 My name is Jed Emerson and I'm with Impact Assets and Blended Value and various other things. This is a session on the purpose of capital and so I'm gonna kind of tee that up and then we're gonna introduce our panelists for this discussion. About two years ago I kind of, I've been involved in impact investing for a long time and about two years ago, I felt like all the conversations I was having were all about strategy and tactics and execution and they're all about how do you do this and I think that part of the reason that people are challenged by some of those questions is that they focus on the how before they've really explored the idea and the concept of why and so they kind of assume that the why is a given and they kind of fall through this other issue of execution that becomes more challenging because they haven't really clarified the fundamental purpose of the capital that they have. They haven't really gone back to reconnect with issues of the fundamental purpose of their own life and what they're trying to really achieve through their deployment of capital and so I just for myself decided I wanted to step back and really try to think through more and kind of question the assumptions that I had coming into this and understand more about what we collectively actually know about meaning and purpose and I feel like we've devolved to what's fundamentally a financial conversation about things that actually have to do with how we as a society and we as humanity over the centuries have really come to understand meaning and purpose and it's really only been in the last 300 years that we've kind of focused on the idea that you can separate kind of financial investing from social and environmental considerations of value and I think that that split and that dualistic approach makes it harder for us to really invest with meaning and purpose and so on my own side I basically spent about two years just catching up and reading I've read maybe 170 plus books to try to put myself in a place where I could be reconnected to this broader conversation that I think really kind of spans the centuries and so today what we wanted to do was number one just kind of acknowledge that this is actually a pretty complicated conversation to have so we just call that out right up front and we're just gonna get at one piece of it. Now having kind of focused on this theme for a while there's part of me that feels like I could stand up and just lecture and that would be not exactly in the spirit of SOCAP so instead what I've done has been to ask some colleagues of mine who I think are approaching this work of impact investing from kind of a deeper place and are looking to kind of pull historic tradition into this conversation in a different way to participate in this discussion and so what we're gonna do is start with a conversation amongst the four of us and then we're gonna have a pause to engage with you and any conversation and discussion you'd like to have and then what we'd actually like to do would be to have each of you take some time and simply turn to the person next to you and have that a similar kind of discussion and have a chance for you to really connect with somebody else around part of the conversation so that's what we have in mind and with that I'm gonna just kind of ask each of the panelists to introduce themselves and say enough about the work that they're doing so you understand something of their context and then we're really gonna kind of pivot away from what they do to try to get into a conversation around why they do it and how they have been informed by different traditions, different history, different ways of thinking about purpose relative to then what they do in the world so I'm gonna start at the far end with Morgan and do you wanna just begin our process? Sure, my name is Morgan Simon, thank you all so much for being here. I've been in the social investment field for about 17 years at this point, I've worked with about 150 billion in that time. The last two, five years has been investing on behalf of two clients doing 100% for impact approaches so we've invested in over 50 companies and funds in that time and then I'm also a co-founder of a nonprofit called XForm Finance that's holding a bridge between finance and social justice. We launched a network of investors at the White House when it was a more hospitable place that is now about two billion strong investors who are specifically focused on social justice and then we also do trainings for community leaders who are trying to understand this trend of impact investment, wanna hold it accountable but don't have much access and those trainings have been 80% people of color over the last three years and then also have done a couple internationally so I think I bring the perspective of a practitioner of actively allocating capital but also thinking a lot about how do we organize people and capital in the field for maximum impact. I'm really appreciative to be here today for the opportunity to talk in a way that's a lot more personal in terms of purpose and from that perspective, if we wanted to pretend that this room was half as big and have folks in the back come forward and if you still need to sneak out at some point you're totally welcome to but we'd love to see your faces for this conversation so feel free to move up if that's something you're open to. Thanks so much. Good afternoon everybody. My name is Omar Mughal. I wanna thank Jed for inviting me and all of you for enabling and supporting what I think will be a very important and interesting conversation. For most of the last 20 years I've advised capital providers and capital recipients in transactions where principles of one form or another impact or control or temper the profit motive that we seem to have as humans. A large subset of what I do is called Sharia based capital markets or Islamic finance and investment which depending on where you may gather your information from may seem very foreign and very unusual but the principles I think the Islamic values and morals, the ethics, they're very much in line with the values that impact investors generally are concerned about and that they're focused on for those of you that are familiar with impact terms rather impact deals and in fact the impact terms project. This boils down to helping clients be they capital providers or companies and businesses design equity or capital structures and governance frameworks that are more participatory, creating transactions in which there is greater risk sharing rather than risk shifting and for those transactions