 My name is Jacob Watson. I'm the senior director of experiential learning at Upstart, and I want to welcome you all on behalf of Upstart, the Jim Joseph Foundation, and the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund. Upstart accelerates growth for the Jewish community by connecting social entrepreneurs to expertise, community, and capital. And before we get started today and meet our wonderful speakers, we're going to begin with a little bit of a getting to know you activity at each of your tables. So I'm going to turn it over to Kendall to share that activity. Hi, everybody. So our opening exercise, it's pretty simple. I'm sure that some of you might have done it in various settings that you've been in, but we'll go ahead and jump right in. So what we're going to ask you to do is either tell the story of your name, so give a moment to think about that if you need to pull it up, or if you feel like the story of your name is not really something worth getting into with someone else. Maybe there is an object on your person that has a really interesting story, whether it's in a bag, whether it's a jewelry or whatever it might be. So, story of your name or an object on your person. And we'll take a couple minutes for that and then a little bit of brief reflection at the end. And we might ask for like two people to share, but you should definitely share with the people around you and we'll cue you when to do that. So go ahead. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Marlise. My name was chosen by my mother who was watching the summer Olympics and saw a competitor named Marlise. And she said that is the name of my daughter. So that's how I have that name. Thank you. Great, passing it back to Jacob. Thank you all so much. So as we get into our conversation today, I just encourage you to think about what you learned about the people at your table and how you might be understanding different aspects of what brings them to this space today and to their work. And that's what we're all going to talk about as well. So before we get started, I want to offer just a little bit of framing. Upstart is so glad to be at SoCAP today and to welcome a diversity of voices and perspectives. And we are here because we believe that social entrepreneurship is critical to creating a more just, vibrant and inclusive world. And especially in these challenging moments of conflict and strife in our global community, we believe that people sharing their identities and who they are and where they come from and why they do the work they do matters more than ever. So we are so excited to welcome this incredible set of speakers and we hope their stories and yours can be a source of light in a dark moment. So thank you all for joining us for this conversation today. I want to start with a little bit of an overview. One of my relevant identities is that I'm an educator, so I'm not going to begin a session without telling you what we hope you'll get out of it. So the purpose of our time together today is to explore and understand the role of identity in the work of social impact entrepreneurship and investing. And as a result of our time together, we hope that you'll come away with a few things. We hope you'll know and understand how identity can impact or inform your social impact as an entrepreneur, as an investor and across the life cycle of a venture. So from founding all the way through maturation and growth, we hope that you'll feel confident leveraging your own identities and your work, whether that's as an entrepreneur, funder, something else. And we hope to address some potential tensions that might arise when we think about identity-based entrepreneurship and the task of growth or scale, such as maintaining your values while fundraising and other sorts of tensions that may accompany that process. So here's our agenda. We've begun with some welcome and intros. We're going to talk a little bit about this term that we more or less made up for this panel, identity-based entrepreneurship and what it means to us. And then we'll talk about why and we'll introduce a three-part framework that we propose for how identity-based entrepreneurship can be an asset, both from the perspective of the entrepreneur and from the perspective of an investor. And at each step of that framework, you're gonna hear from one of the three panelists. So I'll introduce one of the components. You'll hear someone's story. I'll introduce the next one and so on. Once we're through the framework, we will invite you all to participate in a little bit of an activity that involves mapping some of your own identities and thinking about how this framework might show up in the work that you do. Then we'll have some reflection time, close, and there'll be some time for informal conversation and networking. Sound good? Awesome. All right. So I would like to begin by introducing our three incredible speakers in the order you will hear from them. So first off, we have Nicole Navarez. Nicole is a social entrepreneur, facilitator and coach, and the founding CEO of Ta-A-Mod, which is an organization that fosters safety, equity and accountability in the Jewish workplace. Kendall is a theater artist, producer and rabbi and the founding artistic director of The Workshop, which is an arts and culture fellowship for Jews of color. And Bobo Gupta is a first time woman of color president and CEO of Pacific Community Ventures, which is one of the first impact investing funds in the