 I'm pleased to introduce Supriya Lopez-Pillai, she is the executive director and board member of the Hidden Leaf Foundation. The foundation is dedicated to strengthening the connection between inner awareness and collective liberation. They do this work through long-term low barrier grant making primarily and I'm doing kind of succinct versions because for time purposes. Next we have Abdel Lopez. They are the capital, oh sorry, they are the director of capital activation at Justice Funders. They work with foundations to shift their investment practices to align with just transition values. Abdel is joining us with over a combined decade of experience in undocumented culture, sorry youth organization arts culture grant making and indigenous led economic development. Lastly, this is Lauren Restler here to my left. She is the reinvest project co-director at Climate Justice Alliance. She got her start organizing against full coal fired power plants in Washington state. This led her on a career path in activism focused really around demanding divestment from prison profiteers from prison profiteers and fossil fuel companies. She is currently part of growing the reinvest in our power campaign which is aimed at infusing community owned climate solutions with a hundred million over the next few years. So I'm very happy to be here with all of you and excited to kick off this conversation. And so to start we thought we would frame the conversation around some terms that you're going to be hearing. So one term is just transition and I'll pass that to Lauren. Hi everyone. We wanted to do a little bit of audience participation because we know that a lot of what we're talking about really depends like we are trying to change the culture around investing and really focus on impact. And so I wanted to start by just asking everyone in the room for a show of hands who feels like you have a deep understanding of what we mean when we say just transition. Great. Well hopefully by the end of this session you're going to get a lot deeper into it. And I'm going to pass it to Abdel to ask another question. Thank you. And don't be shy. Raise your hand. Hi. So the next question is raise your hand if you have a well-defined definition of risk that you regularly use in your work. Thank you. Hi everyone. Have you heard of the term non-extractive financing? No. I'm very intrigued by all of those hand races. For a little bit of context the Climate Justice Alliance where I work is a member alliance of 89 frontline community-led organizations from Puerto Rico to Guam. And we have been convening to build power for communities, climate justice communities for the last decade. And the work that we're doing now is really exciting. We're building what we call the our power loan fund. And we believe that a huge part of creating a just transition, so really a shift from our current extractive economy that relies on the exploitation of people and planet towards an economy that is not just the destination. It's not just all of the good things we're trying to build, but it's the praxis of how we get there. It's repair. It's centering relationship in everything that we do. And it's trusting that communities who are most impacted have the solutions and know what to do with it if they have the resources shifted towards them. And so with the our power loan fund what we're aiming to do is build worker cooperatives in our member communities. And I get the the pleasure and opportunity to work with Supriya and Abdel on a regular basis. And we kind of hold different roles in the the ecosystem that's shifting capital and trying to change the culture of impact investing. So we are we are on the front lines moving resources building the projects on the ground. So we'll talk more about that later. But I'll pass it to Abdel to talk a little bit about your role. Thank you. So Justice Funders is an intermediary organization that really is accountable to just transition movements, movement partners specifically. But we work with funders to help organize them and really start to move resources and assets into these regenerative economic projects that are led by by POC frontline communities all across the country. And so we do that through a constellation of different entry points and programs that help our funders really understand what a just transition is and really move from the more extractive philanthropic practices that they're currently upholding and toward more regenerative transformative practices that will eventually activate a just transition in philanthropy and really support the self determination of these frontline communities. So for example, one of the tangible ways that we're doing that is through our work with the just transition investment community. And that was really an ongoing community practice that was born out of our first framework called Resonance that we launched in 2018 that really starts to quantify how philanthropy has been historically extractive from our movement partners and has stolen off the back of by POC frontline communities and in the framework we demonstrate how philanthropy funders can move away from that. And from that, we really had amazing momentum in conversation with some of our funders in our network who really wanted to do more than just focus on their grant making for our ethos and really start moving away from investing in the global stock market and the extractive economy and really align that with their values and their grant making ethos. So to do that, we launched a dedicated program called the integrated capital team at Justice funders. We launched our just transition investment community, which Supriya is a part of along with two other foundations that I see in the audience. And so that is about a dozen or so funders who have demonstrated that they are in alignment with the just transition movement aren't working according to according to the values and principles of the just transition and really start to experiment with the other 95% that we don't really talk about in philanthropy and really have only focused on the 5%. So we're trying to open up the conversation and start divesting like I said from the global stock market investing in regenerative economies. And so we launched to do that we codified a framework called the just transition investment framework that is born out of the JT framework that Lauren just mentioned and really starts to codify how through different quadrants through different practices investors can actually activate their investments toward a just transition. So in that, and we can talk about that more later, but in that framework, we really start to highlight and underline the importance of not just shifting capital into the hands of frontline communities, but also shifting power. And I think that really is the innovation here that we're speaking to is how do we shift assets into the hands of frontline communities so that they can steward those resources since they are the ones that know how to steward those resources for their communities and for their, you know, for their kin on the ground. So through that, we launched the framework. Like I said, we are also in the middle of capitalizing our integrated capital fund, which is a closed and 20 million dollar fund. We're inviting investors in the JTIC in the community to invest and really start supporting this idea of shifting toward a more regenerative economy. And it is a 100% community controlled loan fund. So people like Lauren and other movement partners are the ones making decisions as to how much capital is deployed to whom and when. Again, this idea of communities stewarding the resources instead of the investors. And we're flipping the script here. What we're asking for our investors is to start to challenge the idea of power and really give up power so that those again on the frontline, and I can't say this enough, start stewarding those resources. So we're in the middle of capitalizing that. And then we are deploying capital in 2024. And we can talk more about that. But again, flipping the script to rewriting the rules. I mean, philanthropy has created the rules and we can rewrite them. And it's about experimenting. It's about challenging the status quo and being curious and leading into curiosity and being unafraid as long as you are in right relationship with movement partners and with the values and principles of a just transition. So I'll stop there. But that's just a slice of what we do. And I'll hand it to Supriya to talk more. Hi, Supriya. Yeah, if you want to do a quick maybe recap of what you're doing so we can jump into framing these terms and then into the deeper conversation. Yeah, thanks. Hi, everyone. I am Supriya Lopez-Polay with the Hidden Leaf Foundation, a