that are more more debt like than say pure sort of capital that's purely at risk. It's about tying the return to the financier on the performance and the health of the asset or the business. So I think most of what I do is strategy and structure and that's what it kind of boils down to. We have to be very creative because we are building bridges and joining markets and different communities together that may not have previously spoken in a deep fashion or really listened to one another. Let's see what else. I also teach a few courses at graduate schools in the US including Islamic finance, halal food law and what I think is a really unique course bringing together Islamic spirituality, community sustainability and business and finance. That's great, thank you. Terrific and I will just hear the echo in my head. As I echo all of the thanks to you for being here and to Jed for organizing the panel. My name is Allison Lindgain, co-founder of Project Equity. We're a national nonprofit based across the Bay and Oakland and our mission is to increase economic resiliency in low income communities and we fundamentally believe that in order to do that we need to shift the control of capital and the control of livelihoods and so our strategy is really to scale employee ownership as a business model that does that and we're tapping the silver tsunami which is the largest wealth transfer in our nation's history as baby boomers retire and we know that 10,000 baby boomers retire every day and that the youngest of them will turn 65 in just shy of 15 years and so we have this window of time in which the baby boomers own one out of every two locally owned businesses across the country, local employers and so we know there's gonna be a dramatic shift in the landscape of local business ownership and the question is we wanna shift it away from community control and local ownership or do we wanna concentrate it in that direction and so we of course believe the latter and so for us the connection to the purpose and the meaning of capital is incredibly important because these are our businesses that think about it differently. Businesses where the decisions are made through the lens of what's good for the employees and by extension their families and their communities instead of businesses being made through the lens of what's good for the return on capital, right? So the purpose and the meaning of capital is absolutely central and for us it comes down to control and ownership and we'll talk more about that. So why don't we just pick up on that point. Impact investing and social enterprise mission driven companies a lot of times speak about bringing your whole self to work as you think about the work that you're engaged in are there wisdom traditions or historical kind of underpinnings that come in and then influence how you are in that context? Yeah, you know, Jed was kind enough to give us a clue to what he was gonna ask before we got on the panel, right? Big issues you gotta think about. But not in what order. So, you know, as I thought about that what really is my true self? And you know, my family history is that a couple of generations ago, my family was immigrant farmers in North Dakota. And so the traditions of my family, I thought I was gonna come up with something big or profound, right? But it's just my family. But it really is about fairness, trust, community, helping each other if you're gonna survive the blizzards in North Dakota winner, you have to be able to depend on each other. And so I've always seen business as a tool to do good in the world, right? To feed your family or to do, but rather than as something that's gonna line my pockets or, you know, as a thing. And even though I've been involved in business for my whole adult life, I've always felt a little bit like I've looked at it from the outside as an outsider and I have a perspective. So 20 years ago when I decided to go and get my MBA, I thought, gosh, am I gonna find any of my people, my tribe in business school? And truth is there's a lot of people who really see business as a tool to create positive change in the world. And, you know, SoCAP's kind of the same way. I've been coming for years and you know, even this year when I came, I thought, how long is it gonna take me to find my tribe? You know, people who see capital as a tool to create positive change in the world versus as something to make money off of and feel good about it at the same time is just a very different perspective. And so that for me is the grounding is that this is, it's about it being a tool, the greater good and coming back to those values and how do we align what we're doing? How do we really think about capital differently when the starting place is to create positive change in the world versus to create return and feel good about it? You talked about family and community as kind of the context within which your sense of purpose and meaning comes from. So is it more of a cultural kind of tradition that you're tapping into and that you feel you're bringing forward as opposed to philosophical or religious or something like that? Yeah, I mean, I think it is, for me, cultural. I think the reality is we all have a cultural, you know, if each of you could close your eyes for a minute and think about your own cultural background and the traditions, you know, whether it's going back to generations or six generations or 300 years, you know, the relationship between this idea of capital or resources more broadly and how we share them and what they mean and what they can bring can, every culture has a history of doing things differently from how we do it today in a way that has meaning infused in it or has community infused in it in a different way. And today it's so separate. And one of the amazing organizations that we partner with a number of great organizations in the parts of the country. And I just want to share something that one of our partners is doing an organization in the Twin Cities. They're called Nexus Community Partners led by a wonderful man named Rappamaka. And what they do is they partner, Nexity Community Partners, they partner with the whole diverse range of cultural communities that exists in the Twin Cities. And in their community wealth building work, they really are wanting to make sure that people are connecting it back to their own cultures. The culture of cooperatives is strong in that part of the country, but it's a very white activity, this idea of an organized cooperative. And so one of the things that they've done is they have created a, they call it the