 Thank you, everybody, for attending. My name is Alex Necklitz, and I'm really excited today to have my esteemed group of panelists joining to really come and talk about what has been happening with both the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice movement and how we can respond, not only with our time and our effort and our interests, but also across our investment and granting portfolios. You know, we're going to go into what that exactly has meant and what it means, but I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce our panelists here briefly, and then they'll go on and describe themselves a little bit further. We have Ana Maria Argelagos, the president of Hispanics and Philanthropy, Sophia Krieger Nelson, a member of the Marin Community Foundation, and Emily Daniels, a strategic advisor to Brown Advisory. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Well, so, just to give some context and some framing, as was included in the description for this panel, one of the things that has really stuck out to me is Impact Assert Management recently posted an article and they said, you know, all of these things that are happening, what does it mean? And the quote that stood out to me was, racial justice, environmental justice, and climate justice are not three things but one. A sustainable future is as much about equality as it is about climate. Now, it's interesting, oftentimes we talk about ESG and impact investing, there'll be more of a focus on one of those different issue areas or the other, but right now I think what we really have seen is a confluence where the COVID crisis has really exacerbated a lot of the inequities that have also been brought to light by the racial justice movement. Some of the statistics really include that up to 90% of minority-owned businesses have been left behind from the paycheck protection program. Disproportionately, black and Latinx business owners and individuals have been impacted not only by the health effects of COVID-19, but the economic effects as well. Now, in terms of how we respond to something like that, it can almost seem daunting. You almost feel it's overwhelming and it might seem like it's too much. If you would do me a favor as you introduce yourself briefly, maybe just give a brief introduction and then if we could start out and each say over the last six months, what has that meant to you as clients or individuals or organizations have come to you? What has that looked like? Maybe, Sophia, can we start with you? Yeah, absolutely. So good morning, everybody. Good afternoon to those of you on the East Coast. My name is Sophia Krigan-Alson. I'm director of philanthropic planning at Marin Community Foundation. Just by way of super quick intro, MCF, we're the eighth largest community foundation in the country. We steward roughly $2.5 billion in philanthropic assets and we work with individuals and families across the Bay Area for who philanthropy is a really big part of life. So in terms of how we work, and then I'll get to your question, Alex, is that we operate strictly in a context of donated assets. So everything we do is philanthropy. Traditionally, we've been doing mainly grants, but a year and a half ago, we started an impact investing program in partnership with impact assets, I should say, which has been a wonderful partner. And the way we approach it is that we see impact investing very much as an extension of philanthropy and just another tool through which our donors can direct their assets to good causes. So what matters to us is really what our donors can do with the money and how they can quickly put it to work in the community and have maximum impact with their philanthropy. So it doesn't matter to us if it's a grants, if it's like some sort of like hybrid innovative models or if it's impact investing. In terms of what we've seen these last six months, yeah, well, the good news is that our donors are giving at really unprecedented levels. Like I think there's been a real desire to meet the moment and they've been laser focused these last six months on like wanting to direct support to where the greatest need is. In terms of metrics, year on year, March, August, to 2019, 2020, we've seen an increase of probably 50% of grants going out the door. So that's wonderful. But in tandem with that, we've also actually seen a shift or progression in the conversation where at first, back in March where borders were closing and like everything was closing down and there was like that initial panic, the heart and mind of our donors were very much on the immediate relief. Like how could we help with food, rental assistance, masks, protective equipment? And then slowly over the summer, we saw the conversation change and the main focus now is really on two challenges. To build on what you said before, Alex, it's been very clear that the double whammy of pandemic and racial unrest after the merger of George Floyd showed that just how disproportionately affected communities of color are and it really made the chasms and the fissures within our social and political contexts glaringly apparent. And with that, our donors have really had the desire to address the root causes and the systemic issues to this inequity. And in parallel, we've also seen a real concern that is that COVID is threatening the sustainability and the health of the nonprofit sector itself. It's viability. And our donors wanna respond to this challenge by giving to the organizations that do the work that they're really passionate about and the issues that most concern them at greater levels and we advise them to do that, to step up and support the nonprofit organizations and the sector, regardless of issue area, whether it be education, arts, youth development, climate change, health. So we're definitely seeing the conversation sort of crystallize around those two different issues. Great, thank you, Sophia. Absolutely. Emily, from a strategic advisor in wealth management and asset management side of things. First of all, again, we'd love if you could introduce yourself but can you explain what that has kind of looked like for you and your clients? Absolutely. So again, Emily