family foundation that's been around for about 30 years. And, Alana, when you introduced, you shared about our low barrier grant making, which is one of the most, the longest way in which the foundation has strived to meet its mission, which is about building and cultivating inner awareness at the individual and the collective level to make the progressive and social justice movements more effective. So the belief is how are we showing up in the spaces and in our movement work being aware of that? Because if we don't, we often short curtail ourselves and we aren't able to make the victories and achieve the goals that we have set forward for ourselves. So I bring this up because we turn that lens back on ourselves. There was two important things that happened that we were organized by the field, by the movement that we'd been long supporting by our intermediaries who said, hey, how are you looking at your own investments as being part of that mission? And as Abdel had earlier mentioned, you make your money over here so that you can do your grant making over here. And how could we lose that binary? And so in turning that lens back on ourselves, we saw that one, we are actually a financial institution. And we are more than a charitable institution in that way. We are a financial institution and we had way more tools at our disposal. So beyond our grant making, what were the other tools that we could use not just to make money over here so that we could do quote unquote good over here, but what were the tools that we could actually cultivate and open doors to financial mechanisms that we are privy to and turn that those resources and that control back over to community to invest in the solutions that we were giving smaller amounts of dollars for in our grant making. So I can share more about that, but it's just to say we went from low barrier grant making to low barrier community investments and what we call deep impact investments. And it strengthened our impacting investing overall, through the work we've done with with this lovely set of folks up here. Great. Thanks, everyone. So do we want to dig into what a just transition really is if you want to kick us off, Lauren, what we're talking about here? Yeah, and I think we started getting into it, but a just transition is a strategic framework that is principles and processes for moving us from our current economy, which is based on exploitation of people, exploitation of land and moving through a process of repair because it is not just a jump from one to the other. It's a process of reckoning with history of deepening relationships. And a just transition is a transition to an economy that is sustained with care that centers dignity in the workplace that centers community self-determination at every level. And that's what we're seeing and it's been amazing. I think I've spent the last 15 years fighting the bad from pipelines to prisons. And right now it has been such an incredible feeling to be in the dream space and to be with our partners who are doing that. They're fighting every single day. They're fighting policies. They're fighting infrastructure that is poisoning their communities and they're dreaming about what their communities need. And it's beautiful. One of our projects that we were able to fund this year, Invest in, is the Southwest Workers Union down in San Antonio, Texas. And they are building a community resiliency hub that is going to be a place for folks that are impacted by climate disasters to gather, get resources, get what they need. They're also going to have temporary housing for people experiencing domestic violence and people in immigration processes. They are creating a safe place in their community that is buying for them. And it also has a revenue model. They're going to be renting out office spaces. They have a parking infrastructure that is going to be generating revenue from people attending games at the stadium down the block. And that's what we need, is we need infrastructure by and for an owned by community. And so I'm excited to be working with these folks to make that happen. Thanks. There are a couple other terms floating around risk and return. Someone want to jump on that and break that down a little. So typically when we look at risk, and I would say historically as a foundation, we looked at just kind of the risk that we take on as a foundation financially when we invest in something. And this process of getting with how do we resource a just transition with our full body of tools at our disposal actually asked us to turn the notion of risk on its head for us. We realize that we are one, we scrutinize our grants way more than we scrutinize our investments. And we don't see that as having any financial return right on our grant side, but we look at it as having 100% impact return. And then we also realize like who's shouldering the risk. At the end of the day, the reality is the communities at the front line are shouldering all the risk where we are putting in the pennies that we typically put in from philanthropy. And we're investing the massive amounts of our endowments where we say, well, we're not going to shoulder any of that risk. So in this process, as we kind of shift our notion and shift our resources in investing in communities, we're doing two things. One, as Lauren had earlier said earlier in the day to me impact first 100% impact first and impact first for the communities. That's what we're going for. And we have a duty of responsibility and the capacity to shoulder the financial risk. So we do that through and we can talk about this some more through patient capital through community terms. So we at Hidden Leaf have devoted a set of resources and this is done through a large level of math that is sometimes beyond me to be honest with you. But the terms that are set for us are different than the terms that the community sets for themselves. So the terms we set for ourselves on these resources is we don't expect a return. We don't need a return on those resources. And then we work with an intermediary partner who's been really fabulous full spectrum advisors who set community terms which Lauren can share more about how communities set terms. Why? Why not give them another grant? Why not just call it a grant and give these larger sums of money? So we went from like a $30,000 grant to coupling that for CJA. We went to I think $75,000 or $80,000 grant to a $500,000 investment. I think we were first in on their community loan fund. And we see that the returns are going back into the community. The impact is 100%. We can shoulder that risk. And Lauren, you might want to share if you want what were the community terms that were actually set and why were they set? But that's a little bit about risk and return. Yeah, I can share briefly. So I wanted to really talk about the importance of co-creation at every stage in the process. We co-create with our funding partners who are investing in the funds. We co-create. Our governing body is made up of other climate justice alliance members who have their own worker cooperatives who have their own loan funds in their community and have the expertise. And the most important thing for us is we don't want any of our community members to fail. And we will do whatever it takes to support them with capacity building, to support them with technical assistance, and then to move the resources needed to capitalize these projects. And they are our community. And some of the terms that we've set are we have 10-year terms for the loans that we are giving out. We have 0% interest currently on our first deployments. We want to take the burden of reporting off. And so instead we're in conversation. We're already doing this. We have a technical assistance as part of what we do within our Power Loan Fund. We have project stewards who are in communication with all of our projects on a monthly or quarterly basis, making sure that if they need help finding an accountant that can work on what their specific needs are, they're going to get it. If they need help talking through profit sharing structures and things like that among their membership, and they want support with that, we can support with that. So that's a little bit about the terms. And we've got a lot more. And we're also happy to make those terms available to any folks that actually would like to look at the documents themselves and see what we're doing. We're all about transparency. Similarly, Justice Funders with our Integrated Capital Fund, we just released our investment policy statement that really outlines some of the values and principles that go behind the redefinition of risk and return. And so that was launched publicly and we're hosting a public webinar where you get to ask