country to be committed to racial equity. We can give them a round of applause. All right, so we're going to begin with this question of what is identity-based entrepreneurship? So I have a short answer for you all just to save you some time. So it's any active entrepreneurship that is connected in some way to your lived experience or social identity. And that can mean a lot of things. So we have a very incomplete list on this slide of some of the aspects of identity that you might consider. We also say lived experience because it's not so simple as your characteristics. It also has to do with where you grew up, where you spent your time, the kinds of work you did, the training you received, the environments you were in. So it's any and all of that. And so as you're looking at this list, I'd invite you to think about, are there any of these types of identities that came up in your conversation more readily than others? Are there some that were absent or that you didn't even think about as you were beginning to talk to one another? And just recognizing that, that there are some identities that can feel really close to the surface and others that are perhaps less accessible to us or just sort of less present when we show up in certain kinds of spaces. So why identity-based entrepreneurship? So here again, we have a short but not lacking complexity answer for you. So identity-based entrepreneurship offers three things. One is the ability to identify and or meet a specific need. The second is a connection to the community that you serve. And the third is this idea of specificity as something that is going to sell your story. And again, we'll talk about all three of those and get into some of the nuances and hear some personal anecdotes and stories of how they show up for the three folks on stage here. So I wanna start with this first one, which is the ability to identify and or meet a need. So when we talk about this, we're really talking about how do you even know that there is a problem? How do you know that there is a need for entrepreneurship in the first place? Oftentimes it is because you yourself experienced that problem or you were around people who were experiencing that problem. And so this is where we really wanna think about how do you decide what to start a venture to solve? And how do you decide what that solution should look like? So another piece of this is the sensitivity to the needs of the community. If you are an identity-based entrepreneur, you may have an understanding of where past efforts have been attempted and where they've fallen short. You might understand some of the common pitfalls and challenges of working in a specific area or with a specific demographic. Another piece of this is an ability to hold your boundaries around values and scope of the work. As an identity-based entrepreneur, you have a sense of what matters and why and what is outside of that scope. It also can help you to understand who needs to be at the table for those conversations, especially in the beginning of a venture. And here I wanna bring in a quote from Priya Parker, who is a specialist in conflict resolution and community gathering, who uses this phrase exclude generously, by which she means there are some people that should not be in the room for certain kinds of experiences and conversations. That that is an act of generosity is knowing who needs to be invited and that the nature of the group, the groupiness of the group is made up both of who is in it and who is not in it. So excluding with generosity. So I wanna turn it over to Nicole to speak a little bit about her experience with Tahmood and tell us about how specifically this component of identifying and meeting and need is a part of her identity-based entrepreneurship. Thank you so much, Jacob. Thank you so much for asking me to be here today. So I often refer to myself as an accidental Jewish professional, which I think is something that a lot of my colleagues, can I look at all the head nods already happening in the room. I actually have a theater background, as it turns out, do all of us out here. Somebody's gonna do a research project one day of why so many Jewish professionals started in the theater world. But I have always been deeply rooted in gender equity work from the time I was very young. Going to an all girls high school, being raised by hippies who were super involved in lots of different social justice areas, often involving feminism and gender equality. And so that's always been sort of like a North Star of my understanding of myself, along with my own Jewish identity, which growing up was very much, I'm sort of like, for those of you who don't know, there's sort of like the typical story of like the Jewish kid who grows up in the Jewish world, which is like youth group stuff and synagogue stuff and camp, but never planned on a mission toward Jewish professional life. And I ended up there because of an opportunity that was very much about my deep identity as a feminist and as a woman and as a Jewish woman. And that was the beginning of sort of a deepening of my Jewish career, previous to founding Ta'amud. I really understood at that time the work I was doing was for an amazing organization called Moving Traditions. And I really understood the experience of what it was to grow up as a Jewish girl. And therefore I understood a lot about gender conditioning and what that looked like in my Jewish identity and that brought me into that space. Along