 Hi, I'm Monique Akin, host of The Reconstruction. Being a good ancestor today is about doing what is needed to bring the possibility of a more just future that much closer to reality. That said, you can't give other people your revelation, but at the same time, you also can't give people a path just because they haven't lived your life, read the books you read, nor are they scholars of history. We all know right from wrong. And just because we have rarely seen justice, that doesn't mean we don't know it when we see it. And we are all acutely aware that justice is largely missing from our current normal. We know implicitly when things are unjust. Children know it. And kids are quick to point out when things are unfair. My three-year-old nephew knows it's unfair. His six-year-old sister is meant to cut a cookie in half to share it with him. And somehow, her half is bigger. Same with our current systems. We know they aren't working for some. They were set up that way. Some people engineered it so they would always get the bigger half and hope the rest of us wouldn't notice. It was a feature, not a bug. And if we did notice, we wouldn't say anything. And if we did say something, they could ignore us or pretend to listen to assuage us but take their bigger half anyway because we wouldn't do anything about it. Well, just like when the three-year-old looks at his smaller half of the cookie and stomps and screams, no fair, we too are finding our voices. And not just our voices. We're leveraging all of our skills, talents, and organizing power to fight back against getting the smaller half ever again. A recent example, the way black women in Georgia, and thank you to any women from Georgia listening in, said no fair for years and fought back against voter suppression in so many forms. And some say, save their democracy. How are we going to say unapologetically, like my nephew, no fair to the systems and structures that have held us and our forebears back? And find a way we must because more of the same or worse is unacceptable. We should not have to protest the same things folks protested in the 60s to get what we should have had from the beginning and almost had during the reconstruction period here in the US in the 1860s when a multiracial democracy almost took hold. It should not be the case that our human rights are still up for a vote in this day and age but here we are. The work is not yet done. But despite that, and because of the events of the last 18 months, the pandemic, which nearly brought the global economy to its knees and caused incalculable human tragedy, which is not yet over. Our democratic crisis, unfettered police brutality, repressive governments around the world, systems failures and fragility have been revealed to more people than ever before. And as patients, Marie-Mire Ball, from the Women of the World Endowment says, let us not unsee. In some ways, the unveiling that has happened in these last 18 months creates an unprecedented opportunity to harness the greatest connectedness we've ever had as a species, supported by the microcomputers we have in our pockets that give us access to data like we've never had before. We have a choice to do something we've never done before, make justice normal. And liberation, our collective goal. Against this backdrop this past February, I launched a podcast called The Reconstruction with some friends that's being incubated with the Impact Alpha platform. For those who aren't familiar, Impact Alpha is a digital news magazine that covers impact investing. The tagline of the podcast, moving capital toward justice, rethink, redress, liberate. If you'd asked me 10 years ago what liberation had to do with finance, I would have given you a blank stare. But my guests like Dr. Carmen Rojas from the Marguerite Casey Foundation, Rodney Foxworth from Common Future, John Duong from Kind Capital, Jean Bruskin, author of the play That Moment Was Now, Epshida Mandel Johnson, founder of the Global File Fund and Dr. Tiffani Manuel from The Case Made, among others, have taught me so much. I've had to learn so much. And more importantly, I've had to unlearn so much more because we've all been formatted with the same disks, so to speak. White supremacy, the patriarchy, colonialism, neoliberalism. We need to uproot these poisons from our minds, our culture and society. So what are we rethinking? Capital, assets are neutral, like any other tool. You can use a scalpel to kill just as easily as you can use it to perform delicate surgery and save a life. If you do with the tool, how you use that tool that condemns the tool or elevates it, we're rethinking finance. The management of money is about choices. What are the norms and models underpinning our financial system? Who was the financial system meant to serve and does it work the way that represents our values? If it doesn't, we need new norms and models that incorporate all externalities in service of greater, more positive outcomes for all stakeholders, human and planetary. We need to place a close attention to how these new norms and models affect the most marginalized among us and do all of this with an intersectional lens, considering the many identities people have, including gender, race, or ethnicity, sexuality, ability, neurodiversity, or other factors as not siloed and present in the same body in many instances, as important to the ways we work and fund things going forward. We're rethinking power, who has control, authority or influence, and how do we equitably distribute these things? In short, we're rethinking everything. What do we need to redress? What do we need to make amends for? Exploitation, the exploitation of black bodies, women's bodies of every ethnicity, the carceral system, immigrants and refugees, modern slavery with permeates our consumerist culture and tastes nearly every supply chain. We need to redress removal of indigenous people, modern gentrification and displacement. We need to redress extraction and insist on regeneration in our land and natural resource use. We need to redress extractive practices that have harmed black, indigenous, and other communities of color. In short, we need to redress injustice. And what or who do we need to liberate? Bob Marley said it best. We need to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery. We need to liberate people, both literally and figuratively. We need to liberate our planet. Our planet is at a tipping point relative to climate change. Once thresholds have been crossed, all the rest may be moved. We need to liberate our spirit. This goes hand in hand with imagination. Right now is not about incremental change. We need revolutionary change. The will, the collective resolve, the internal fortitude to sustain this fight as this road will be long, but it's the only way for us to get free. We need to liberate the narrative from the shackles of other people's limited imaginations and agendas. We need to shift from scarcity to abundance, impossible to possible, despair to joy, individualized to collective and shared, self-serving to living in service of others. In short, change the narrative we tell ourselves about what we're capable of and the reality we can design and deliver for ourselves. So to be a good ancestor in this moment for me means to shout no fair at the top of my lungs and find folks modeling justice in their work, folks thinking about how to live more justly as founders and investors or other actors in our financial system. I wanna find the people who can teach us history so we can learn from it. The people who think in an interdisciplinary way, who recognize the world is not neatly compartmentalized, but rather complex and inextricably interconnected. Those who can help us understand and who will lead us to a more just future, impossible to imagine though it may be. And make no mistake. This is Octavia Butler level science fiction. This is the Jetsons, but science fiction has always helped us see an alternate reality we have never experienced ourselves. We need a new imagination so that we can create a new shared vision for our next normal. To be good ancestors, we much as a dream the impossible to make possible a new more just reality for my niece and nephew, for their children and their children's children and so on, honoring those who fought before us. I will not unsee and I will fight for a new imagination and a new narrative. If you too are rethinking everything and the ways that I'm trying to be a good ancestor, resonate with you, please share that in the chat. We're taking ideas for what to do beyond the podcast with this concept and these principles. Should you know someone who embodies what I've shared, I'd love to use this platform to lift them up and share their wisdom. We are looking for investors, allies and strategists to work with us to build this concept further. We look forward to working in solidarity on the reconstruction of a more just next normal.