North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship, as I believe the name. And so they've created a fellowship experience specifically for folks from African-American communities who have historic family that traces back to slavery in the United States to really be looking at what the history of cooperative economics is in the black community so that it is something that they bring their own, their own cultural and historical background to and that you can think about that across every single cultural community, like we all have that. Right. So, Amar, your work obviously is in Islamic finance, but before we kind of go there, can you reflect a little bit on the cultural context of the work that you see and when you're engaged in it and how that kind of informs how you approach your framing around this and then maybe pivot toward the Islamic finance piece? Sure. I went to law school largely on a whim. How did that work out for you? I just couldn't get in, but. But you were saved. So there were very few people of my religious and ethnic background in the States who were lawyers far fewer on Wall Street. That's not to say I started out on Wall Street. I started working in Indonesia and then later at a Saudi Arabian office of a major U.S. law firm and it was there in Indonesia that I was first introduced to this concept of Islamic finance, but it was sort of a distance from me. And a few years after graduating, I decided to join what was then the preeminent U.S. law firm in the U.S. When it comes to Islamic finance, I thought, well, I've got this personal interest and maybe I could have a more holistic existence if I could unify these kind of components of myself. So I began working, I began learning and I began asking questions and as I asked questions, I kind of wandered spiritually and intellectually as well. Largely focused on the how, if you will, or the what that I was doing, drafting contracts, sort of the technicalities, the particulars, the details, sometimes thinking about the higher objectives, the grander purposes, if you will, and oftentimes not really doing that. And about a decade, I guess it was about a decade later, over lunch in Dubai with a dear friend of mine, he introduced me to the concept of climate finance. And we kind of wondered, would something like that be possible under Islamic commercial principles? And so my eyes were opened to all of these different communities and markets and initiatives that were trying to bring notions of social or environmental responsibility and so on and so forth into business and trade and finance. And I sort of fell in love with that, if you will. And I saw quite a bit of parallel with what I knew about the Sharia in terms of the Islamic commercial principles and the ethical guidance. So I started studying the social responsible initiatives and impact investing more and more. And so when you talk about the traditions that I'm sort of utilizing, I'm sort of fusing in a sense these two in the Sharia I found, and I'm not the first to find it, so I'm not gonna lay claim to anything of that sort. A rich tradition of inclusive governance at all levels of society, environmental sustainability and consciousness, I feel some thinkers well over a thousand years ago very much concerned with the impact that production, manufacture, consumption, investment would have on a broad range of stakeholders so much so that they even lay out sort of a theory of which stakeholders have which rights and how do they interact with one another and so forth. But it wasn't until I started studying the social responsible initiatives and coming to SoCAP for the first time last year that all the technicalities that I've been busy with for years, they started to have some meaning now. I was starting to understand some of the purposes behind transparency and business, behind risk sharing, behind participatory transactions and economies, behind the prohibition on interest and lending and so on and so forth. So even though these were details, I would sort of see that they're linked now to higher notions of responsibility. And so I guess the quick answer would be I'm looking at medieval and classical Islamic discourse. I'm trying to make it relevant to contemporary context and I'm doing so with my own, with a lens that's as an American, I'm using the American cultural context to look at that tradition. No, that's great. But why don't we pause there for a sec because I want to come back to the Islamic finance piece of that more specifically. But Morgan, do you want to talk a little bit about how you see this question of culture as it's informed kind of your understanding and your traditions that you're bringing forward in this and just reflect on that a little bit? Sure. I think there's three kind of main cultural paradigms that I operate out of one. And I think Allison, where you're saying it's just family, it's like family is everything, right? We're 90% water and then the other 10% is like what gets passed down. My family is from a Jewish background, Sephardic and Ashkenazi, so Greek and Russian. Sometimes in the US we'll say, Jews the other white meat, right? We're a little different origin and culture perspective. And part of that is a really deep history in social justice, right? So, and some of that separation of Jews is in a really negative way, right? That it was no blacks or Jews written on the water fountains in the South, right? And I think that that also led to a very deep history of solidarity, not just from like an allyship perspective, but because our lives also depend on it. And it's sort of no accident that Jews were the founders of the NAACP legal fund, that they were 90% of the freedom riders even though we're only 2% of the US population. I'm very proud of that. And I think that some of that has ruptured over the last decades and that's a whole other story. But I do think in terms of whether within my family or even as a cultural, not religious at all Jew, there's something in the water. And I think that there's something in a lot of people's waters and that it often can be kind of connecting back to what is the family history that we can connect into? And that can motivate us to wanna carry that forward. The other that's kind of funny for me is Jews historically managed a lot of money because it was viewed as a dirty profession, right? So they gave it to the Jews to do and then, ha ha, we took over the financial system, right? So there's sort of a joke around my family is that I sort of stepped into that stereotype as well. But the other tradition that I was really steeped