the way, I have been immersed in the Jewish communal landscape. So when we say that, which I'm learning maybe is a little jargony, when we say that, we're talking about like the Jewish organized world. So that looks like a lot of different things. That looks like houses of worship and Jewish schools, but it also looks like lots of social justice organizations and organization that most of you probably have in your communities, which is called Jewish Family Service. Those are organizations that do a lot of social service work out in the world. And so the Jewish communal landscape is all these Jewish organizations. And as an individual, I have been involved in them in various ways for a very long time, including eventually marrying a congregational rabbi and had a lot of exposure to what's happening across the Jewish communal landscape. So I'm walking around the world as like this deep feminist inside of gender equity where seeing a lot of themes show up in Jewish organized workplaces that are not so pretty, but also very thematic. And then me too went viral. And I was involved at the time with the organization, Jewish Women's Foundation of New York, that was doing something to respond and was pulled into a project that eventually became the founding of Topmode. That was really about the intersection of equity issues and workplace wellness. And so while we were founded in the gender equity space and my own identity and connection to both Jewish life and gender equity work is how I landed in that moment. Since then, we've been able to take the work which originally started as harassment prevention training and really build a much broader scope of work of creating whole human centered equity rife Jewish workplaces in the Jewish organized world. And the other piece of my work that's so deeply rooted in my identity is that the work that we do is not like all that profound. I mean, it's very important upstart and funders in the room. It's very important, but it's not profound in the sense that we do really, really solid wonderful workplace wellness work. But if you go out into the world beyond our sector, you're gonna see a lot of the same pieces of work. But in our world, in the Jewish communities, I'm sure in lots of identity communities that you all belong to, we have some specific characteristics that are really impact the way that we work and the way that we relate to one another. And because of my background and my experience, I have an acute understanding of and lived experience of those things which allows me then to step into a Jewish organization and say, I see you, I know you, I understand you. And then we can take all of these great principles and tools and apply them. Thank you so much, Nicole. Can take a moment, appreciation. I wanna just emphasize that last point you made about the unique understanding of that the topics and conversations themselves may not be distinctive, but that the context and the identities that folks are bringing to those conversations is part of what makes that unique. And one of the ways that this shows up in our curriculum at Upstart and when we work with social impact entrepreneurs is to really talk about this question of being an insider or an outsider to a community, which of course is an oversimplification, right? We're all insiders in certain ways and outsiders in other ways, but we find that that's something that is not always consciously thought of even if it is experienced. So you might be an insider to your community in your shared religious identity, but you might have a different socioeconomic background or context or a different racial context. And so thinking about how your experience is, as you said, as a Jewish person, as a woman, and the way that impacts how you see this challenge of workplace culture, but also how you address it, right? How you decide what the solution should look like. Can you talk a little bit about that? About what the solution should look like as rooted in my own understandings of, yeah. So I would say a few things. I mean, first of all, as much as we're talking about the Jewish communal landscape as my work, there's lots and lots of intersectional and different identities that work inside of the Jewish landscape. So I'm bringing my identity and lived experience, but my work partner who's our chief program officer also identifying as a Jewish woman, but she has a deep background also in a lot of racial equity work and we are both bringing a lens of understanding what it is to be inside of the Jewish community as a Jewish person with a deep sensitivity to how much of the Jewish work for the Jewish world's workforce is has a different identity. And that's a sensitivity and awareness that we are bringing constantly. And I cannot tell you how often we find that we've got to remind the Jewish leadership because the reality is that in most Jewish organizations, the leadership do identify Jewishly. We have to remind them that we're not all necessarily speaking the same language all the time. It also gives us a real sensitivity and capacity to understand some of the pain points that we see in organizational challenges because when just for as an example, we work with congregations a lot. We work with Jewish communities of worship and there's like a lot of real specific dynamics that go on inside of Jewish communities of worship across staffs and board. And we have just are able to bring a deep sensitivity to that and an understanding so that instead of saying