our movement partners who have authored that on November 2nd, if you're interested in learning more about that. But this is again the Integrated Capital Closed Fund that works as a demonstration project for funders to really start to experiment with if they can already experiment institutionally with us and really use this as an opportunity to understand how to be in right relationship with movements and invest using right relationship values with our movement partners. So we really hope that this Integrated Capital Fund is a way for funders to have an ongoing sort of political education around this work. So I think, similarly, it's just building on top of and with what communities are also building on the ground and really amplifying this work and creating urgency because the future is literally happening right now and our movement partners are building that and we need to be resourcing them so that we can start looking at seven generations down the line and really starting to put them, the people, the future generation as part of the people that we think will be impacted by our work with our investments too. Yeah, thanks everyone. Yeah, definitely. Underscore is the fun big fun now big and now aspect of this conversation. What does catalytic capital look like when moving in solidarity with movement partners? I think I touched on it a little bit and you two should definitely feel free to expound on this as well. When we talk about the term catalytic capital, it actually has a definition. It means capital that's patient. So these longer terms capital that has concessionary terms, which we also shared some of the terms for us, for example, on a loan fund, having a negative 100% return is a concessionary term and it recognizes that we make a lot of money and have and hold a lot of wealth that we have the capacity to release more. And I want to say that was not easy as a foundation to come to that decision to come to that agreement in addition to other mechanisms, including asset transfers to indigenous communities as part of that view of concessionary terms. And it's a different regard to what risk and return is. So that is some of what we mean by catalytic capital. And what it looks like, as Lauren had been saying earlier, is we are centering first our relationships with the partners that we know hold the solutions to the problems that we face. So that relationship leads how we design, think about, and execute these kinds of investments. And I'm proud to say that we are organized by the field and by the intermediaries like Justice Funders Network to show us and demonstrate the pathway that we aren't just on some frontier saying, you know, we as philanthropy are first in, we wouldn't have been first in if they hadn't hadn't organized us. So that's really important to know our role and it's not naive either. We recognize that we have been relying on them for the impact on the grant making side with smaller amounts of dollars for such a long time. What does it take to unlock more dollars? Lauren's not just talking about dreaming, there's actual projects on the ground. And these are not all just projects that are brand new. There are projects that have been in the works. We've been in conversations with communities for years and it's like, how are you going to actualize that with a paltry amount of money? So we need to shift that relationship. And these are all grounded in the principles of the just transition. We talk about ourselves as a foundation that centers love, that spent centers spirit and we see resources like money, like water, they need to flow. They cannot be damned and we cannot control or demarcate them. So these are some of the ways in which that catalytic capital flows and works in relationship to communities like Climate Justice Alliance's work. Yeah, thanks, Supriya. I think that leads well into another question of round, we're talking about what's working and this is a great example. But on that point, what needs to change so that these resources are released in a more effective way, just and effective way? I think the framework that we launched also touches on and codifies some of the best practices that our movement partners identified as being in right relationship with them and can start to unfetter their self-determination. So things like, I mean, sorry, can you repeat the question, actually, because there's a lot here. Yeah, just like what needs to change for these funds to be released in a more just and effective way? I mean, you guys have figured out something here, but if you can elaborate on that. I want to say like first fun big, this was the title of our meeting here today, this panel. But what needs to change is, as we were talking at the beginning, was this binary that we make money over here so that we can deploy some grants over here. We have to think, and even our impact investing, the way that we do our impact investing is often we kind of confer that to somebody else outside of our organization. We've invited our, I want to thank our traditional investing firm, RBC, Wealth Management, they were really helpful in showing us that we could do more. And then we have our partners like, if you've met Amaka Agbo in this space from Katali, she is a total pioneer in this work, and Full Spectrum Labs, who we've been working with, Justice Funders Network, who can show us, what does it mean that you can do more than your grants? And what does it mean that you can deploy impact dollars differently than the way that you're doing it that's earning money, whether it's over here in private equity or in venture capital or in the stock market? There are these other tools that you have at your disposal, and those are the kinds of things we need to get creative about now. And those are the kinds of resources we need to unlock, and they are far, we need to be giving far greater dollars right now, which we can talk about again at the end. But that is the big change that needs to happen. And it's not just because we can or we should that it's morally just, but this is the moment these, these same issues that we're facing now are not going anywhere. And the investment that we can make now is so much, it's going to be so much more cost effective than the investment we're going to need to make in 10, 15 years when it might be too late. Amazing. Yeah. And I think there's also something to be said about co-creation, again, underscoring this idea of building with those that you're already in community with. So asking your grantees if you are a foundation, what else, how else can you support in resourcing them? So already started, there's already an open waterway there of funding that you can start to amplify and really start investing in. And then I think another thing too is challenging your own, this is, I mean, this is just as much institutional work as it is personal work. So challenging your own ideas, again, of the status quo, asking questions, it's not enough to just know how much you're spending in your grants, right? It's really asking the questions and bridging the programmatic work with your investment work. So being curious, again, just to ask the right questions. And then also being in community with people who are doing the work like NRGTAC work with Supriya and other funders, they're constantly cross-pollinating and helping each other out and fortifying and calcifying this infrastructure of divesting. So, I mean, there's a lot here that we can, yeah. Lauren? Yeah, I'm going to build off that a little bit and say that I know at the beginning I said just transition is a strategy, not a destination. And two major components of that strategy are changing the rules and ending the bad. And I think that we often, I'm curious how many of you have experienced that there's like when there's no conversation happening between programmatic staff and investment staff in foundations, it happens in investment spaces as well. And the communities that are receiving the grants see that one arm of the foundation is investing in the corporations that are causing harm directly that are creating the problems that their money is then going to try and solve. And I think that another thing that we talk a lot about is the emergence of false solutions. Capitalism is adaptive and what that means is there are a lot of people who have been a part of the harm that's happened within the energy sector, for example, who are trying to capitalize and take control and create monopolies of renewable energy. And that's not what we need. We need democratized energy solutions. We need community-owned solutions. We need to transition governance. And one thing, yeah, what we say at Climate Justice Alliance is if we're not prepared to govern, then we're not prepared to win. And our