Daniels and I'm a strategic advisor with Brown Advisory. We are an investment management firm started in Baltimore a little over 20 years ago, came out of Alex Brown, the investment bank. We have about $86 billion of assets under management split between our institutional side of the house which actually runs investment strategies, mutual funds, private equity funds, separately managed accounts and the private client endowments and foundation side of the house which is your traditional family and organizational portfolio management function. What we've been seeing over the past six months I'll say is threefold. From the business itself, we have really accelerated our efforts in diverse hiring for the firm at all levels. It's something that we've been talking about already before this year, but we have really put in a lot more pushes a lot more very technical activities to increase our diverse hiring at the top of ours all the way through summer interns. As those of you on the call in financial services know that's a tough thing to do in our industry but we are really dedicated to doing that. On the institutional side of the house we have had many sustainable investing strategies on our platform for many years and I'll say that we have been talking more about expanding that offering due to increased demand both from individual investors and institutional investors and thinking about more thematic ways of doing that beyond the basic ESG version of sustainable investing and starting to target actual impact areas for some of those investments. I as a strategic advisor sit on the private client and that went in foundation side and my role in talking to clients is that traditional wealth management function wealth planning function. So I'm not the investment manager I'm really the person who's helping them put some context around their financial lives. So we do all sorts of financial planning up through the both sophisticated philanthropic and wealth transfer planning and business exit planning for clients. And so typically in the past it has been my job to help clients think about what their goals are what their family legacy looks like but I'll say that in the past over the past 20 years most of those conversations especially around philanthropy were really about tax saving strategies. Our clients were not coming looking to me to help them think about what actual impact they wanted to make. They were looking to me to help them figure out how to save on income taxes and to stay taxable. Over the past six months I will say that we've not necessarily had clients doing more philanthropic structure set up. So I've not seen clients putting more into their foundations or more into their donor advice funds. I've been seeing them push more dollars back out the other side which is kind of what the field was saying. We're seeing more dollars actually go out into organizations that will use those for change. And we're also for the first time in my role again as a tax technician having clients come to me and say, you know, I've just never really thought about how to decide where to give the money. That wasn't part of the conversation at the front. And so that is forcing me and my colleagues to build more relationships with the Cephas and the Annamarie's in the world because our clients are asking us where should these dollars go? I need to know what organizations to look at. I need to think about what impact forgiving means and we're still building our skill set on that in-house. And then one final thing is that we do have an endowment in foundations practice but that is managing money for endowments and foundations. And I'll say that those organizations are starting to think even more about mission-related investing. You know, not a new thing at all. I just think that this year has created a bit more urgency for those clients and aligning their endowment portfolios or saving portfolios with their mission. Great, thank you very much. And Annamarie, to that point of as the money is going out, if you wouldn't mind, of course, describing you and your organization, but then also what has that meant in terms of the inbound? When people are coming to you, are they looking for an answer? Are they looking to, you know, how does that process work? Thank you, Alex. It's really great to be here and to be with Sophia and with Emily. It's just a great platform. HIP is very different in that we're a philanthropic supporting organization and we're also a public grant-making charity. We've been around for 38 years. I've been the president and CEO for two and a half of those years. And so you can see that we've been shift-changing, excuse me, throughout our time. So our work as a philanthropic supporting organization, we're connecting, we're convening, we're informing, educating, advocating and really through the first half of our existence, we were doing that for a range of foundations, whether they be community foundations or family foundations, private foundations. We also now have been working more and more with organizations like Emily's, where we're working with donors, high-net-worth individuals and others that want to really understand how, what is their role and how can they work with the Latino community, which is growing as you all probably already know. We are almost 20% of the population now and I think by 2050, we will be 30% of the population. So it's an important, in a very young population. So it's important to work with the community. Our work as a public grant-making charity looks more like an intermediary. As such, we're sourcing, also advising, aggregating and leveraging dollars, excuse me, part of our work is about getting more and better resources on the ground. And as the only Latino intermediary that's working across the hemisphere, because we work in the US, in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Central, South America, we can do that in ways that we address problems in a holistic way, because problems really like health, for example, don't end concretely at the border. They do cross borders. Our work as Democrat, our North Star is democratizing philanthropy and we've touched on that. It's the notion