like you're doing this wrong or this is a terrible dynamic, we can say, look, we understand where this comes from. We understand what's happening for you here. We've seen it. And here's a different way, a new way, a better way. And here are ways that we can support you in that. And I will say the other reality is that there's a reason that this, that Tom Ode was founded by women and born out of the gender equity space. And I do think that the ways that we are constantly recalibrating and reorienting and paying attention all the time to what's happening with like very nuanced issues around equity very much comes from my background and experience in the understanding the gender in the work through a gender equity lens. Does that answer your question? It does. Thank you so much. Fantastic. We're gonna move on to our second component of this framework and our second story today which is this idea of a connection to the community you serve. So when we talk about identity based entrepreneurship we're not just talking about the founding or the creation of a venture but we're also talking about the maintenance. How do you build your ecosystem? How do you form relationships and create ownership and investment in the community? Whether that's with actual investors or other kinds of stakeholders, board members, partners and we really believe that having an identity sharing an identity with the community that your venture serves allows you to operate with an affinity for those that are most impacted by the challenge or the problem that your venture exists to solve. We also think and Nicole you began to speak to this as well that it offers you an awareness of the nuances of experience that if you are not if you are coming in as an outsider to a community you may not necessarily understand or be able to relate on a deeper level to some of the particularities of how that problem or challenge shows up in that particular context. And the third piece here which I think is fairly straightforward but probably can't be overstated is the sense of trust. The sense of being in alignment and in affinity with those who are in a common experience and a common challenge so that you can show up authentically and you can lead from a place of authority on what it is like to be in that position or to hold that identity or lived experience whatever it may be that your venture exists to address. In other words, it makes sense that you're the one leading this charge, right? So I wanna turn it over to Kandel to talk a little bit about his work and founding of the workshop and how some of this shows up for him. Oh no, it's just to keep me honest that I have my little watch going here, my timer. First, it's just lovely to be with everyone here. Okay, so it's the year is 2019. I'm in the middle of rabbinical school in New York City at the Jewish Theological Seminary where I found myself as the first black person to matriculate through it in its 137 years. And so I'm there, my experience by and large is going fine but the main thing that I'm actually coming up against is my background is as a theater artist. I got my master's of fine arts in musical theater writing and playwriting from NYU. And so I decided long story to go to rabbinical school for a number of reasons and I get about halfway through because it's five years and I'm like, I feel like I'm missing a piece of myself here. Not only do I necessarily not see other people who look like me, but I definitely am not encountering a lot of artists in this space and I feel kind of like I'm dying a little bit on the inside. And so what I did was then I reach out to a number of friends who happen to be artists, happen to be Jewish, also happen to be people of color and some of my closest friends and I'm like, hey, can we connect? Can we make something? Can we create something? And they're all like, bet, let's do it. So we start creating something and then I decide I'm gonna show it to one of my professors, one of my mentors at JTS and she's like, one, I didn't know you could do this, two, this is like really interesting. We should show it to some other people. And so we start showing it to some other people and then I recruit a few more friends long story short, what ends up happening is we end up raising some money, we end up getting some more support from Jewish communities and non-Jewish communities. And this idea is born for the workshop. What is the workshop? The workshop is North America's first Arts and Culture Fellowship that really focuses on foregrounding the work of professional artists who are Jews of color or Jews from Sephardic and or Mizrahi backgrounds. With a little more time I can get more into like the exactness of what that means. But in short, these are like Jewish folks who are not necessarily part of all mainstream Jewish conversations. In my case, I grew up in the black church. I'm fluent in black church. Speak if you wanna come talk to me about that after we can talk about that. But in this process of becoming Jewish and being an artist, I found like I kind of need to find my people and I need to figure out ways to support us as we want to create work that reflects our experiences. So what does that look like? In the first year, I recruited seven artists, some of whom were friends, some of whom weren't friends, but folks of a variety of racial and ethnic experiences, all of whom were Jewish and all multidisciplinary artists. And we provided them with as much funding as we could give