communities are prepared to govern and actively doing it. And we just need the resources to flow to make it happen. And we need some accountability, especially on the philanthropic side in the investment world to say, don't harm us on one hand and then try and give us the crumbs on the other. Yeah, thanks. That leads me to my next question, which is, what does climate justice work look like when fully resourced? Well, I already talked to you about the Southwest Workers Union and what their building is beautiful. We also made our first deployment to the Detroit Black Food Security Network in Detroit. Detroit is a majority black city. There hasn't been a black owned grocery store since 2014 in the city. And what they're doing right now, it's almost done. Construction is almost completed on a community cooperative grocery store that's going to source from black farmers in the community. It's going to have intergenerational food education. It's going to be an organizing space where people will gather, share their visions of the city, like build power. And it has taken them over a decade to capitalize this project. Why has it taken a decade to get the resources to build a community cooperative grocery store that is so much more? It's going to be an epicenter for so much transformation. And we're so happy that we're providing some of the final funding needed to really get produce on the shelf, honestly. But that's the kind of thing that becomes possible. And I think that that's what I would also encourage folks in the audience to really sit with is go and see the things that you're funding. Get to meet the people on the ground. Get to hear about what the impact is going to be and the visions and what people have been building towards for decades in so many places. Because you feel it immediately. And the impact is deep. I think one last point that I want to make is a question that we get a lot is, but how is investing in climate justice a scalable solution to the climate crisis? How many people have heard that before? And what we say is distributed scale. We are all about distributed scale. Get it to community food systems. We don't need monocultures. We know that monocultures kill ecosystems. What we need is a million community-owned solutions all across the country, all across the world. We need land back. We need to be transferring ownership and giving it to the stewardship of people that have been stewarding it for hundreds if not thousands of years. I don't think we need to say anything else. Here we go. That's a wrap. That's great. That makes total sense. What scale of resources are we talking about to do this? I could share a little bit about the transition from a foundation that started out when I joined five years ago from giving $30,000 grants, then moving to $75,000 and $80,000 grants, then to $500,000 in investments and asset transfers to a variety of organizations and groups. That's what it takes. I know somebody earlier told me not to call myself a small foundation because we don't, relative to the field in particular, we're sitting on a lot of resources. But what it takes to unlock the imagination and the capacity and the ability to then go from $30,000 to $500,000 is what it's required at this time. It was a lot of hard conversations around risk and return and our capacity as a part-time staffed foundation. It was leaning into the values that we held on our grant-making side and the values that we held with staff that had come from movement work to lead the ability for us to make different kinds of investments at that scale. Groups have been not just talking about but imagining, I love what you said, Lauren, that we are prepared to govern. One of the other groups that we work with, Luis Sanchez from Power California, says we are practicing the world we seek. So we are ready. We are ready when no one else wants this. No one else wants to invest in our communities. When it all falls apart, we are ready to govern. We are ready to govern when all of those resources are coming to us as well. We have plans. We have various things we have been investing in ourselves as a community. So it takes leaning into those relationships and it takes also, you know, honestly, we had to also have a lot of convincing with our investment advisors that we could do this. But we were really lucky that we had a set of investment advisors that were already movement aligned, that were already in the same shared values to some extent. And communication across these binary of the foundation of the investments over here and the grants over here. So we had to very much have very much uncomfortable conversations about unlocking a half a million dollars for us when we have never done that before. And I know other foundations, Catali has been doing million dollar investments, you know, one after the other. That is the kind of scale and even more. We know that there's no level, there's no bottom to the absorption of that resources for the field and the imagination and the know how to execute those solutions. I want to say that we are exploring this on so many fronts. And so how many of you have been following the Inflation Reduction Act money that's been coming up? Yeah. So there is a pot of $27 billion that is going into the greenhouse gas emissions reduction fund. And when it was announced, we heard at Climate Justice Alliance from a lot of folks that there were coalitions of people who from the traditional finance sector who were ready to just immediately take all of that money. They were like, they were consulting with us to say like, will you support our applications? And not actually treating us as like possible partners. And so at the Climate Justice Alliance, we came together with movement aligned CDFI. So like the working world with People's Solar Energy Fund, so many folks that are building the infrastructure at scale and also the tools that we need in order to move this money. And we just applied for $750 million from the GGRF. And this is the biggest, this is by far, this is magnitudes greater than we have ever approached. But we knew that frontline communities deserve access to this money and they're not going to get it if it's all held by people who are from within the industry already. We need to be able to distribute it to the funds that actually have accountable relationships with community. And what we're also trying to do is scale up and prepare our members. If we don't get the money, if we are not awarded to be one of the pass-through entities for this funding, we want to make sure our members have the tools to apply for it for whoever is awarded the funds. And to do that, one of the things that we really need is grant money for technical assistance for members to scale up. So we have, I'm sure Abdel could talk more about the other members of the JTIC. But for folks that have affordable housing, like how do we scale up so that folks are ready to do retrofits? How are we leveraging groups like our member uproads, which is Brooklyn-based, one of the oldest Puerto Rican organizations, climate justice organizations in the country. They're building a massive community-owned solar project. They've gotten a land from the city in order to build their infrastructure and it's going to power over 250 homes in Sunset Park, which is a neighborhood that's right in a corridor where a lot of shipping happens. They've been fighting against so many extractive industries for so long. And right now they are looking for capital to build energy that is good for their community and that is owned by their community. I think to that point, a phrase that comes to mind and that we work with funders on or expand on that phrase is, invest where there's already existing relationships, but really the phrase is, instead of building a mile wide in an inch deep, you want to flip the script and build an inch wide and a mile deep. So really start to calcify those relationships and the replicability of that work can be done across the country and we see that with the co-ops. We see that with different movement partners who may seemingly on the surface be working in different program areas but are all connected toward this regenerative economy. And so what does it mean when you fund climate justice alliance through, for example, our integrated capital fund, you're also investing in all these other projects around land back, rematriation, et cetera. So I think that's a phrase that really stuck out as we're doing this work too and that is all, it's all emergent. There is no, I guess blueprint, we are creating the blueprint as we are working with our movement partners. So we're also unafraid of this emergence and Adrian Murray Brown always reminds us that the emergence is where the beauty lies and what