in and feel really informs my work is just traditions and learnings among social activists. And the sort of central notion of nothing about us without us and how to think about accountability to affected communities and seeing that as practice, right? Is something that you have to do on a daily basis, not just a philosophy but an action. I feel like it's a really critical component to my work and it's part of why I'll often be at venues like the World Social Forum or Facing Race where I'll have activists literally come up and say, wait, you're an investor? Like why are you here, right? In a way that sometimes can even be a little bit hostile. Which is fine, like there's great reasons for historic distrust of investors. But part of it is saying, if we wanna really move from a purpose-driven place, how do we kind of stay accountable to social justice values within that? And I think the second piece to that is also about doing actions and collectivity. So I recently wrote a book some of you know that came out last week called Real Impact and one of the fights I kept having with my editor is that I kept saying we at moments when it was kind of more grammatically appropriate to say I, right? And she kept trying to edit out my wheeze and I kept saying, well, but I never did any of this alone, right? Like there were all these other people who were part of this and that sort of vision of collectivity and the importance of acknowledging that in every moment. I feel like it's really critical in terms of connecting the purpose because it is about that interconnection. And then the final one, unless I'm taking too much time, is that I do a lot in music and dance and that that has been a huge part of my life. I was a professional hip-hop dancer from years 15 to 20 before I decided that college was a good idea. I think that's the first time I've declared that publicly, but there it is. And part of what's beautiful about the dance community is that you have people from so many different backgrounds where you would never ask the question, what do you do? There are people I've had really deep relationships with for 20 years where that is just kind of irrelevant, because there's so many other ways that we're connecting and learning to be with each other and that it might be people who I've never even spoken to, but I'm able to have this really deep connection in a very fast way through the arts. So I think that's the other that really informs my work of thinking about what are ways of connecting with people, what are different ways of assessing worth that's not always just about what it is that you know but how you make people feel, and that that really translates into the way that I try to show up for people in terms of purpose. So those are three pretty powerful examples of, again, the cultural mindset and tradition in forming how you approach your work. Flipping it to the other side, are there things professionally as an investor that undermine your sense of kind of meaning and purpose and that you have to kind of fight against, or are there the inverse of that? Are there things that you are asked to do professionally that actually affirm and advance what you're culturally trying to be about as well? I love, Jed, one of the things that you inspire in people is authenticity. So I'll give you the first thought that popped into my head, which was really about stereotype embodiment. And I don't know if people are familiar with that term. It's one that I learned about much after I realized I was doing it, which is that when you start, when people perceive you in a certain way, you start acting more that way. And I started, I was a first-time executive director when I was 23 years old. I was leading the Responsible Endowments Coalition. It's supporting college campuses across the country and investing their 400 billion towards social investment. And people presumed that I knew nothing and nothing to add to the conversation. I was a woman. And that sort of continued throughout my career. I learned I couldn't wear black at certain events because people would ask me to get them water. People assumed I was the secretary, even if it had like managing director on my card. And I think those instances where I embodied that stereotype, right, and I would even go further to try to prove myself that I really had my financial chops and I knew what I was talking about, even just amplified that sensation. So I guess I would say that times in my work that I have allowed myself to feel small by the actions of others, and that it took me a while to get trained out of that. And what was kind of interesting, when I started to get a good amount of gray hair, I started talking to women that were older than me in the field, and I realized I wasn't gonna age out of it. And what was really disconcerting, I was pretty depressed for about a month after, I realized it wasn't ageism, it was sexism. And that I wasn't gonna get to age out, right, that I was gonna be stuck with this. And therefore I needed to figure out another way to get past that, essentially. Part of that is that I have a male business partner who is unbelievably supportive. So there's some venues where I'll just say, you need to go to this instead of me, I know I'm not gonna be comfortable. And he's okay with that. So I think you learn how to self-manage in venues that are not always gonna be kind to you and whatever body you happen to be born into. And other ways that you push past it. So, Umar, I know that being an attorney is a very inclusive and affirming environment. I wonder, could you reflect a little bit on your experiences and how you've worked to try to keep your presence in that? And if there are things within the law that actually are affirming of what you're trying to be about in terms of your practice? Yeah, you know, kind of building off of some of what, sort of echoing what Morgan had said. Do people think you're the secretary, too? No, that hasn't happened, there's other questions. You know, I didn't really wanna be an Islamic finance. I wanted to do venture capital. And the firm that I went to work for, you know, they had a very prominent standing in the Middle East. So they kept kind of nudging me over, saying, well, you know, you're arrowed. I kept saying, I'm not arrowed. They would literally think what you're close enough. I haven't. You know, and you're sort of in this position you don't wanna lose your job either and so forth. So, you know, I find myself where I am. So, there are things I think, there are certainly challenges. You know, we're working in cultural contexts