them. And for those of you who know artists, there's never enough funding for artists, right? I see some heads shaking and nodding and providing them with residency opportunities, yada, yada, yada. But that really all sprang from this sense of what were the things that I wish that I had had to support me as I was coming out of my MFA program? Also, what are the things that I wish that my seminary was providing for me as someone who absolutely does not want to work in a synagogue and even turned down 10 interviews for synagogues because I just knew that wasn't me. But I wanted to create this other space for Jewish creatives of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Also, I should say, shout out to all of the rabbis who are working in communities. That is hard. But a lot of that sprang from this sense of real desire and needing to have community that kind of reflected that experience. Now, one of the things that we actually kind of talked about a bit in preparing for this was this idea of, okay, how do you move from this place of like the personal story to this notion of like growth from lived experience? Now, I'll be honest as we're only about two years old so we're still very much in that early venture phase. So I'm not exactly sure what scale looks like here but the one thing that I do know is that making an intensive investment in artists is never a bad thing. And you probably also need to change your horizons in terms of seeing a return on that investment. But one of the things that kind of helped it gain traction early on was the fact that our artists, like they're no slouches. Like we've got one who was just at Sundance. We've got one who was an associate director on a Pulitzer Prize winning musical. Others who were in movies, yada, yada, yada. And what's crazy is that the more that I checked in with them about this process, half of them were like, look, I'm a person of color and I know I'm Jewish. I don't know if I'm that Jewish. Like can I really be in this? And I'm like, that is like good enough for us come and we'll figure it out. And what's lovely is that over the course of spending a year together, working together, building art together, the number of people who come back and say, wow, this Jewish thing is one, more important to me but two, I've never had an experience where someone sought to like allow me to integrate that into my being a person of color or integrate that into my being an artist. And as someone who took a like 10 to 15 year journey to become Jewish and create a career where I can bring it all together, that's like the most satisfying response that I can ever hear from any person. So one other thing I'll say is that in figuring out the workshop, I also worked back from the fact that I had been in plenty of fellowships that weren't such great experiences. And so that notion of like the things that you don't like are also great teachers is really important. Like I've been in a number of arts and culture fellowships that are not Jewishly related, a number of culture fellowships that are Jewishly related. And in each case, there's often something that was great about it, but then other things that less great. So one of the things that I knew is like, I wanted to figure out how to take the best of all of these worlds and the wisdom that came from these programs and try to thread the needle in a way that was gonna work for artists. The last thing that I'll say about identity and how that plays into creating this venture of the workshop is I very much identify as a religious convert to Judaism. Like I said, grew up in the black church. I'll be honest, I didn't meet a Jewish person until I was 17 years old. And there's a story behind how that went that you can ask me after. But as someone who took like 10 years to figure out what my Jewishness journey was, my identity as a convert really grew to this place of realizing that my whole approach to my entrepreneurial path is, it comes from a place of questioning and a desire to understand, huh, how is it that you came to that conclusion via the life experiences that you've had, the education that you've had? Whereas for me, like I ended up at such a different place. So it kind of leads me to this quote that I have, which might be one of the weirdest quotes that I've ever come up with this. I wish I could give everyone a conversion experience in the world to actually understand what it feels like to grow up, in my case, thinking that I understood the universe by virtue of my religious experience only to then change my mind, change my beliefs, feel the world disintegrate under my feet and then rebuild it back piece by piece only to realize that the result could be just as beautiful and that there are ways to bridge those experiences. So maybe one lesson to take from that is by virtue, like the things that are the challenges that you've been through, the things that you never thought that you would get over, the way that you never thought you could make a way out of a way where it seemed there was no way, those are often the things that someone else will exactly need in their journey and you are in a specific place to be able to serve them in your entrepreneurial journey. So that is approximately my time. Those are some of my thoughts on how these identities show up in my work and I'm super excited to speak with you all at a later time. Thank you so much, Kandel, and I'm gonna just erase this whole slide deck and replace it with creating what