that regular people, folks like us, are also philanthropists, even if you're not writing the $10 million checks, if you're writing the $10 check, if you're doing it through a crowdfunding platform or other different pathways that we're helping to create, that also counts. And so how do we make sure that that's easy and accessible to folks and that they're able to grow as their finances grow? With regards to COVID, Alex, we've put out between April and the end of October, it'll be $10 million in COVID relief, and that's double what we usually do in a year. So yes, I've seen an incredible amount of generosity, both from individuals and also from foundations and corporations, three million of the dollars that we are putting out is from Google. And that's specifically for the Power Up Fund to help small businesses, entrepreneurs survive this horrible pandemic. Already, we've seen that one third of our Latino businesses have already closed and we're trying to figure out how we can help them, those that are still surviving, survive through what's going on. We want to do this because we remember the 2008 recession. We know that when the country started stabilizing in 2010, it took our communities, people of color, an extra two years and those are two years lost. And so for people to be able to be givers and philanthropists in their own way, we, they also have to have some kind of built up wealth and through the Power Up Fund, it's one of the tools that we have, it's a return seeking, as an impact investing fund, it's a return seeking, excuse me, fund. And we feel that that's one tool. I think the takeaway I wanted to take from this conversation is that a COVID, the pandemic, the economic situation that we're in, the unrest, it requires us to double down on creativity and nimbleness and not doing the same thing. At hip, we're doing that. If you would have told me a year and a half ago when I first started that I'd be investing in businesses, I'd be like, what? No, we're about, it's about charity, it's about, we invest in nonprofits in essential frontline organizations. So we're investing in businesses and we're doing not a silver bullet of just grants, but really looking at your whole portfolio of tools. And that includes grants and it includes investments. And that's the way I think we can get out of this. Hopefully sooner rather than later. Absolutely, thank you for that. And to your point, Anna Marie, one of the things that we have really seen is what does it look like to do things creatively? Just at impact assets, just as a brief introduction for us, we're a donor advice on the focuses on not only helping people grant their money out, but invest it for positive impact. So in the first half of the year, we gave out 3.5 times the number of grants that we typically give. Our clients though have also said, what does it look like to not only grant for causes, but how do we invest into these things? So $160 million have been deployed to frontline healthcare needs, 25 million to high impact social enterprises that might have been in danger of closing if they ain't get support, and another 29 million to underserved businesses and individuals. So these are clients saying, I wanna use philanthropic dollars to invest in these types of organizations to make sure that they succeed. And that brings me to the next point is that if somebody does want to come and get involved, we want to really talk about what it would look like across asset classes. And this is where I'm not only gonna look to our panel, but to our attendees as well. So I already see that Rick was asking about community development financial institutions. I'm gonna go over with the panelists some different ways that we have seen individuals and organizations deploy capital to these causes. But by all means, please add in in the chat, different groups or funds, we are learning here just as much as we are sharing. So that would be fantastic. So Rick's point, Calvert Impact Capital is an organization that has been around for many years, but has really right now taken the cause of how do we support these communities and been the infrastructure, if you will, of supporting the different funds that are happening. So they've done a fantastic job of working with different communities to say, how do we invest in our community going forward? Another group is called CNOTE, VAMOS Ventures. There are multiple different community development financial institutions or feeding organizations like Calvert Impact Capital that are doing a great job. But outside of that, panelists, would you, if you wouldn't mind sharing either what your organization itself is doing or other organizations that you have come across that have been really strong models. You know, I think the CDFIs are fantastic in the Latino community. We have an umbrella organization that's called NALCAB, National Association of Latino Community Asset Builders. And it's an umbrella of the CDFIs at HIP. We're partnering with a lot of them, are working in Texas with the Lyft Fund, for example, in a place like Puerto Rico. We don't have CDFIs. So we work with the CDCs and with the community banks. And a lot of them are hoping to be CDFIs, inclusive action in Los Angeles. We're working with them. But I think that that's an important place to start. But I think, as I said before, don't just put all of your eggs in the one basket as much of a fan as I am a CDFIs. I used to work at HUD, right? So there are partners. You remember that CDFIs are also financial institutions. And so they are restricted in their flexibility and they have criteria to meet. So I would do an assortment of working with CDCs, CDFIs. We also work with accelerators, incubators, other types of organizations that can also take risks. Because what's happening in the current economy is there's not a lot of risk-taking. So there's a lot of organizations and Bridgespan did this report with Echoing Green of foundations and donors are being very generous, but they're investing in those that have attributable track record that we can see. And what happens? People of color are left behind and are not the ones. And this is not just my anecdotal observation. This