 All right, awesome. Welcome back, everyone, from lunch. So for those tuning in, this is the Innovations in Capital Support Conversation. I'm Ari Rosenberg. I'm the Program Director for Ambitious, which is an initiative of the Center for Cultural Innovation. And all of us just have the other panelists introduce themselves. I'm Janelle Orsi from Sustainable Economy's Law Center. Woo! Oh, supportive audience. Mama's house, co-operative, and the art of motherhood. Awesome. Thanks to everyone for being here. So I'm just going to set the stage a little bit before we have the panelists talk. With Ambitious, we want to be pretty explicit about our view of capital and how it can be leveraged to sort of catalyze support for different initiatives that we're supporting and that we understand that grant capital and sort of traditional philanthropic dollars are actually sometimes very detrimental to the initiatives that we're trying to support and that we've been explicit in our communications and in our actions with the folks that we're supporting, that we want to make sure that we're providing capital in ways that are actually useful. And it was brought up earlier when we were talking about the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative and sort of the work they were doing. And we wanted to make sure they weren't doing something just because they thought we wanted them to be doing it. It's because it was really what was best for their community. And so through Ambitious and through CCI's work in general, we want to be explicit that we're not trying to ask people to work in a certain type of way. And we're also not trying to get people to ask for a certain type of capital. We want to understand from them what will actually help leverage their work and be supportive to their community. And so in this panel, in this conversation, we're going to talk about that and talk about sort of how capital can be used in different ways. So I'm going to start with Amake and just invite you to share a little bit about your mama's house and then also about your fundraising, your crowdfunding campaign. OK, your mama's house has been going on for 10 years. And it was only last year that I decided to start making it a business. I did not want a nonprofit. I did not want it to be a regular traditional business. But I had no idea about cooperatives at the time. I did start to go fund me to start looking for a house because mothers came consistently to the program when we had a house. We learned that it was the spaces that the mothers loved. It was the safety. It was being comfortable, sitting in a fireplace, been a cushy couch, plants, candles, the ambience of a lit fireplace, being able to eat together, the children playing in the gardens that mothers really were able to open up and feel safe and make art together. So the concept of your mama's house is to have that house that continues to do that, but also have that house that's a working space for artists, activists, and healers. Those are the women that tend to be attracted to what I do. After having the very generous donation from ambiguous, it's like money's like honey. It attracts bees. It attracts ants. It attracts flies. So I've had a lot of things happen that are good and some are questionable. But what I am seeing is mothers are saying, this can be done. This is something we want to be a part of. Yes, it's good that we hung into it. I've seen over 500 women in probably 10 years, and there's probably a core group of 40 that consistently will get together. So we envision your mother's mama's house having the spaces to do the things that they already do. But most of them are renters and cannot do a lot of the messy artwork, or they can't drag a lot of stuff in store, or they can't be up all hours of the night because they have other people in the building. So we're envisioning a four or five bedroom house within a finished basement. We have rooms. I have 20 women already who are ready to go. They have already said, this is my commitment. As a member, I can pay X amount of dollars a month. If every woman that commits, 20 women commits to one day of being in your mama's house and paying for that membership, that's $19,000 a year. So we're looking at what can we do with that to continue to put in with the things that they do. They make canned goods. They make clothes. They do fashion. They do a lot of things, but they want to make more money and be more resourceful with that. So that's where we are right now. I would like to point out one more thing. The things that mothers do when they don't have money. We make plates. We have Patreon. We have GoFundMe. We have started auctions. We barter. We make good medicinal medicines. We can do food shelves, child care, car sharing, house sharing, yard sales, giveaway parties, and potlucks. Great. Thank you. And I just want to share that for ambitious, participating in the crowdfunding campaign for us was important because of the public validity that it gave to the work that Imake is doing and to leveraging our capital so it could support the campaign and getting more capital afterwards. And I know Imake you shared with me that after the support from ambitious, they were able to leverage more capital and had a fundraiser that was useful in order to have more money for the down payment on the house. And so for us, that public validity was really a key piece, even though it was difficult legally to set up the relationship. Yeah. And then I also wanted to acknowledge on our agendas and online that Stephanie Gutierrez from Hope Nation Consulting was also supposed to be here today and unfortunately was unable. But we still wanted to uplift her work. And so I'm going to ask Fran just to talk a little bit about the conversations we've been having with Stephanie and sort of how we're thinking about capital in terms of the relationship, especially