I would have wanted, which I think to me really sums up this idea of identity-based entrepreneurship, right? Is that you are the client. You are designing for yourself and as you said, you took what worked. I'm sure you also discarded quite a bit of what did not work and then you've created this space where it also sounds like you've given folks permission to lean into some of their identities that may not have been as consciously held and also really created a lot of nuance, a lot of space for nuance and complexity within those identities, right? And that I think so often when we start talking about and we're gonna be doing this identity map activity later and we start listing our identities that we can end up in this kind of perfunctory space, right? Where we say things like, okay, I'm Jewish. I'm a man, right? These are my identities, but within that, as you're sort of naming, being a convert to Judaism, right? Or in my case, growing up culturally Jewish, but attending the Unitarian Church and sort of having that sort of mixed religious experience, that's a really different kind of thing. And so it creates, I think, those spaces of really appreciating some of the different options that exist within our identities. The last thing I just wanna call out is that you started to get into, which I think maybe we'll continue in our next topic here, is just this idea of values and how do your values show up in the way that you lead? And I think Judaism, for me, is a questioning. It's a questioning faith and that's a big part of our values. And in any cultural experience or identity, you're going to be assigning certain values to the work you do that are gonna carry through in the way that you make your choices, the way that you lead, right? The kinds of decisions and priorities that you hold in your work. Which is why it's not just what I want, creating what I would have wanted, it's creating the thing that is the opposite of the thing I didn't want, but I experienced. So, and that's a really important piece of it too, and I hear that in your work also. There we go, yes, and to add, it started out by what was the thing I wanted, what was the thing I didn't want, but by virtue of I'm trying to support fellow artists, it means I actually have to listen. And because we're still in early venture, that means I am checking in with my artists at minimum every three weeks, how are things going, what are your projects, what do you need help with? And I would say that they have been the ones who have helped me shape the workshop, and it is as much their creation as well. So, it starts with what I wanted, but it's like, we're doing this together as a community. Fantastic, thank you so much. We're gonna move on to our third aspect of this framework, which is this idea of specificity, and specificity that we like to say sells the story. So, that can mean everything from the way that you talk about your work, to the way that you make a direct ask, or appeal to a funder, that it comes from a clarity of vision, of knowing who you are and why that matters, and that through specificity, we access the universal. And one of the things that we've been talking about quite a bit in preparing for this panel, is this idea that there can be a fear sometimes of being too specific in a mission statement. To use the example of your organization, you support professional artists who are Jews, who are people of color. That's three different categories, but there's quite a few people who exist within those three categories, who are in need of what you are offering. And I think there can be a fear sometimes of saying, we don't wanna limit ourselves, or we don't want to miss out on opportunities. But again, it's through that specificity, that generous exclusion, to use the phrase from earlier, that you're able to create something that really has a unique reason for being. And I think to go back to your point earlier, Nicole, that there are other organizations doing the kind of work that you do, but none in the exact same way, with the exact context and framing that your leadership brings to it. So I'm gonna hand it over to Bulbul to share a little bit about her story in reference to this third part of the framework. I will do my best. Namaste. Thank you. So my identity in terms of what I would offer in terms of how my identities have shaped how I show up in the world, particularly in supporting other entrepreneurs to connect back into this conversation fundamentally, for me, starts in India. My grandfather marched alongside Ghandiji for India's freedom back in the 1930s and early 40s. And when we were growing up, just fundamentally raised us to deeply understand why non-violence and tolerance and acceptance is the answer. He literally would walk us around old Delhi from this is what a church looks like, this is how Christians pray, this is what a synagogue looks like, this is what a masjid looks like, and to make sure that we did not repeat the mistakes that he had seen make, been made. My father was born before India was free. I am the first generation in my family of a free India. And fundamentally, coming to this country as the daughter of an immigrant entrepreneur and a family of immigrant entrepreneurs, what does that look like, right? For entrepreneurs who don't have American business degrees, who don't always speak English fluently, who don't have friends and family with capital, what does that look like? Having grown up on the other side of that dining