is tracked and there's evidence but are not getting the dollars. And so we need to take some kind of risk in terms of our philanthropic investments because we don't do that with the philanthropic investments. The government definitely isn't gonna do it. At Brown, I mentioned our socially responsible mutual funds. Those are really public companies. So that's not really what we're talking about here. On the private company side last year, so this is pre COVID, pre craziness of 2020, we set up two opportunity zone funds in partnership with a local social entrepreneurship firm. We had one in Baltimore and one in Austin, Texas and both of those projects were focused around real estate redevelopment in underserved communities. So that's one thing that we were doing. And then we also have internally an embedded venture capital firm slash network that itself is not generally just looking for socially responsible investing, impact investing, but they do have a subset of their network that does look to invest very specifically in socially innovative companies. And so they do several things within that network. It is sourcing companies that are doing social good. It is funding companies regardless of what they do, but that are led by underrepresented minorities in the business community. It is encouraging all the businesses that they invest in to think about diversity within their workforce. So they're doing that work on every level of working with these companies that we engage with. And I'll say that that piece is also happening within the mutual funds in terms of not just looking at the top of the house, but also pushing out into those organizations and figuring out what we can be doing to encourage them to be better citizens. All right. So I, you know, I'd like to add that and MCF we sort of start with the issue and we let sort of a donor come to us and tell us what they're interested in. And then we help them, you know, have that impact and that can be through, you know, grants and it can be through investments and it can be through other, you know, innovative models. So on the CDF five, for instance, yes, we have had a number of clients that wanted to help small businesses and especially the ones that did not qualify for the PVP and the ones that were left behind. So we've had some clients address it through grants. You know, I've seen some significant grants go through to opportunity fund. Another one that's come up a lot is the, let me see, L-I-F-F, what does it stand for again? It's low income finance fund, I believe, also have committed like $5 billion in the next few years to helping communities of color. But we've also seen, you know, more like you're talking about the importance of doing things more in a more risky way. We've also actually seen clients that wanted to make sure that VC, wanted to make sure that like women entrepreneurs like in the VC space of color got, you know, the funding that they typically don't get. So we've actually seen a fair amount of pretty good size custom deals go through in a first fund. So no tracker at whatsoever call how women lead fund one. The interesting thing about this is it's a VC fund that is investing in women of color, but it's actually also run by women of color. And we definitely have a lot of donor interest in C-Note that Alex mentioned as well. And, you know, they have, you know, that their wisdom fund focuses on small business owners, but like women of color in particular. So yeah, so we're open to sort of, you know, facilitating money going to the populations that our clients want to help in a variety of ways. And it can be many different issues. So I saw that in the chat that Katarina Schwab from NPX Advisors is on the call. And I was just going to say that we actually have some clients that have supported some of the work they do, which is, you know, a very interesting model that blends investments with grants as well. And like a very interesting place-based approach. We have some clients that are big supporters of their work. And it's really, it's work that addresses, I think the viability of the nonprofit sector. You know, it's like how can a nonprofit actually raise assets in the long, in the short to, in the medium to long-term. And then I'd say that we sometimes also, you know, addressing root causes can also be looking at maybe voter registration, a voter engagement. And we've seen a lot of interest from our donors to that. And it can be, you know, through regular grants or it can be in a much more risk-taking way. And on the more risky side of things, we have a client that made like the largest custom deal to date, you know, in partnership with Impact Assets to a company, it's an LLC that is sort of an online gamified platform that really tries to get younger people to register and engage in the political discourse. So I think we've seen, you know, everything from classic grants to, you know, the private direct investments in companies, operating companies. That's fantastic. And, you know, in hearing you talk about that, about how there's so much more that needs to be dealt with, there's a, well, I was gonna say it's a quote, but it was actually a tweet. So I don't think that's the, but Melissa Bradley from 1863 Ventures posted something the other day that really stuck out to me. To my friends investing in black business, remember COVID exacerbated our challenges, not cause them. If and when the pandemic goes away, racism will still exist. Use not just your money, but your voice and clout to remove the structural barriers to our success. Annemarie, if you wouldn't mind sharing, when you think about those structural barriers, what type of capital and in what ways Hispanics and philanthropy advocating, removing those structural barriers through investing? Or do you think it's not just investing? Well, like what is, how is the power-up fund approaching this? Thank you. And I see that Jill Johnson also sent a question. Which is related to this. We know that over the past 10 years, Latino businesses were growing 34%. And that's as compared to 1% for the white counterparts. And so they were doing this, even though there was huge disinvestment despite the