in Indian country, to make sure that it's not being used in a way where people are beholden to us as a funder. Absolutely. Thanks. Yeah, I actually want to tell you a little bit about Stephanie. I also want to talk about crops and about them. So I'm going to tell you about all of them. So I'm going to start with crops. This is actually the first big project that I think a collaborative approach. And Lauren earlier said, people endeavor, community endeavor, you know, that's really what I feel Angie and Ari try to do here. And so we met with Lauren and other crops partners and with Ari and Angie. And we sat down and we co-created what crops would look like. We came up with a canvas of options. I mean, it was a full PowerPoint that went through, I don't know how many iterations of different options of what they could do, but really co-creating and we sitting to find out what would mean successful Lauren, what would mean successful crops and how she wants to use the money. And what was wonderful about this project is we structured that first as more consulting engagement and sitting around the table and figuring out what we want from that. And that learning we put into a document and CCI and ambitious could use that for next projects. Now we're in a separate engagement with crops, but it became a full document that they could use. And I just added to that that part of our engagement with crops is we were explicit that we don't care what the outcome is. We want them to be building whatever is best for them. And so we just wanted to be able to sit in on those conversations so that we could get the learning. But if they decided not to be a cooperative, we were still going to support that. And we did explore other options. In the end, we landed on a multi-stakeholder co-op. But we looked at 501C3 with subsidiary for profit. We looked at a single member co-op. We looked at many options. So we indeed did land on the co-op models. Ben Stephanie is not here. She started Hope Nation and it's an LLC. Just from their website, because I don't work for them, obviously, they do social enterprise development, organizational management, program planning, and general development of community empowerment practices in indigenous and rural communities. So what I appreciated about this process too was that all of us got on the phone and we had an hour and a half of brainstorming of how Stephanie could use these funds. But it became so philosophical. It was a fun conversation. And we started talking about recoverable grants or forgivable loans. And that's not a truly legal concept. I think the Ford Foundation came up with it. They are also, I think, PRIs. They also did the PRI work on it. So it's a grant where the funds require repayment if it's successful or if it's not successful or if there's some kind of certain conditions attached to it. And we spoke a lot about not paying it that model, but rather a paying it forward model. Like how can Hope Nation use the money to do what they need to do? And then when they are successful, use what they've made to pay it forward instead of paying it back. Now, in the end, we didn't use this recoverable grant. We went another route. But again, co-creating something that would work for Hope Nation and for Stephanie and figuring out what success would look like for them and not for the Foundation. Yeah, and I think for us, the pay it forward model was really interesting specifically because for us, it's not about holding onto the financial capital. It's about getting the financial capital out to the communities that need it most. And we also understand it's a weird relationship as a funder that ultimately we still are making decisions about who gets capital and who doesn't from ambitious or from CCI in general. And that that's a weird role to be playing when we're saying that we're trying to create economic systems that work for everyone. Why do we get to make the decisions about what works and what doesn't or what fits into this lens? And so this pay it forward model would also lead to us not holding on to all the decision making. It puts some of the decision making into the hands of the communities that we're supporting. And so that was interesting for us in sort of trying to tease out that piece. I didn't want to be a 501c3, but there was this crowdfunding campaign and what was incredibly important in this project was visibility. So how do we make your mama visible to other people so that it's more accessible and other people can invest in it? And we figured out a fiscal sponsorship relationship where the money was funneled through the crowdfunding website and then into a separate bank account. Now the bank account became a little bit of a problem. And I hear. But the thing with fiscal sponsorships, I'm sure most of you know about this, but it remains responsible for the money aspect. Your mama can do everything else, but the fiscal sponsor needs to keep an eye on the money. And we figured out that they will open a bank account, which proved to be difficult. I'm not sure why. It proved to be difficult for a couple of reasons. One, we wanted to make sure we were opening a bank account that garnered interest because we knew that Amake wasn't gonna spend the money immediately. It was for a down payment on the house and she was still fundraising. And so we wanted to make sure that the money could earn money in this bank account. And then the other piece, the bank that had to be in CCI's name and Amake needed to have access to it. And so that with the interest became very difficult. We found one bank in the whole country that was willing to work with us and luckily within Minneapolis. So it made it easy for Amake, who lives in Minneapolis, but that it was more difficult than we thought it would be to do that. But again, it's not a failure, it's a learning as we discuss it. Next time