and even in regulatory environments that are designed by a particular ethical outlook, a particular worldview. Maybe it's shareholder profit maximization. Maybe it's, you know, favorable tax treatment to debt or indebtedness that kind of rub against what I'm trying to do with my investors or the clients that I'm representing are trying to do. And sometimes, you know, the clients are trying to do things they shouldn't do either. And sometimes you're put in a position where you need simply to earn. And you have to be careful about not taking on work simply for the sake of profit without proper regard to the principles that are relevant, that are at stake. And, you know, we have had to turn down. I say we, my partners and I, have had to turn down some very lucrative assignments. For example, structuring some of the vehicles that led to the recent financial crisis because they know that we can structure. They know that we're creative. And so, we've left that at the table and said, no, thank you. We're not gonna get involved with that. And, but it's a continuous process, you know, and trying to, you know, self-transform and hopefully that that leads to a transformative business, yeah. So, you're not in your head, but you work in cooperatives. That's like God's gift to empowerment and justice and advancing equity in the world. Are you resonating in some way there? Well, let's just say that, so back to my business school experience. When I tell my business school folks who I haven't seen for a while what I do and they finally kind of wrap their head around it and they say, they usually say one of two things or both and they say a cooperative now, is that a business? Or they'll say, co-ops just totally need to be rebranded. So, you know, there are across the United States about 400 worker-owned cooperatives. There are across the United States about 8,000 employee-owned companies. So, if you were to translate that into percentages, you'd be right in a decimal point and a whole lot of zeros, right? And so, what we're doing or sort of what we're up against is a tremendous lack of familiarity. People don't know what the heck it is that we're doing. A lot of baggage, if they do think they know what it is, they usually don't actually know what it is. And then where the capital comes into that, we're actually trying to do capital different. Not we, but you know, I didn't create this, but this model of democratic employee-owned companies does capital different. And so, when you go to talk to a capital provider who is used to doing capital the normal way and you tell them, well, I wanna get a loan for a business that has 27 owners, they look at you like you have three heads on, right? And on top of that, so we talk a lot about ownership and what ownership means, and we actually break it apart. And so, you own a company, right? What are all the benefits of ownership? What are the components of ownership? Well, you own it, you control it, right? You own it, you get the profits or are responsible for the losses, right? You own it, you get the benefit of the underlying asset if it appreciates or depreciates. But in a broad-based democratic employee-owned company, what we say is, well, those benefits of ownership shouldn't go to the equity investors, they should actually go to the employee-owners. The employee-owners control it, the employee-owners get the share of profit. And so, the capital is participating, but it's not central and it doesn't get the benefits of ownership. And so, when we break those benefits of ownership down into the component parts, we can think about reassigning them out to the stakeholders, including capital, in a different way, partially or wholly. So, yes, if capital is going to participate, capital gets a return of some sort. Of course, every stakeholder should get a return for participating, but why is it that capital gets the return first in line? And the people who put their energy and their time and their creativity into the business get it second in line. You know, as we talk about purpose, we talk about purpose of capital, there's also purpose of the business itself, right? So, you know, business is a tool to create positive change in the world. The purpose of the business should be first in line. You know, we talk about fiduciary responsibility, and that being first in line. So, you know, the challenge that we face is there's a system that is out there that has, you know, in many cases, sort of unwritten rules that we just all believe, you know, like why is it? Why do we believe that capital should be first in line? Who created that rule? Who agreed to it? Who wrote it down? You know, in my mind, the purpose should be first in line. The purpose of creating good in the world through business or deploying your capital, that should be first in line. And just a really quick story, we're working with a company that is decades old, amazing in their industry, have created for decades, amazing impact, have driven their space forward from an impact perspective. And as the owners are getting ready to leave the business and step away from the business, they are saying, you know, gosh, we are afraid that capital is first in line in our business. So when we're no longer here to control it, because we control the purpose by our presence, we're afraid that this company could get acquired and the purpose could then disappear. And so they're actually looking at structuring their business in a perpetual purpose trust so that purpose is first in line. And the purpose includes being successful financially so that we can continue to create the impact in the world, but the purpose does not include maximizing financial return to the capital providers. No, it's really a great example. And I think that one thing that we tend to forget, we kind of, we take what's given to us as the accepted way of the world and that somehow our understanding with under a financial capitalist approach that the purpose of capital is to make more capital is actually a newer understanding of meaning and purpose of capital and economics. And I think part of what I just kind of like intuitively fell into, and there's my own research and writing was just kind of like a real sense of like that just can't be right, right? There's got to be, it's not like the purpose of capital was handed from God to Alan Greenspan's calculator and that's it, right? And there's different books. The Myth of the Rational Market is one book that's really interesting and exploring kind of like the evolution of modern financial capitalism. And I think we forget that these