challenge they were growing. And what we were trying to do before the pandemic was figure out how to close that gap, given that, again, foundations are only investing 1%. Government is not investing. I mean, with the PPP dollars, I think only 9% of Latino businesses were able to access that. And then we saw the same disinvestment in venture capital. And I think the number is 2% back in 2016 that black and brown entrepreneurs combined were able to access those dollars. So what we were trying to do is close that gap. And that includes a broad, it includes like, for example, getting fund managers that are people of color, they're not enough fund managers. It includes demystifying that investing in our communities is risky. It's not, the numbers show that it's not. But there's this mentality that it is. And so the power-up fund was meant to start closing those gaps in terms of where do people get their money to get started? And before COVID, it was gonna be all return-seeking, $16 million fund, which impact assets is holding, and $1 for every Latino, Latina that's living on the mainland of the US. Because of COVID, we restructured what the power-up fund is looking like. As I mentioned, now $10 million, the first 10 million is for cash assistance in cities across the country. Trying to, since PPP was not there for them, offering that cash assistance and technical assistance too, because not just throwing dollars at the situation, we need technical assistance. So we have organizations like the Lift Fund, like Eureka, like Alapada, that are providing wraparound technical assistance to our entrepreneurs to make sure that they get through this. Those that did receive the PPP loans right now were very invested in making sure that those loans get forgiven, because that's not a done deal either. But the next 50 million that we're launching now is for the return-seeking impact investing, because we have to remember that there are also some entrepreneurs that are starting their businesses now. They're seeing a gap in the, so not all of them are failing. There are some that we're able to support now and that they have a good, if supported they have a reason to, they have new audiences and new clients. So what I would say is that we need to do both the investments and the grants. It takes both. Great, no, I appreciate that. And Emily, when you deal with this and you're looking at dealing with both, maybe one of the things if you wouldn't mind we could talk about is, we don't wanna use the term pushback because maybe we should, but we'll talk about that. But what would you say have been maybe, are there any challenges that you've come across? Either explaining this to the clients or looking at what is available out there? Have you come to anything that's made this either difficult or you'd like to see improve over time? Yeah, I think in the early days of the concept of impact investing, we would get a lot of pushback from portfolio managers because their job is to drive returns. And so it is convincing portfolio managers that clients would indeed be interested in investing in something that does not necessarily have a market rate of return. That's the first hurdle. I think the second hurdle is, not something unique to Brown and something I think we've gotten past at this point and it's something that you see in any for-profit business. It's a question of whether or not having conversations like this is even part of our business model. Why are we having conversations about social impact? We are here to help our clients save for retirement and things like that. And so thinking about how these issues should be incorporated into the company's DNA into how we do things, I think is an important cultural shift that all firms are gonna have to think through, for-profit firms are gonna have to think through in order to move forward on this. I think our clients don't give us a whole lot of pushback. Our clients are waiting for us to raise this issue with them. I just think that often wealth managers just don't know how to start that conversation just because we're not trained in that. We are trained in economics. We are trained in tax. We are trained in financial modeling, but this is softer. And sometimes we don't think it's in our wheelhouse to have those conversations with clients. Oh, sorry, Annamarie. Well, you were talking about pushback. Pushback is very gentile and gracious and from my perspective, I very seldom see a, no, that doesn't make sense. I often say, that's a good point later, later, later. So it's always later, but we don't have any more later is to pull out of our pockets. I think that the urgency of the moment requires now. Well, in that sense, Sophia, one of the things that I think you really work with clients on is maybe they don't know what to do. So when somebody comes to you to that point, what does that conversation look like? Or where are they expressed? Where have they said maybe this is challenging? So, yes, so that is very much our model. Clients that come to NTF come to us because they want that engagement and they want philanthropic advice. So, I mean, it starts from the very beginning, they'll have a dedicated philanthropic advisor. And I should say right away that that's not me. So I'm speaking at a very high level about like what this work looks like, but a client will come with us and we'll start with an onboarding and a very, very deep discovery conversation to understand what the client is looking to achieve. So we're very donor driven in the sense that we don't have issue areas or things that we push in terms of what we think they should be interested in. We hear what they wanna do and then we help them achieve it by curating opportunities and educating and showing them, doing due diligence on the types of organizations that we think they might wanna give or invest in. So I'd say it's very much, it starts with what a client wants to achieve and then we take it from sort of, all the way from the mission statement to a giving plan to the tactical implementation. I would say that there's always, the challenges slash opportunities because they're both in moments like this is that this is a moment for