we will know which bank to go to. Exactly, exactly. Great, and so Janelle, I'm gonna have you talk about Next Egg and sort of how that's opening up new capital for communities and then also the city of Berkeley, the work that self did there. Cool, thanks. So the Next Egg, it's a project of sustainable economies law center and Lyft economy. It's a play on the nest egg. You know, like this idea that we're all saving for retirement, we put away a nest egg. It came out of the strong desire to be like getting capital to the projects that we love. Like sustainable economies law centers given legal advice to 1,300 micro enterprises and cooperatives and grassroots groups and just sort of seeing over and over again the lack of access to capital being a challenge and just thinking what are the pools of capital we can tap? And of course we've talked a lot about like philanthropic capital but for us community capital is really powerful and by community capital I mean like money from everyday people in our communities, the people who are participating or in or impacted by these cooperatives and enterprises. And so, but that's challenging too of just sort of like having an everyday person put some of their savings into an enterprise and knowing that it's at risk. And you know, only about a quarter of people in America have any form of disposable savings that they could write a check from immediately. But about half of people have retirement savings. It's just that most people view retirement savings as something they're not gonna touch until a very long time from now or money that's being like invested in Wall Street tied up in institutions. And so we were like, all right, how do we tap this pool of capital? And so the next egg is it's an online community first of all the next egg.org. So it's a community of practice, a community of people who are learning together, sharing stories about how they're investing. But it's also sort of a bargaining collective of people who are getting access to low-cost tools that give them actual checkbook control or power over where their retirement savings is invested. And so I'll use my own example. I'm about to turn 40. I only have, by the end of this year I'll have about $12,000 in retirement savings. But I do not wanna single one of those dollars to be doing anything on Wall Street, to be doing anything that's not contributing to a world where I can actually retire. So I'm starting a 401K and it's a solo 401K where I will literally have a debit card and a checkbook to control where this $12,000 goes. I'm of course gonna write a check to the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. I'm gonna write checks to a variety of other social enterprises and cooperatives and the local community. And we're trying to build up a cooperative not really cooperative, but just sort of a collective, a community of 100 people who are gonna do this along with me in the next couple months. So like 100 people who suddenly have checkbook control over their retirement savings and we're having conversations about how we're investing it, that's really powerful. And what's especially powerful is this is not money that I'm gonna need anytime soon. I'm, you know, keep my money for 25 years. Do good things with it. And particularly do good things that is actually gonna create a planet that can nourish us by the time that we retire. So the next day, it's a very, like we're creating a lot of practical tools, but it's also, I think it's shifting some of the culture around how we think about money. And so, and just getting people to take, you know, a little bit more risks and to think a little bit longer term. Yeah, and I think one thing for us, like one reason we were interested in supporting next day is that it really feels like it's opening up new capital because it's targeting people who probably are not saving for retirement right now because there's not an easy mechanism for freelancers or gig workers to be participating in 401Ks. It's mostly done through your employer. So this is a new, you know, it's still 401Ks aren't new, but sort of the way you are uplifting it and the self-directedness of it is innovative and new. But then all that money flowing into communities is new capital that we can be investing in local cooperatives and theater companies and anything we want right in our community. And so for us, that's also like looking at capital in a great way where it's like, well, how do we leverage our individual dollars to be supporting our community? And it's not just about philanthropic dollars, though those dollars also need to be flowing into the community. And you know, one thing that's powerful about it is I'm gonna put $5,000 into it this year. I cannot get a charitable deduction. If I were to donate that $5,000, it would have no impact on my individual taxes because I take the standard deduction, which 90% of Americans take the standard deduction now, thanks to the tax bill. So by putting it in my 401K, then I get a tax deduction. It's more of like postponing my taxes until I take it out much later. But in a way, I'm still investing it with a charitable mindset. So it's actually a nice tool to sort of starve our military industrial complex from funding right now by putting in our 401Ks. Great, great. And can you talk briefly also just about self-work and Berkeley and sort of how you're supporting a municipality and sort of leveraging capital for cooperatives? Yeah, so we're trying, where our hope is that cities everywhere will start adopting policies to prioritize worker co-op development, prioritize worker co-ops and procurement and purchasing and technical support, but also lending and grants. And so a few years ago in Berkeley, we started advocating, and we actually organized the local worker co-op community. We got worker owners from various worker co-ops to lead a lot of this