are all simply social constructs that we've evolved over time and have roots and traditions and things that have brought them forward in the same way that alternative visions of the purpose of capital are also alive in the world and have roots that go back actually to pre-date our understanding of financial capitalism by century and century and century. So I think that part of this conversation is trying to reconnect and root ourselves back in those actually more fundamental and more principles that have greater primacy relative to what this all is about. And I think religious traditions are clearly kind of like the root of a lot of these alternative perspectives about meaning and purpose of wealth. And so I wonder, Amar, if you could, without spending an hour and a half lecturing, I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit about the Quran and talk about the prophet's background and experience and how that might have informed the Islamic perspective around the meaning and purpose of wealth and capital. And then maybe do this a little thing on the Sharia and then no. It's a tough question to answer. I think what I would say is that the Sharia through the Quran and prophetic teaching lays out general principles and guidelines. And there's some specifics, but there are these boundaries and I find them pretty broadly drawn, pretty flexible. And there's quite a bit of opportunity for we'll use the word impact, you might use the word good. And the consideration of the various stakeholders and even capital structure that you were talking about in terms of risk sharing. A lot of that is there and it's built into the framework. And so for example, the Islamic financial institutions and investors, they're embedding their mission into the legal structure of the organization. So the first thing they've done is adopt the modern business entity. And the next thing they've done is say, okay, but it's gonna have a particular mission and purpose that limits it, that controls it. And there are individuals, we call them, sort of euphemistically Sharia advisors that look at products and transactions and underlying paperwork from an ethical legal lens, if you will. And there always has to be a conversation with those folks as to what's happening, why what's being done is being done. And all of that links then to the five purposes of the Sharia, the protection and preservation of life, of religion, of the intellect, of property, and of family. Those are your five purposes. So everything has to fall in line with those and not violate any one of those universals. So hopefully that kind of is responsive to your... But it's interesting, out of those five principles, I mean, property sounds pretty direct toward kind of capital and blah, blah, blah. The other ones don't have anything to do with anything having to do with economics, necessarily it sounds. I mean, what do you think? Did I miss hear some of that? Morgan, you're, please. I gave a body language reaction. No, it's just interesting, but go ahead. I mean, I think what's really beautiful about that, it's a fundamental understanding of everything connects to those five things, right? That sometimes we view economic activity as this other, and that's part of why we'll sort of toss money over to the financial advisor and sort of forget that it's there, or the response that I find most hilarious, I know we've all heard, to foundations considering impact investment is, oh, I'm not sure if it's impactful enough, so I'll just keep my money in Chevron. So sort of missing the fact that this activity is happening no matter what, and the impact on the average family, when you think about, do I have a quality job? That means that I get paid sick days and I have the ability to take a day off and take care of my child, or that I'm getting a living wage. How does that impact the family and what does finance do to encourage or discourage responsible corporate behavior? I think it's really fundamental. So why don't we turn the light on ourselves a little bit? I wonder, as you all think about the current state of practice within impact investing, as you think about how we're commoditizing impact in order to create these conforming investment vehicles that can go through these distribution channels and go retail and blah, blah, blah. Is my assumption or not my premise that impact investing is basically at risk of becoming disconnected from the deeper meaning and purpose of capital, a correct one? Do you see that as well? Or do you think I'm just being a bit of a jerk and kind of over emphasizing things just to sell books? No to the last part, yes to the first part. You clearly have seen my book sales. How's that working out for you, dad? What we can say mission dilution, whether it's for a business or an individual or some other collective. And there has to be periodic reminders of the why, of the objective. So if it's a conference, there should be spaces in which there are conversations like this that are happening and that these conversations are not off to the side, literally and figuratively, they're integrated into all of the conversations, if you will, so that we are reminded of the various rationale, the various why's that may be at play. And I appreciate there's a rich diversity here of purpose and rationale and background and so forth, all of which is relevant. And I say that not so that we learn from one another but so that we also learn about ourselves from others. And not merely that we broaden our horizon, but that we have these reminders so that we keep mission or principle or objective or whatever word it is that we want to use, that we keep this in mind. Because I think there is that risk there and when we're talking about markets, there are players that step into markets because of certain trends and there's a quantitative advantage to them. And we've seen this happen. We see it in Islamic finance. We've seen it in I think organic food, for instance, where players step in and their commitment to mission is not there. Their commitment to profit, however, is there. And so there is that risk of dilution. So we need to counter that in conferences and in spaces like these, but also in our individual lives where we'll see struggles in different contexts and we want to sort of stay true if you will. Yeah, and what you said about the systems and the structures, I think that's huge is that the system, you said the word ethical. Like, oh, that's right, ethical should be integrated, right? Into these systems. So the question I would have for the impact investing field is how do we ensure