you pay attention to grows. So pay attention to movement partners who have already held so much wisdom and are stewarding so many different projects to seed the future that we deserve. I just want to ask, is everyone familiar with the term integrated capital? Is that a, there's some, I just want to say that I want to underscore the point that Lauren made that as we make these investments, we did not shift and other foundations that are in the same boat with us, it's not shifting to, you know, all loans, but recognizing that we need to put our grants alongside our investments that they're both extremely valuable and important to the communities. And so I just wanted to underscore that point that Lauren, you had made to make sure folks understand what integrated capital is. Yeah, thanks everyone. I'm going to jump into some questions from the audience, but first I just had a quick question for Abdel being kind of in the matchmaker role a little bit. Are you seeing an uptick in interest from investors coming to you and how's that, you know, how, what's that like? Yeah, 100%. I mean, the more conversations we have, I think we peak enough interest. However, the beautiful thing about being an intermediary is that we get to work with our movement partners to really create a criteria for determining offenders or investors readiness to support this work because there is a real conversation to be had around what money we accept to. So through those conversations, we've codified some, I don't want to say requirements, but some values that are really core and integral to this work that if we do want to activate a just transition, again, I think you just said it best, we are practicing the world that we want to live in. And so in that, we're doing that in every step of the way from who's money we accept to our IPS to the way we deploy capital, etc. So there's interest and I think there's still a lot of work to be done, which is why Justice Funders is in a very unique position because we work with funders who may be on the more extractive end and really start working slowly with them to go toward more transformative practices through consulting through programmatic public workshops, etc. Great, thanks. I'm glad to hear that there's interest in growing interest. So a question here from the audience is how do we account for the transformation of our communities as a result of interregional slash rural urban migration? And kind of the second statement is there with acknowledgement of privilege that comes with mobility. I think and this I feel like this is a much bigger conversation than we even have space for today. But I think that's something we think about a lot, especially with the impacts of climate change, forcing people to migrate, there's migration of choice, and then there's migration of necessity. And that comes up a lot at Climate Justice Alliance. We have members in Puerto Rico and Guam that are now being impacted by hurricanes every single year. We have folks on the West that have been hit by wildfires year after year after year, flooding in the South. We are seeing conditions worsening that are requiring migration, that are requiring this. And what we want to do is shore up the community members and the community institutions that already exist in these places, build the leadership of people who have lived in place to create a welcoming space for folks that are leaving because they have to. I think there's a much bigger conversation too of like we need to build a space for this transition all over the United States because you know I have a background working on abolition work and we would go to prison industry conferences and they are building prisons to incarcerate migrants down the line. And that's unacceptable. This is not a just transition, this is not, this is incarceration. And I appreciate bringing in the long lens, the long perspective to this conversation and I would say this is a reason that we need to fund big, fund now, and fund in place. Fund the people who have solutions and are creating loving places that can hold the change that is required by the conditions that we have allowed with climate change. I think we often talk about centering the communities that are most impacted because they have the solutions, right? This is a common phrase we use. It's definitely a belief that we have and I want to add the caveat that it's not just anybody. Like I feel that the work of CJA exemplifies that it is about communities that have history, it's a connection we call about translocal organizing. So when Abdel talks about go a mile deep and an inch wide and you connect that mile deep and an inch wide across a series of communities, you have what we call translocal organizing. You have a tethered network such that when we have climate disasters, climate conditions that cause more migration and a capitalist system that isn't working at all for everybody. We have more migration. We have communities that are enabled to be able to handle and work with that migration, even the example that you gave of Southwest Workers Union in San Antonio, Texas, building a center that is dedicated to that. And the other thing that I love about this movement work is that we get to work with networks that are rural and urban. We get to work with networks. CJA is spanning Guam, Puerto Rico, the US South. These are ways in which these communities are poised and ready for what's happening now and is only going to be growing as we move forward. I think similarly with the Integrated Capital Fund, we look to our stewards, our movement partners, to guide investors into where the capital should be deployed since they're the ones on the ground really doing the work. So they're the ones who completely control how the capital is deployed and to whom. Some people, some beneficiaries are new to our network as well, but that's why we rely on our movement partners to start building that network and that infrastructure so that funders can also start learning about these different efforts across the country. Yeah, thanks. Another question here is does or slash will the Just Transition Investment Framework support community in the global south or only in the US? That's a very good question. And it can be applied. Okay, so the framework is emergent. It's cyclical. It's not prescriptive. And it is meant for institutions to really look at the quadrants and start imagining how you can apply that and start experimenting across borders. I mean, even at Justice Funders, we're exploring how that can be contextualized in the global south across different regions. We're just starting our international work very slowly, but surely we are hoping to expand this framework. But really, it was informed by our movement partners who have experience across the world. So it's not just pertaining to the US, but really has codified the values and practices that can be implemented really anywhere. I think it's important to name that the Just Transition concept was born out of solidarity with the global south, that there are funds like Buen Vivir coming from the global south that have informed how we even came across this term. I'm even thinking of Jose Bravo, who has the Just Transition Network, who does work across the border and into the global south. So specifically the framework that Justice Funders uses is experimenting first in the US. But the concept of Just Transition is deeply informed by movement work and alliances in the global south, which is also connected to a variety of economic sovereignty efforts. And I just want to say that climate justice alliance is based in the United States. And I think one of our core values is combating imperialism and recognizing that the US government is a main driver of destabilization and continued colonization and most of the global south and that being in solidarity means doing the work here to redistribute, stop funding war, start funding communities, hold accountability for the history and legacy of violence and destabilization of governments in the global south that has happened. And we do that in, we gather at the cop negotiations, we gather through our members at Via Campesina, we gather with our partners at Grassroots Global Justice and we hold space and share what we're learning on the ground from our different places and build international solidarity that way. Great. Do we have any more audience questions? I wanted to pause and make sure we have time for that. I'm curious to hear about how investors find, you know, we talk about movement partners and how do you, how does that come together? Because I'm guessing these movement partners can be quite small and localized and so like how did they get on the radar? I feel like one way is places like this. So you're meeting