advocacy, but ultimately the city of Berkeley adopted some amendments to its Revolving Loan Fund that made it a lot easier for worker cooperatives to access this capital. And one of the things that it had to navigate is creating a more accessible or usable guarantee program. So rather than having every worker owner and a worker cooperative guarantee alone 100%, they created some workarounds that make sure the workers aren't all taking all of the risk. Great, great. So now I'm gonna open it up just more conversation within our circle. We, you know, in our prep calls, we were talking a lot about how these conversations about around, excuse me, around capital are actually really difficult to follow and not everyone feels even included in it because of historical trauma, because of language that's used and definitions that are used. And so let's talk more about sort of that and how to make this accessible. And, you know, Janelle pointed out like, it's silly that we need lawyers and accountants to explain this to us. You know, why can't we have tools where we understand how to utilize capital and be innovative on our own. Lead it to any of you to speak to that. I'm the one who was saying, I don't understand what you guys are saying. I've got a PhD, so I don't get things done and just keep going. But I'm very excited to be in the presence and know what they did to make it happen for your mama because it's very hard to explain. I would also like to say that I do still do other ways of making money. I used other, my art practices to do that. So I was also able to save $10,000 of my own money for the house as well. And I also write grants that continue to keep your mama programming so people know what we're doing. So this year I was able to give 50 women emergency bags and for us to create plans to, for them to take care of their families one to three days in case all hell breaks with the government or some national disaster or in Minnesota, they could be negative 34 at any given time and snowing and then sunny the next day. So we're able to do that. I'm also educating women about water, the access of clean water and taking care of themselves in a free way by drinking water and dehydrating themselves. Dehydration brings on diabetes, high blood pressure and some forms of cancer, allergies and asthma which plagues the black community. So I continue to program and get in kind services from other agencies by partnering with them. Okay, there if you wanna speak, speak, speak, sure. I don't know, I was just like contemplate, I actually printed a part of a poem. I'm like, would that be weird on a panel about capital? Maybe not because like to your question of like, how do we make this a little bit more accessible and down to earth? All right, this is a poem that's been kind of like the theme of my year. So this is Mary Oliver's Wild Geese. It's just the first few lines. Well, a little bit of background. So my mom died about five months ago. I got very sick right afterwards, you know, just all the stress. And so this particular, this last line that I'm about to read is like, that's been like a guiding principle for kind of healing myself, but also like applying it to my work. So, but think about this in terms of finance. Getting access to capital. You need access to capital? So you do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. So what does it look like for an enterprise to let the soft animal of its body, or you know, entrepreneur, you know, we as human beings, like how do we create relationships that let the soft animal of our body feel like human? And for the investors, and when I say the word investor, it's like community members, everyday people. We are all investors. Like how do we let the soft animal of our body love what it loves when we think about where we're putting our money? So I get a little shaky just talking about this, because like this is really like, it's meant a lot to me, it's really strengthened my resolve to stop ever like falling into the tendency as a lawyer. And as someone who works in finance of being kind of like intimidating, hard to understand, confusing, like anytime I'm in a room, and usually it's somebody else who will say something like, well, you should talk to a financial advisor, or have you gotten advice from a securities lawyer about this and it just shuts people down, like the soft animal of our body just sort of shrivels up. And it just, yeah, I'm tired of like the disempowering effect that professionals like financial advisors, accountants, lawyers have on like our clients. And so for me, it's like, we create cartoon legal documents. We create securities offerings documents with cartoons in it. We have branches where we talk about finances of the co-ops that we work with. We have just ongoing relationships. So the relationship between an enterprise and the investors should feel like family. It should feel like a mother and child relationship. It should just feel like the soft animal of our body loves what it loves and that's what brings our resources to the table. Yeah, thank you. And I have to say, CELC's cartoons and EB Prex cartoons are in your bri laws. Like they do make the documents more accessible and we send them to people. We're like, have you looked at this yet? Because a lot of people get really confused about, especially cooperative law, it's different in every state, right? If you're not a lawyer, you might not know the nuances of all of those things, but to be able to see someone else sort of demonstrate it as a cartoon and with little stick figures with signs, it does make it much easier. Yeah. This is more of a bylaws' story. Yeah, to Jenna. Yeah. However, since I drew your cartoon bylaws, a lot of other people have started getting inspired to put cartoons in legal documents and it's actually gonna be, I mean, just give it two to three years, it's gonna be