table, constantly hearing, how do we get this? How do we get people to believe in us? Who is out there as one of the first Indian families in this small town in Connecticut, going from 12 million brown people in Delhi to 50,000 white people in Trumbull, Connecticut, first person of color in my school. They had never seen a person of color in their life. It was called the N-word, which just fundamentally shapes who you then see as the outsider and the insider, having been one of 12 million brown people before that. My father really forged us to have identities that were ambitious and work hard and sort of persevere to go have evidence-based opinions and just go and try to be the best in our fields. And my mother really made sure that we were gonna try to be the best wives, daughters, and moms possible to continue the culture side. And still four years into being a CEO, that is the number one thing I get asked about when I go home. Are you being a good enough mom? Are you being a good enough daughter? And just fundamentally is the identity that they care most about, right? Because that is like a perseverance of their culture. And this may seem kind of random to share, but for me, my identity, I think in the role that I now have and being able to speak truth to the identities and entrepreneurs that I serve was really forged to a large extent in college as a rape survivor. At the age of 17, I took on my college system as the only case to come out and self-report, report that year and lost. And took on the system to say, this is not right. Like this one case a year, we know that that's factually not true. And went on to support launch a survivors group. That is what brought me fundamentally to my policy career in Capitol Hill, working on the first inclusion of sexual assault into the Violence Against Women Act in 2000, where sexual assault was not federally protected in this country before the year 2000. But fundamentally that is where I found my voice because I felt like I had to. If I didn't speak up, who was going to? If not then when, right? If not now when? And I think that is really where fundamentally I learned how to shed the constructs and rules that weren't serving me any longer and weren't serving us. And challenge and question what rules are intentionally designed to oppress us and to hold us back that don't want us to speak our voice, don't want our truth to be heard. I spent the first half of my career in international microfinance work, economic development and found myself into impact investing. And spent many years in the back of these impact investing conferences as one of the very few people of color wondering, did I belong here? Was I gonna be accepted? I didn't grow up with money. I am pitching asset holders who have millions of dollars. And once fundamentally was told, we can't hire you for this job because we need people who the registered investment advisors, these gatekeepers in the middle can relate to. And yeah, we know what that means. They didn't finish that sentence. But you know, who belongs and who doesn't? Who belongs in these conversations? What identities are appreciated? What parts of your background do you have to sort of code switch to fit into different rooms and different audiences? All of those identities shape then fundamentally, right? Like in this job, those are the entrepreneurs I am trying to make sure we are actively investing in who haven't historically had that access, who don't necessarily look like those who do hold the capital. How do we in the middle understand the identities they are coming in with, the challenges, the fear barriers, the trust barriers they are coming in with and help translate and play that role in the middle to really make sure that identity-based entrepreneurship first and foremost sees people for who they are and honors that lived experience. Because that lived experience is what is forging their passion for some solution in the world to a problem they have identified. I was an entrepreneur. I started my own small business consulting firm before I took this role as a first-time CEO. And so as a woman of color, turning 40, becoming a CEO for the first time in an organization that had never had a leader of color before. None of my staff had ever worked for a leader of color before. How do you then turn around an organization that comes out of impact investing and then became, I don't know if any of you are familiar with the community development financial institutions that were really born in this country out of the tail end of civil rights to embody both an impact investing mindset with a civil rights intention to fundamentally show up for impact investing for racial equity, right? So that entirely relies on you being able to leverage the identities you bring into this role to work with the entrepreneurs and community partners that you have to build trust with to change how and whom you are able to deploy that capital to and build trusted relationships where there weren't before. And in some cases, harm repair, right? For how capital has not shown up in or turned down communities that should have had that access to capital. I'm also a mom, so that's another identity that has shaped me. And I say that because more and more entrepreneurs, the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in this country are women of color entrepreneurs, right? Many of them are coming into this world of entrepreneurship, coming out of workplace discrimination, coming