that ethical is integrated into the systems? Because the system is gonna produce what it's built to produce. So you gotta build it in a way. So if impact investing is trying to get into the larger system, does the larger system have ethical built-in and if not, how do you build an ethical? So it's both systems and then it's also just sort of an understanding of structures and a sense of limitation I think that we have of, oh, well, the system works that way so I have to operate within it. Or the business structure works that way. There's a hunger. We see why are there so many B-corps, right? There's a hunger for a different kind of a structure to do it differently so that it's got ethical built-in so its purpose is on top, right? And so I think we have to constantly be questioning. Do the systems and the structures, do they actually serve the purpose? And if not, we've gotta rebuild them because otherwise we're gonna be stuck with them and then everybody's gonna have to operate that way and we're gonna assume that the unwritten rules of how those systems work are the rules that we have to live by but they're not the rules that we have to live by. They're not the rules that we have lived by historically in the past so we need to be, we need to not just allow that to happen. We need to step in and be a part of making sure that it doesn't happen that way. Morgan, are we at risk of becoming untethered from purpose? I think that when we start to really focus on the questions of how in terms of execution that we've done that really well from a financial perspective and that we've answered a lot of the questions around like can we scale? Can we get market rate? Can we do some of these really essential tasks? But can we do it in a way that scales the purpose alongside the impact? That to me feels like the execution gap so it's connecting to purpose from an execution perspective, right? To get both of those things together. So for example, in the traditional finance world, less than 3% of fund managers are black or Latino and I think the average impact investor would likely get up on stage and say that they support racial justice but then you look at their portfolios and it doesn't necessarily look that different, right? And then it becomes the question of well what are the practices that would actually get you from your stated purpose to manifesting that in the world, right? So one of the things that we did recently was finally went through and said okay yes we say we care about racial justice but what does our portfolio look like? And what we found out is that it looks really awesome. It's about 60% people of color if you exclude the clean tech investments where we are absolutely over indexed towards white met. And part of that has to do with the way the clean tech field is structured but it caused us to think a lot about well yes some of those investments are specifically targeted towards communities of color so they're doing solar installations in low income communities in Louisiana or they're retraining former coal workers in West Virginia to become solar installers but that we might need to do more to think about the ownership or think about the founders and diversity from that perspective so that gives me an action plan of saying okay I'm still on my purpose but I need to drive my purpose a little more when I'm looking at clean tech, right? Like what's the specific practices that actually support your purpose? Right now when I ask a lot of managers so how do you learn about what social change is needed of how you're manifesting that purpose and a couple times I've gotten the answer well I read the New York Times. I mean I read the New York Times too it's a great publication but the point is right if you're trying to make social change what do you need to do to be much more consistently educated, engaged and accountable to your purpose and I would posit it takes as much discipline as it does to execute your financial mission, right? It can't just be kind of an add on to that financial mission. So the great thing about SoCAP obviously is that we're bringing together folks who are first and foremost about changing the world and getting out there and grappling with this in practice. We're gonna in a couple of minutes kind of pivot over and give an opportunity for you all to just kind of have your own conversations around this topic and then share that back up to the larger group but before we do I wanted to see if any folks had any comments or questions either the panel or any statements you wanna make before we go into our kind of deep dive as a group. In the back please. I can, to start I guess I try to think regardless of sector or geography about the difference between incremental change and systemic change and that for every industry that's gonna be a little bit different in terms of what a systemic intervention might mean or like what is the next step but I think it's always about how do you like push the ball a little bit further each time in that direction as opposed to trying to get it perfect either and that part of it is sometimes thinking about any solution is kind of just a transition into the next step rather than a dead end and that going back to what Allison was saying it's about asking questions like are we asking questions consistently around what systemic change can be and who needs to be at the table to even make that decision and how do we kind of set that table in a much broader fashion that I feel like resting in the constant inquiry helps me to feel like I'm still on purpose as opposed to feeling like I have to be perfect and succeed in the absolute pinnacle of social justice all the time which is just not attainable. Any other thoughts on that point? I would just say also for you personally what's your North Star? What is the, I found my North Star in I believe that we fundamentally need to change the inner workings of our economy around ownership and control of capital so that's my North Star. And so, yeah, what's the North Star for you? I've also heard that described as first principles and I think part of the challenge in this conversation is we live in a society and I think we're also kind of morphing in the impact investing space to this place where everybody is supposed to have answers all the time. You have like, if you're an entrepreneur and you're looking for capital, God forbid you don't answer the right question from somebody who's got money that you want to have them invest with you. If you're an advisor, you're always supposed to immediately understand the issue and have an opinion