the new paradigm. It's gonna be a thing. It's gonna be a document. I just have to say, Jason actually came to me and he said, don't you like drawing cartoons? Which is like, hi, I'm good at PowerPoint, but. So, I was at a conference in BC a couple of weeks ago and some of you were there. It was the NCBA CUSA Impact Co-op Conference and Ed Mayo, who's the, some of the things that I'm just secretary general about co-operatives in the UK. He had this really nice quote about co-ops and he said, co-ops should create a space where we can all be fully human. And that made me think, and your beautiful poem also kind of connects to that, how, what is my role in this Oceans 8, Oceans 11 space? To create a space with everyone to be fully human and in a co-op space and whatever. And I have a certain skill set, yes. But unfortunately, and I am the lawyer and I'm gonna say this, but our industry is broken. The fact that we have to bolt per hour is sad and it makes us exclusive and it makes us huge. I mean, it's a justice gap, it's all sorts of gaps. It makes it inaccessible. And I appreciate Ari and Andy so much for making us more accessible to everyone in this room. But it's hard and I think self kind of figured it out. But it's difficult to make this profession. That's why we're siloed and that's why we're on the side. Everyone talks between each other and then they come to the lawyers and then we say, but that can't work, that can't work. So then we need to come into the conversation and it becomes more expensive. So I don't have a solution for this, but I do think we need to talk about how professionals, what is our Oceans 11 role in this? Yeah, and we know it's also unique. We just told self last week that we're supporting them and they're a nonprofit law firm, which is not a traditional structure for a law firm and we know that most foundations won't support law firms, even nonprofit law firms because they think of lawyers as charging $250, $300 an hour and why would you support that work? And for us and ambitious, we really saw that the work that Selk is doing goes beyond just like traditional legal expertise. They're helping incubate EB Prec. They're helping support art and culture makers like build businesses and understand financing and all these tools and they're doing it in ways that are actually accessible and sharing the learnings. It's not just about legal expertise. And so for us, we're like, yeah, no duh, like this is a big fit, but we understand that most foundations see lawyer and are like, well, why would you give them a grant? Like they have access to money and we know that your firm is very different than that. And it's not just different in how you build clients, but it's also even different in your structure and like all the employees are paid the same and that you're very transparent about that. It's on your website. And so I think for us sort of also trying to figure out like how do we make sure that legal expertise is more accessible? Because people need it in the current system, even though we might know what's best for us, we might not legally know how to do that right now. Yeah, and I could maybe move quicker and you can see the bigger picture from a legal point of view, I mean not from every point of view, but from a legal point of view, faster so that you can move ahead. Yeah. And one thing that's nice about our salary structure, so everyone at Sustainable Economies Law Center makes 60,000 a year right now. That's actually higher than average locally, but we are in a closer ecosystem with our clients, meaning we make not too much more than our average client, meaning that if clients are paying us, they could afford to have us in the room and have it be part of an ongoing relationship rather than just paying lawyers for a few hours to swoop in at the last minute. And so we are, it's a much more natural, like we're part of the family of a cooperative as it's growing and for the lawyers, it just feels like a lot more like being a human. Yeah. Rather than, I don't know, the ocean's lovin' thing cracks me up, but it's like, yeah. I don't, I like more of a family metaphor. Yeah. Well, I have the black skillet, so if they survive, they crawl to you guys. I assume this approach to Jason Winer, if you haven't met him, he's a great, he's my boss, my partner colleague. He doesn't like being called a boss. He started the firm five years ago. He worked for Namase Solar, and he was in our legal counsel there, and then started the law firm, and he's really just focusing on co-ops and employee ownership. And I believe he's a thought leader in this, in the country. He's great. And his approach to the law firm is also, it's very similar. We're trying, I mean, it's still an hour in fee thing, but we also have many fixed fees to make it more accessible for clients. If people come to us and say that, you know, this price point is too high, can you help us at this price point? We work stuff out. So, to make it accessible, we don't charge, sorry, $250, $300 is pretty low. I saw a legal engagement the other day where a junior associate's fees was $750 an hour. So, yeah, definitely not that high. And that's real. Yeah, it's real. Yeah, and I will say that, you know, what you were talking about before is like thought partnership. I think one thing that we've really appreciated is being able to jump on the call and be like, can we just ask you a question? And you're like, oh yes, and you're actually in this with us. And I think part of that has to do with the philosophy of the firm specifically, right? And like Jason's understanding of cooperatives and why they're important for the system that we're trying to build. You know all lawyers think that we need to be building a different system. So I just think that that is a unique role. Great, so we can turn off the live stream. We're gonna do it early. And open it up.