us here. I want to just like shout out some of the other movement-owned community investment vehicles that exist because they're popping up all over the place and they're doing incredible work. I don't know how many folks here have heard of the KEPRA Institute in Indianapolis, but they are doing incredible work incubating businesses, primarily Black-owned businesses in Indianapolis and they have a really incredible model of a flipped investment structure. So local residents making $30,000 a year or less can invest and are guaranteed a 7% return on their investment and institutional investors are holding that by receiving a low interest repayment for their fund. But that's the kind of thing that we're looking, they're trying to build community wealth, they're trying to build generational wealth and they see it at every level. They want community members to be investors too and I think that's a beautiful model. We've got some amazing folks in the room. We've got folks from EFOD here that are building the infrastructure for agroecology projects, food justice across the country. We've got folks from Native Women Lead who are here investing in women-owned Indigenous businesses and building a culture of entrepreneurship among Indigenous women. We've got folks that write to the City Alliance who are doing really great things with folks in everywhere from mobile home parks to apartment buildings and I think something that we like to talk about is when communities own and govern their own housing, they're not going to be evicted. When communities own and govern their food systems, they are not going to go hungry and that is the impact that we are talking about. I think we have a very important resource right here with Justice Funders Network. As a foundation investing in this, sometimes you just can't go it alone and we wouldn't be here if not for Justice Funders really educating us and bringing us along in a cadre of others that are doing this and then now Justice Funders has a fund in which people don't know, people don't know enough about it but people often don't know, well, where do I start? So I don't know, Avdale, if you want to talk a little bit more about the fund and how it could be a good place to consider moving some resources. Yes, that is the Integrated Capital Fund that I've talked a little bit about already that is 100% community controlled. Again, closed and fun for the purpose of demonstrating to the field that this can be done and it can be done now and so really, again, can't reiterate enough learning. Actually, this is a good plug for us November 2nd webinar on the IPS for this fund. We will be hosting online so check that out justicefunders.org where you can learn more about the different vehicles that we are supporting and that you can support learn about the terms again that the movement partners have set for their investors. And I just want to add that it's not just a fund where if you want you can just go kind of put your resources in there but it's actually an opportunity to learn which I don't know on the other side of the table in many of the funds that we would invest in through kind of more traditional investing. I couldn't always access the way to learn how that investing happened. Justice Funders is a community and the fund itself creates community amongst philanthropic partners to learn and activate how else they can move capital. So I just wanted to share that as well. It's been an important space for us. Yeah, thanks. I'm also curious to hear a little bit, Supriya, maybe you can elaborate more as the foundation you mentioned you had had to have some real tough conversations to, you know, you did a big shift it sounds like as a foundation. What were some of the considerations and how did you kind of eventually get to the decision you got to? I think one thing that's really important to name is our own personal storytelling. So the foundation had a story of how the family had accumulated wealth in one generation and Dave Brown who was the founder of the Hindley Foundation was a Buddhist and in his lifetime he saw that this was the best way to give away that wealth through his Buddhist principles. And through the process of the work that we did around understanding what are what is integrated capital, what do we mean by restorative economics through work with Amaka Agbo and then with our friends at Full Spectrum and then with our friends here at Justice Funders, the story started to change. I wish Tara Brown was here who is a board member of the Hindley Foundation. She went back and she said well what is our relationship to this capital? How do we take you might have heard us talk about seven generations that's a common framework that we all have taken on but it's actually a principle of looking seven generations back and seven generations forward and seeing ourselves in a full arc of humanity and time and our responsibility is to that full arc and it comes from Indigenous principles. And from that Tara really started to shift the story of the family and recognize well we've been here in California for seven generations how have we actually accumulated that wealth? What is our relationship to that? We started giving Shumi Land Tax which is a land tax, an Indigenous land tax to the Olone here in the Bay Area and that was thanks to Justice Funders. They said could you give a little and through that it opened up the story in the relationship to the resources that the family had cultivated and if the principle was that we want to give these resources away to the way that it would maximally benefit community it opened up the door to our first asset transfer to Sigourte Land Trust. And it was you know there were conversations around guilt and there were conversations around responsibility and now the foundation has a commitment to continue to do asset transfer as one of those tools in the toolbox. I don't know how long we'll do it for we're in the experiment we have a commitment to being an experiment in philanthropy. So those were some of the hard but it took reckoning with the past and let me tell you Tara's not here to tell her story but I will say that she was scared to say to her siblings actually you know what there's this other long view that we didn't take into account and I want to be the leader in this family to start to repair that and we recognize that these resources are but a drop in the bucket. I want to mention also part of the story was that the families Dave Brown's wealth came from commercial real estate so there was a sort of full circle conversation about real estate and who's real estate and what does land back mean and that was also coupled with oh my gosh we have our foundation dedicated to inner awareness practices and we recognize that part of organizing requires at least we fund community organizing requires you know supporting indigenous practices which we which which we haven't done so coupled with that we expanded the the grant making and the integrated capital approach to to indigenous communities as well so there's something here about connecting the dots between our personal stories to wealth wealth accumulation and the ability to unlock some of the imagination and the kinds of resources that we need to to give they're all kind of tied together they're not a binary they're not separate the story of self and the story of money is is quite connected. Yeah thanks money is a very emotional thing yeah um curious to hear around and maybe any of you can speak to this but how to pull you know Hidden Leaf Foundation seems like a really nice fit maybe low hanging fruit to like get over here to to experiment with this just with your philosophy it sounds like but what about getting more more of those investors that are just familiar with them the extractive capital and getting them to shoulder the risk and move over to this non-extractive I just want to say we were not low hanging fruit in the beginning okay I bet you played hard to get we're like oh my gosh but I just want to add that part of the journey is starting with impact investing you know we thought we were doing the best that we could do so I'll I'll say that but I would love to hear what my colleagues have to say. Yeah yeah the question being you know essentially how do we shift the business as usual you know what which we're talking about but how to incentivize more those investors that maybe aren't already poising them so yeah I really appreciate having accomplices like Supriya in our community and I think that's what we need more of is accomplices people who are willing to be champions within their own field the people who will ask the hard questions in the rooms of people that don't want to hear it like we need everyone here to be questioning business