, the amount of money spent is never gonna be as much as private capital, but political capital, how do you think about political capital making the rest of capital move in this direction? So, all right. So we're about eight minutes out from the end of our session. We're gonna do a kind of lightning round here. I want each of you to give us either, because this is a pragmatic crowd, right? Either one solution, one very concrete solution for getting farther down this path, or if you had some advice for the crowd, you could do that too. And I think, Rashad, I'm gonna start with you. Last words on solutions or advice? Yeah, so I'm gonna do a mix of both. And then quickly, the thing that I think is really important, the kind of loving advice for the room is that the world is changing, right? That things are changing and decisions that might seem expedient and right today will be wrong, you know, five, 10, 15 years from now. And if you just wanna look at this in the economic terms, I run a campaign, I run an organization that runs corporate accountability campaigns. And I am regularly in the room at the end of campaigns with leaders of corporations that were surprised about how the ground shifted underneath them and how society changed so quickly and how decisions that may have seemed expedient. I also wanna make a real plug for the work that we're doing at Color of Change and just invite you all in. For the last several years, we've been building very powerful work around dealing with consolidated power, around monopolies, around the issues that we have in this country, around the lack of antitrust. The framing that we're doing is not about some good old days when we had, you know, fair rules, because the fact of the matter is we've always had monopolies. Sometimes they have been all male monopolies, sometimes they've been all white monopolies, oftentimes they have been both. And the fact of the matter is, because we've always had those things, we actually have to build power to change that because that will unlock capital in a new way, unlock opportunities in a new way when a few people don't get to control everything and that our politics are not set up in ways. And so that is a project of both holding and dealing with the institutions that have been able to build this power, but also creating a new set of standards and narrative rules in our society, around our politics, about what we will accept from politicians and what is possible from politicians and political leaders in terms of the economic rules of the road. And we only have to recognize that right now Mark Zuckerberg is, you know, testifying in front of the banking committee in Congress right now. And he, and we have spent the last several years pushing him- In front of Maxine Waters, I think. In front of Maxine Waters and the chairwoman of that committee. And, you know, and when he sort of opened it up, he couldn't even quite answer the question about how they are monitoring political ads, how they are determining accuracy in political ads. So if anything animates the conversation we've had today about power and power being the ability to change the rules, it's that you have the largest communications platform that the world has ever seen. 2.3 billion users, more followers than Christianity. So we just can't back out of it, right? It's impact on our economy and our democracy and our media information is clear. We just can't back out of it. The fact of the matter is, and that the CEO who has over 60% of control of the company, of the largest communications platform the world has ever seen, which played a deep role in our last election, goes before Congress and can't quite explain how they are dealing with political ads. Says everything about how we can't just have business as usual in terms of how we are investing and how we are moving capital. We also have to invest in the type of advocacy and political power building and people mobilization that will change the rules and force those in power to not only be nervous about disappointing us, but recognize they have to do something different or they'll be out of the game. Rodney and then Alicia, I'm gonna let you close it out. Yeah, how do I follow this guy? Thanks, Alicia. So one of the things I think about, and I say this all the time, I appreciate the framing of solutions, but I think part of it is that we have to understand that it's so much deeper than a single act or model or set of solutions. It's so much more than that, right? But we're talking about actionable things right now. So I'll pause on that. I was told to ask you about something actionable. So when I look around the room, it seems like it's a very friendly crowd in terms of like a particular segment I would say of the impact and investing universe. So I'm gonna note that because one of the things that I think that all of us can do within this sort of particular segment is consistently raise up the things that we see as positive examples of what we want to see in the world. I think that like these two are really great at being able to communicate and be able to get the stories out in a wonderful way. And I think that for those of us in this room who are in that particular, that aren't exactly bought into doing well by doing good but recognize the importance of leveraging capital, we have an obligation to actually continuously elevate and uplift those stories and narratives so that people can actually see with their eyes what it looks like for success, what it looks like to unravel this racialized economy that we have because the thing that I hear constantly is what are the things that you're talking about? Give me examples, give me models. And I know that they're in this room. So I think we can collectively do a much better job of that. And so that's one thing I would point out. The other thing I would point out just really quickly is that there's an existing infrastructure, community development financial institutions that many folks I recognize that impact investors are not even aware of that require, that are positioned specifically to actually work on these questions, right? And there's a lot of advancing into that. I know the next dialogue with Anthony Buglevine, Ellis Carr and a few others are going to actually get into that conversation. But I think really recognizing what already exists and what are the boundaries that can be pushed even with those infrastructure, what that existing infrastructure is, that's something that actionable that we can be doing. Particularly for the folks in this room who I know, I'm seeing a lot of my colleagues who are really sort of, I think are the boundary pushers. So one, continuously elevate what is possible and what we see on a day-to-day basis. And then two, continuously push the existing infrastructure that we have access to, to actually enable a direction in which we can kind of unpack that racialized economy. Thank you, Alicia. Final word. I think that one thing that we can do right now is for every dollar that you are investing in impact that is changing how people live every single day, you should also invest a dollar into an organization that is working to change the rules. That is something that you can do right now. You can match your investments. Match your investments when you are empowering people to start and own their own businesses. Every dollar you invest in that, you should invest in their ability to make the rules and to transform how the rules are made. Every dollar that you invest in somebody being able to profit from their own crafts, right? You should invest a dollar in making sure that those varied communities are the ones who are determining what their economies look like. It's a very simple equation. You've got to do both and. I could not ask for anything better to end, and I just want to thank, I said it was a superstar panel, I delivered what I promised. Thank you so much.