philanthropy to step up. And I think for the most part that this is definitely what our clients want from us. They are engaged, they want our help. There's obviously, the greatest challenge I think of backdrop is that this is a moment of reckoning as well. 2020 has prompted a lot of soul searching and the philanthropic sector I think as a whole and individual funders like MCF, we've been forced to maybe re-examine in a way we never quite did before the role we wanna play in addressing root causes of inequity and how we may actually be able to do things differently and better. And I think part of that is recognizing some tensions that exist. I mean, I can just say like Marin County is unfortunately, a very segregated community. I mean, how can we with authenticity actually lead change and in the same way, respect that it has to be our donors that want to do this work. A lot of us on the team, we probably have a more diverse team than our client base. We have clients that have led long life of privilege and they are high net worth. So we're trying to find ways to meet the moment, to turn towards action and towards choices that reflect that we think that we wanna do. And in the same time, like make maybe MCF as comfortable as possible to clients of color. So I think a lot of that work is not something you do very quickly. And at MCF we're really looking inwards to our own values and we've engaged on very, very deep DEI work. So we already had a DEI committee before COVID hit but I think that there's a sense of urgency from everybody that works at MCF to actually really take this to new levels. And we're starting with ourselves and I'm thinking like this is challenging, it's difficult but it's also an opportunity to really reinvent ourselves as funders and be more relevant and more impactful than ever before as we go forward. Thank you for that, Sophi. I really appreciate you sharing about that because that really, it can be one of the things that when somebody comes to you and they say how can I make a change? How can I have impact? You also have to evaluate yourselves and how you're doing business. I know it impact assets. When our clients come to us, we have over 1200 clients and with that that means we have 1200 sometimes views of how they would like to see change happen. Some view it as I wanna use my philanthropic dollars and just make for granting. Others might say I wanna get deeply involved in direct investments into early stage companies. And so being able to not just have a single prescriptive way of saying if you wanna deal with the COVID response or racial justice here's how it's done, full stop. I think it's something that isn't going to really be feasible. And so in that sense, and again, I brought this up earlier figuring out what people can do. In the case of just talking about private equity, Illumin Capital recently closed their round. And they're a private equity firm that is focused on not only investing into organizations but educating them on what it looks like to be more mindful about racial inclusiveness and diversity. And so they've done an amazing job. And so several of our clients have said they wanna get involved. We have other clients though that investing in a private equity fund is not necessarily something that they either have the assets to dedicate to or have the experience of doing that. So yeah, I definitely know what you mean when we talk about the difficulty and the tensions of trying to respond to all of those. We're gonna be getting to questions actually in two minutes now. So as I said previously, please by all means share. But before we got going, one of the things that I was curious to hear about is when clients do get engaged, what does it look like to take them to the next level? Or what is something, so Anna Marie, if somebody came to you and they said, we want to get started, how do you kind of walk them through that process? Is it more so, well, listen, here's how we do things or what does it look like at Hispanics and philanthropy? There's a lot of engagement and education because they often just say, we don't wanna sit up the sidelines during this urgent moment, we wanna do something. And so we try and look at imbalance between the immediate needs. For example, in April, we were putting out funds to address farm workers, right? The health and safety of farm workers who are picking our food and who's paying attention to them, essential workers. So the immediate relief after Hurricane Maria right now, with the fires right now, you need to balance that. But you also have to talk to funders about the longer-term systems change. And Safiya talked a little bit about this. If we're putting all of our dollars into just right now and we're not looking into solving for, how do we get in this place? As Melissa Bradley's quote says, this is just all exacerbating what was already there but we weren't seeing. So we work with donors so that they can understand that they need to put dollars into both of them. And we've been by far very successful. Although there are still a lot of donors that say, just put all of the money into the immediate relief and later on everything will get sorted. But we work really hard to do the donor education upfront and it's something that is all year round. It's not just one time of a year. I don't think it can be a one-off because I don't think that that works with donors. But in the end, you have to reach both the heart and the mind when a loan I don't think is successful. And you have to have good partners like you guys at Impact Assets, Alex. Well, thank you for that, I appreciate it. I got a little red, but thank you. That's great. We have about 15 minutes left and I wanted to open up to some questions. And as they come in, maybe I'll wait a couple of a minute or two but then trust me, on our pre-call we had to cut ourselves short. We had a lot to cover but it would be great to hear if anybody has anything specific that they would like to cover. Just looking at the chat log here. There's lots of great resources on the chat log. There's some fantastic resources here. And as we're waiting for those to come in, I think we've covered most of the things