as usual to be asking is this really all we can do or is there a little bit more we know this partner like can we take can can we experiment can we be more flexible can we see that the impact of patient capital especially in a moment where funding now is going to make the difference between what we're seeing just with the climate with our community's long term with generational wealth funding now and and recognizing we're going to see the impact later we're going to see the impact on so many fronts basically we need you all to step up and join us and be a part of this community and be brave in the spaces that you have access to there's a there's like an there's an organizing principle where you divide three camps you're they're never going to be with you they're there maybe and they're with you right there's a there's a much better way Lauren could could explain this but this is a principle that I've used in funder organizing quite a bit and I would say we were uh they're there maybe and can you move can you move them and part of moving us I mean the conversations that we had the hard conversations we had a justice funders network some of the language just did not work for our trustees do not guilt us into giving us the giving the way that is not going to work so you know we talked about the impact there is actually a tangible impact and while we could be first in on on um cj's fund katali is first in on several other funds that we're doing so they're shouldering the risk let us shoulder the risk if for anyone who's interested let us shoulder the risk come along join us on this let's learn together and our $500,000 could be a drop in the bucket for somebody else or our $500,000 could be the thing that unlocks your capacity to give $50,000 whatever it takes so that's the way in which we're trying to figure out who we run with and how we we want to be we want to be a choir this is this is definitely a a metaphor of justice funders network so you know I think that like I said we started on the impact investing journey we were good ESG years we we did great ESG and we still do good ESG we're still trying to figure out how we make the current economy better while we simultaneously build this new economy we can we can walk and chew gum at the same time so you know there are ways if you're if you're like an ESG person and you're curious like this is the place to figure out how you could just dabble in and dabbling in actually has such great impact I just never forget when we were doing ESG screens and we realized we were funding solar panels on Walmart and we had so it's great we got the solar panels right and we had groups organizing against conditions at Walmart you know so that that just kind of brought up we can we can also look at the contradictions and we need to address the contradictions in our own story and what we're investing in and we we just keep moving that needle we keep moving that needle yeah I want to underscore that this is not work that can be done or should be done in isolation this is really going to require a community of practice and so the these conversations really start to create sort of a rip in the current status quo where we start to talk about how we can also redefine investment language through the lens of a just transition so currently we're co-creating a glossary of traditional investing terms so that your foundation staff can also talk about that with your investment staff because it requires agitators on all fronts and it really is an all hands on deck approach and we would love to have program officers for example know how to even approach your investment officers to understand where the investments are and have that conversation have those hard conversations and then have those hard and ask those hard questions so that institutionally you can collectively move toward a more transformative and you can ask those hard questions with dignity like I think that's the thing I love the role that justice funders plays they're going to ask the hard questions and they're going to center your dignity and they're going to do it with love and courage and that's what makes the difference like they're holding a grant and that comes from the connection to the front line so that might not work all the time for our investment advisors or for our trustees at first but you always come around somehow it always comes around so I think that that's a really important principle to this work yeah that's great and there's a couple audience questions that really dovetail nicely from what we're talking about one makes me think about your Walmart example how do you respond to the pushback that prioritizing equity risk equity risk the speed needed to address climate transition i.e those who say we're better off catering to carbon majors right i'm going to give a shout out to obron that's not in the room right now but just to say I was on a webinar recently with somebody from obron and I cannot do justice to the whole the whole company but I just want to say one principle that he said was well yeah you can make eight percent over here or ten percent but I'm going to tell you you can fund good work and I'm not even going to promise like the actual returns but he said something like six percent so you can fund solar on standing rock and Taj James who I work with at full spectrum advisors says wind is always going to blow and those those the you know the you can fund the wind the wind turbines on standing rock the wind is always going to blow those turbines are always going to go and there's a there's a return do you need do you know I think part of what we're talking about non-extractive financing is also what is enough we have we are living in a time of unprecedented billionaires and unprecedented poverty like what is enough and I think that the trade off that we we make is a false trade off that you you know we need to invest over here to make maximum return so we can give over here doesn't it doesn't add up for me it doesn't morally add up and it doesn't kind of add up you know even with the basic math so you know I think we we also want to change the script that you can't invest and actually have a return the question is who does that return go to who governs that return and some foundations and some folks aren't totally ready for that so there are other funds there are other we were just talking about there's we have something called deep impact investing so this is this portfolio is our community investing where we say we have a negative hundred percent return we are also looking at places where we can expect returns but they're not in wall street and and they're in communities that you know are self-governing and are looking for economic sovereignty and have amazing opportunities if the investor needs a return that is a question that cj comes up against and then we're shifting towards who controls that and within our fund for example to like these these are these are loans that we're dealing with we want community self-determination we want we want them to be able to pay their workers we want we want the businesses to be successful but we want the revenue generated and the profit sharing that will happen eventually to return to the fund so that more people can get access to this capital so that is the idea of a revolving fund is that the fund this isn't grant making this is money returning slowly but returning and then a seeding so many more projects I also just want to want to sit with the the idea I feel like a lot of this question also connected to the point that we made earlier about scale and like do you trust Exxon to create the energy solutions for the future with the track record that they have or do you trust community and think a lot of this is about combating the isolation that has been developing in our society too and really like building relationships and recognizing like the only way through is with the people around us and we uh investing can be a place of relationship okay thanks another really great question um is are you measuring impact and if so how would having impact metrics help foundations make the switch that Supriya spoke of you can all 100 percent expecting this question I first want to just start with in philanthropy we've always been measuring impact and it's been both a wonderful thing and actually part of the problem so what do you mean by impact you know and I think that's the question I don't know who posed this but like we as a foundation want to measure the conditions of satisfaction that the community has set for itself that's the that's the the litmus for us I don't want to get into metrics and data that then goes back to what I was saying before about the level of scrutiny that we put on our grants previously but I do