out of survivor pernorship, income pernorship. And we don't talk about this so much, but the fastest group is actually women from 40 to 60. So mom printers, I call us mom printers, thank you. But so when I show up with the entrepreneurs and community partners we invest in, the first half of the conversation, especially when you're talking about trust building and repair, is what are you dealing with today? What are you showing up with today, right? If you have a childcare crisis or if one of your kids is not well, a third of your brain or half of your brain is not fully there, right? We know that as moms, it's really hard to understand that when you're not a parent sometimes, I think. But I think just going back to how all of these identities shape us, I remember once, and I will wrap up after this last little piece, I had a comment a couple of years ago in the middle of COVID where someone said to me, well, you're raising that capital because you're a woman of color. Everybody wants to find women of color right now. And I was like, wow, okay. Well, that's a whiplash and backlash coming. I mean, which we are seeing this year, but I can't take off the fact that I'm a woman or a woman of color, right? I can't divorce any of these identities I bring. All of these identities shape who I am, who I serve and how I show up. I have to decide often in which audience I'm in, which part of my identity I put first and which I don't speak about or diminish. But I don't have the privilege of taking off any of these to play the woman of color card, right? So neither did my entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs we invest in are hustling their butts off to prove out this vision for why they started this business and us honoring them for who they are and meeting them where they are. I think the relatability of that from my lived experience to their lived experience has really changed the nature of how we show up with community partners and with our entrepreneurs. So I will just wrap up by saying, when I think about, I was trying to use specifics to tell the story, so to speak. But fundamentally what drives me is really the principles of how we learn from these issues around the world to decolonize capital. How do we redesign capital that is human centered and in our case human center to really be addressing racial equity, racial and gender equality. If not now, when, if not us, whom? How do we really show up to build this beloved community that centers equity and invests with love? It's cheesy at that point. Preach. Thank you so much for sharing all of that and for sharing so much of yourself as well in your story. I think it really, it adds quite a bit of important context to how you came to your work. And the impact you've been able to achieve because of it. I really love the if not now, when and if not me, who. And for those of you who are familiar with the public narrative framework from the organizer Marshall Ganz, he has this story of self, story of us and story of now. And I think you hit all three of those as a model for how to really situate yourself and your community and create investment in buy-in into this shared challenge and this sense of urgency. The last thing I'll say before I bring us to our activity for the day is just that I really also appreciate in your story how you talked not just about how being an insider to the problem was valuable but also being an outsider and sitting in the back of the room and saying, I am not from this world. And the way that that I think can help us sometimes to see a challenge more clearly when we are in a space and we recognize what is lacking from it. And I think all of your stories had some dimension of that as well, so just wanted to add that piece. And thank you all for listening and for bearing witness to these three stories. We wanna make some space now for each of you to reflect and to think a little bit about how some of this content might be showing up in your own work or how you might start to think about leveraging your own identities in the work that you do. So I'm going to invite you to turn your attention to the papers on your table. And some of you may have already noticed that you have two different documents there. There is a large shared paper, which is for you as a group to work with. And then there are individual handouts which you can take home with you that are slightly smaller size. And what you'll notice is that these three circles reflect the three parts of the framework that we just discussed. And what we're gonna ask you to do is this three step process. The first is to think a little bit on your own about what identities and experiences inform the way you approach your work. So as you've heard from our speakers, there's a number of different ways you can answer that question. Some might be more relevant immediately than others but whichever ones you feel are appropriate for you, go ahead and write each of those on a post-it note. And then what you'll do as a group is place them on that large shared piece of paper in whatever part of that diagram feels appropriate. So if you have an identity that you feel really is about helping you connect with a community, you can put it in that blue circle. If it's two, you can put it in the overlap. And if it's three, you can put it right in the middle. There are no right or wrong answers here. It's really just a chance for you to explore how and where your different identities show up in your work.