but please let me know if there's something that I missed. I'm trying to do double duty here a little bit. One thing that I have somewhat seen and we may have touched on it already, but when a client, one thing that we have seen is that in certain instances we have seen firms say something along the lines of and I won't name them, but they said, oh yeah, COVID, we dealt with that. We raised some money. We had a fund, it's over. Maybe if you wouldn't mind panelist sharing what we're thinking, what does A, how do you keep people engaged to know that this is an ongoing issue but B, what might the future look like in terms of the next steps of responding just so that people don't say, I made a grant to the emergency fund? Oops, I'm off mute, so I'll talk. You need to think about both the relief and the recovery. Someone that's done a lot of the disaster response and manmade disasters like the economy and social unrest are also disasters as well, but think about that the recovery is a lot longer and more complicated and needs a lot of people at the table and so what are the partners that you're gonna bring in to help fill in the gaps because I don't know any organization that can do it all. As great as we all are, we need to bring in others and so being knowledgeable about developing that landscape analysis and figuring out the recovery that to me that's important and needs to be taken into consideration. Yeah, and I would agree completely with that. I think that there's always gonna be a need for addressing something very urgent. Like we know the fires right now, there was a need for food and rental assistance, it's still there, but I think the important thing is to take that conversation and actually keep it current and I think that we have seen our clients have a willingness to think about, well, what does this well look like in the medium to long-term? We know this is not something, this is not a box that's just checked and I think that the one, like those of our clients that are really interested in doing, addressing the systemic issues of what this double pandemic of social unrest and COVID has shown is that there are some things that are like there are deep fissures that we need to address and some root causes and I think we all understand that that's gonna take quite a while. And then again, to come back to the other issue about like what does the nonprofit sector look like in general, like how can we make sure that those those organizations that do things around the arts or education are not defunded because everybody's money is going to the very immediate needs. So I think like it's having those conversations and then and really also I think forging the partnerships and thinking of new and innovative ways we can all work together. There's a lag, Safia, and you probably know this because budgets for nonprofits were determined usually last year by foundations that budgeted for them last year. And so many nonprofits are okay and or they might be limping along right now but the real moment of crisis is gonna be 2021 because budgets for 2021 are being done now and those are the ones that are being retrenched on or reallocated. I mean, I saw numbers, we have something called latinexfunders.org. I'll put it on the chat which has been tracking funding from 2013 to 2017. And I just talked to an LA Times reporter yesterday. She's like, how come funding has gone from arts and culture, which you mentioned from a 45 million in 2013 to only 13 million in 2017, right? And this retrenching and this reallocating and I'm scared about what that's gonna look like in next year. And so I think that our role as advising donors our word of what their money is even more important in this environment. And emphasize the fact that there is no such thing as bad philanthropy. Like everybody has need right now and go with where your passions are and just give more and maybe in a slightly more unrestricted way as well. That's really, I've never heard that. That's really good. I wanted to follow up on both of those points actually. Both how do you keep people engaged and how do you keep philanthropic dollars from being sucked away from other areas? For my clients, I approach this conversation the same way as I approach their personal planning conversation. What do you want that outcome of this deployment of dollars to be? And then we can back into what you need to do to get there. If really all you wanna do is make sure that people can pay rent for the next six months. Maybe that is just the one time thing and I've given to the fund and I'm done. If you want to revamp the healthcare system well, you need to know at the front end of us coming up with a plan that that's not gonna be a one and done type of thing. We're gonna be looking at a decade's worth of you funding it. So starting with the end in mind is how we approach those conversations. And on the other piece that we were just talking about in addition to my work at Brown Advisory I'm on the board for World Food Program USA and we work to support the United Nations World Food Program. And we were actually very happy to have done a good job at fundraising over the past six months because we did have a campaign that was centered around COVID. And I think for a lot of donors, the trick not I don't wanna say the trick the goal is to make sure that they understand how interrelated all of these things are to one another and that you can give to a variety of types of organizations and still help a particular cause. And I think we found that to be very helpful at World Food Program in encouraging donors to keep donating to us. Great, thank you. And Emily, as we were talking there was a question for you. Are you seeing top-down change helping wealth managers initiate the values and portfolio alignment conversations or is that something that you are bringing to this conversation yourself? Yeah, it's a little bit of both. I think a lot of those conversations are had because portfolio managers recognize that clients increasingly expect those conversations to happen and expect for us to be putting them in diverse is funds that have diverse managers and things like that. But I'll say that also