want to say it is a real live question for us as to what we mean by impact and we hope we can be in a co-creation because we've just started this journey with with partners like CJA so we want to be in a co-creation process with them around what impact means and let them lead us to to to the answers around that yeah just underscoring that with this integrated capital fund that's exactly what we're doing is asking our movement partners to really set those and redefine those definitions so that investors can continue to learn about what impact could look like in their backyards in different places beyond this integrated capital fund so again just underscoring that through this work and I think something that we think about a lot is that the impact investment space has had decades to come up with successful metrics that actually produce change and has largely failed has largely there's not consistent metrics there's not consistent accountability we talk about ESG and the lack of of real like deep investigation into what does that even mean what counts and what doesn't and I think we as community members are stepping in and saying the metrics matter for us because it's our lives it's the amount of food grown it's the amount of housing that our members are able to to live in it's it's the number of people who have a safe place to go if they're experiencing violence it's the number of people who receive heat pumps water treatment when there's a disaster and we know that the the investment space has largely and I think it's because of this relational element there's no accountability because a lot of the folks who are making the decisions are not being impacted and not dealing with the consequences that so many of our members are so metrics matter but we see metrics as coming through the form of storytelling and like true lived experiences of what is it like what what is it like in the affordable housing we're building is it a comfortable space do you feel like you can have people like is it a place you want to live people don't ask that question but it matters is the food that you're growing food that your community wants to eat or are you growing it for somebody else and I think that is the kind of conversation that I would love the this broader community to be in conversation with us about because that those are the metrics that matter thank you um I I feel that we're kind of tiptoeing toward the end and this is a really great question um which is what is what is your dream for what the just transition looks like in three years maybe you can all speak to that because you all are filling a different you know role in this work um I can I can start and I think the time span of the just transition is definitely longer than three years but within three years I want to see all of our member projects um fully funded I want to see I want to go shopping at the new community food center in Detroit I want to go um share space with folks in San Antonio and see programming happening that is um intergenerational where there is real uh healing work real uh learning happening and I think for myself too um I think something that was coming up personally is um I want to see my family the family of every person that I love able to access dignified work I want to see that beginning to happen I want to see money moving to work and uh projects that are uh truly changing material conditions on the ground and I want to see ownership shift I want to see that in numbers and I want to see that in place and then I want to go visit them in three years I want to see more foundations asking themselves how they can relinquish control of their assets and really hand it down to more movement partners beyond the ones that we're working with um and including them as well obviously but really what we're trying to do here is eventually work our ways or work our way out of a job so that communities can be self determining so what does that look like I mean we have our 100 year vision for that in resonance framework but in three years that hopefully will have all the capital for the integrated capital or the integrated capital fund deployed to our movement partners will have more of those funders investing directly into uh movement partners like climate justice alliance like need a woman lead etc like like you prep as well so that's what I hope in three years in 2026 that's like tomorrow uh so hopefully that we can see more Suprias in the world agitating also the field and other investors and really bringing in investment advisors wealth management offices into the fold as well it's not just enough to have foundations it's a great starting point it's an amazing place to really have champions and advocates of this work and we also need to start uh broadening the scope of those we uh work in tandem with I think what you're hearing that's common here amongst the three of us because we are cut from the same thing in a way is that it's easier in some ways to tell you what we dream of in a hundred years because in a hundred years we are not stupid about what's happening right now we recognize we're going to go through and we are going through a very hard moment that might be the moment of our entire lifetimes but we work with communities that dream out that hundred years and look forward to and hold that child a hundred years from now so that we can start building black it used to be that you did a five-year plan or a 10-year plan and even 20 can feel like a stretch but we operate from that vision and then we come back and I can tell you while they're not saying it these organizations have very solid what their plan is in the next three years but it's grounded in where we're going in a hundred years and to that end three years is a blip I just see oh that's the end of our first long-term grant making cycle we have gone into doing that for the first time we are not doing year in and year out grants but five to ten year grant making cycles coupled with so we will just really be in the middle of it but one of the principles of just transition that both of these fabulous organizations have taught me is we have to take the big leap now is the time for that big leap that means take the biggest jump you can now not a dabble your toe in moment it's a big leap and we weren't totally prepared for it so I want to see in three years oh hell yeah there are a lot of foundations my peers that are in the big leap whatever whatever big leap means for them and they're doing it in community there are more resources being deployed and people are imagining a hundred years out they are not just in they can see the urgency of this moment grounded in where we're going it's very inspiring even three years from now but the hundred year looks really good um so I have one more question from the audience and then we're gonna do some wrap-up statements um and and this is kind of a would be a big leap but uh what is the state of conversation on a collective vision and building and building companies that do not produce profit is there an interest in in transforming our economy into a nonprofit one I mean I think coming from a nonprofit we know that like the non-profitization of movements is a problem um I think what we want to build is community self-determination where profit is being shared between the people that are doing the labor and the people producing we want to see whole supply chains where people are getting the value that they are producing I think that would be a huge a huge necessary shift and I don't think that we need to be focusing on turning things into nonprofits I think that profit sharing and recognizing that there are so many thousands of people involved in the single product in a single space and and making sure that that the communities that are a part of those businesses are reaping the benefits instead of profit leaving the community going into someone else's pocket who's building you know a climate bunker in Canada you know somebody said the other day on this conversation that I was in that it's not just about this paternalistic opening the door and giving the keys to somebody but or sharing the tool but that you see that communities are building their own tools and that those tools are not those tools are scalable shareable that's that's what we're talking about great well on these last few like few moments here can you each just maybe share a sentence of a to summarize in your closing thought and then we'll look call it a wrap I will just repeat myself and say take the big leap and fund big and fund early experiment don't do it in isolation lean into community and lean into curiosity and be accomplices to movement and if you're interested in talking about what that looks like come talk to us after this panel