Brown in particular is very much committed to increasing our own diversity because we feel that we really don't have the moral authority to encourage our clients to invest in ESG funds if we ourselves don't fit the criteria that we would need to include a company in one of our funds, right? So it is both a sense of what do we want our firm to look like from the top down and it is also a response to what we know clients today and in the future will ask us for. So it's a little bit of both. That's fantastic, thank you. I would say just real quick as well, I'm on the board of a group called Black Girl Ventures and one of the things that the founder, Shelley Bell, has said is that she doesn't have time for necessarily people to figure out the exact best way to have the conversation or we need to make sure that everything is completely filled, done properly. She's a big fan of people saying, let's get started. So she says, come join one of our pitch competitions where we support Black female ventures, join in, watch it next time, give a few dollars. It can be an education that happens but you have to affirmatively just jump in. And I think it can, in certain instances, seem daunting but I think it's important that we all do this work. And so in that instance, where you were saying, where does this conversation start? I just think an impact that's that's when our clients come to us, whatever their interests might be, we just ask them to get that process started, whether it's, there's a group called Impact Shares. They have an ETF where they actually worked with an NAACP to figure out what are the best public companies for that support the African-American community. They invest into those companies and then a certain percentage of the proceeds go to support the NAACP. These are funds on the public side where maybe it's not a direct investment into an early stage enterprise, which is amazingly important, but it's a starting place to say, I'm getting involved. As we're wrapping up, we have about three minutes. I'd love to just hear from each of the panelists, just as a final thought, what is something you would want people to take away from this conversation? Or what is something as they go and they talk to other people, maybe they need to keep in mind? I can start if that's okay. So I'll just say, actually, building on what you just said, Alex, I think we wanna be thoughtful, but we also wanna actually meet the moment. And I think let's not make the perfect be the enemy of the good. So I would sort of be, there's so much work that needs to be done. There is no such thing as bad philanthropy. All causes are kind of interconnected when you think about it. So I would say, let's not sit on the sidelines. I love where you took us, Alex, as well, and underscoring, Safia, which is just get started, be curious and open-minded and listen more than you talk. That's hard. We like to talk, and also just be willing to do both immediate, which is where your heart is and balance that with the longer-term recovery, which is what's gonna get us out of this, your mind and your head. And I'll say that I have watched over the past 20 years of doing this work as my clients have started to integrate doing good into every part of their lives, not just in terms of philanthropy. And so I think that going forward, we're going to see more and more opportunities for social impact in every type of financial situation that you can imagine. It's gonna be very mainstream. It's gonna be very transparent. It's gonna be very easy to engage with at every income level, at every wealth level. So I'm actually very optimistic going forward about our ability to fund whatever needs to be funded in ways that every type of giver and investor is comfortable with. Great. Thank you so much. As I realized, this is my, I did my Zoom fail. I saw two questions that came in from Jill Johnson that talked about giving the relationship between access to capital for businesses and wealth. Are any of you involved in efforts to address the void in friends and family dollars and angel capital for entrepreneurs of color? Briefly, I would say that absolutely this is an issue. Friends and family in and of itself is a privilege when you're talking about raising dollars. I know, and I'll just say this briefly, for Black girl ventures, what they say is that whenever they have a pitch competition, they based it off of the Harlem red parties where communities used to come together when they couldn't make rent. And so everybody that attends actually is asked to put in money no matter what the dollar amount is. And at the end of the pitch competition, they aggregate those dollars and it goes to the winner of the competition. Since that has started, they've gotten additional sponsors so that dollar amount has increased. But there absolutely is a place where friends and family is not saying that's available to all clients. And I know we're at time, but if you wouldn't mind briefly touching on what that might look like for the Latinx community. Absolutely, and that's exactly the void that the power-up fund was meant to create before COVID, we were trying to solve for this gap of dollars. And so right now you can invest in the power-up fund and we've had Tiburon tanks, which is our version of tract tanks and the entrepreneurs that have been on Tiburon tank are getting picked up like at tech stars and at LA latitude and others and they're getting visibility and they're getting other like $25,000 from HIP has leveraged $250,000 for these other companies. So it's just getting started and we're out there. There's lots of them. We just need help in getting them over that finish line. Great, well, listen, I wish we had more time and we could continue, but we are at time. I really want to thank all the panelists for doing this. It was an honor to get to hear from you and to hear about the amazing work that you are doing. If you do have any questions, please feel free to reach out to any of us. That information will be shared in the follow-up email and that's gonna be it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Thank you very much. This was great. Thank you. This was fun. That important.