and a perspective and that's the answer kind of thing. And we don't really have a space for simply reflection. We don't have an appreciation of the rhetorical question that the paradox where you can just put something on the table and just kind of be with it and let the answer come from silence. And I find it, and as an advisor, I'm as bad as this as anybody, but at the same time, I feel like there's a lack of humility and a lack of appreciation of the journey and the process and really taking time to if there's 20 kind of purpose statements going deeper and understanding the connectivity between those really and what underscores and supports that out here. And I think this is exactly what I was saying before where I feel like in our space, we focus so much on the execution piece that we're starting to drift, I think away from some of these deeper kind of understandings that actually could inform execution if we brought them forward. And then the last thing I would say is that we're not the first ones to grapple with these questions. And I think every generation, because we have this very linear understanding of time and progress, every generation seems to think that they're the pinnacle of evolution and that they're better looking and wealthier and smarter than the generation before kind of thing. And when you really take time to read like 5,000 years of human history, you're like, I mean, I gotta tell you, I have never realized how incredibly stupid I am, right? Because you really realize that there's nothing new. These are all the same issues. And in fact, you have traditions, you have different philosophical perspectives. Yeah, I mean, folks have put a lot of energy into trying to understand like, what is this fundamentally about? And what is it that we're really trying to be about not only in our individual lives, but in our lives as a community? And I think we're really, we're the poorer for not bringing that forward and injecting it into these conversations because when you think about cooperative structures in any number of cultural contexts, this is how people used to organize, if you will. When you think about the fact that before being called by God, the prophet was a merchant and basically understood kind of like the connection between commerce and community at a level that I don't think a lot of folks who haven't really looked at it could appreciate. And then the same thing in terms of advocacy and empowerment and all of these, these are super strong traditions. And the very first jointly traded stock company was the Dutch East India Company in 1604. And when it came back from its expedition, some of the Mennonite stockholders sold their stock in protest because of the piracy practices that the company had engaged in in order to make its profit. So this is these issues have been with capitalism since day one. Are there any other thoughts or reflections before we turn, please? No, it's really true. One of my more amusing kind of facts that I learned in my reading process was that Martin Luther, during the period of the Reformation, he would go from area to area and meet with people to kind of foment a different perspective about the church, but he traveled with one priest and three attorneys, which I think is just fascinating. I mean, so right there, he basically is grappling with how do you execute and how do you maintain kind of fidelity, other thoughts? I'll note in that same historical vein, Candid group is named after the Voltaire novel, which admittedly I had never read until my business partner came forward saying, hey, this could be a good name for us. And Candid is all about wrestling with the origins of good and evil. And I feel like that is what we're doing every day, right? We're not coming forward saying we have the answer to it, but we commit to that wrestling. And it also makes me think of the tradition of, and this is where you get to see what a bad Jew I am. I think it's Jacob, right? And that Yaakov, the name means to be a God wrestler, right? Because he wrestled with the angel all night, who then revealed that it was God and that the purpose was kind of committing to that struggle. So I feel like there was pieces of struggle of letting it be kind of a joyous struggle, but that that is the daily work that we do. That's great. Please. So how does that work? Yeah, I'd love to jump in on that. That describes 80% of what I do all day, every day. So back to the, you go into a regular banker and you say, I want to loan to something. It's a business with 50 owners. They look at you like you have three heads on. So I spent a lot of time educating. People are unfamiliar. So if you're unfamiliar with something, of course it's going to be scary and weird and like you don't want to deal with it, right? So educating, building relationships, trust, right? When you have trust with somebody, you're more likely to believe what they have to say, even if it's scary or hard or different. And then helping people take baby steps. So yeah, I do a lot of bringing kind of trying to bring, I'm not at the maids room yet, but bringing folks who are closer to where I am, bringing them along closer, so that then we can bring the next ones behind along closer. Yeah, and I would say it's about relationship, education and trust. For yourself as an individual, the struggle that we've been talking about, I think it's first and foremost an individual struggle. I don't think that systems will transform or be transformed unless individuals are also themselves and ourselves transform. So I think that that struggle is critical and we need to demonstrate a self transparency, a self assessment process and then be doing what we're talking about doing and adding again to what she's talked about in terms of relationship, building, education. You mentioned humility earlier on. I think those are, and having an open mind and letting whatever questions or comments come, let them come without judgment, let alone anger and just explanation and easing things along gradually. Morgan, how do you keep purpose present as you engage in change? I think I can share some of what I have done and I don't know if that's a model or right for every situation. I think to some degree for me, I found you can't do it all at once and that one of the things that's nice about when you start to live more years is that you get to go through various phases of life and that means sometimes getting to be a lover where I want to invite everyone in and kind of have that open space and sometimes when I need to be a fighter and that there are certain things where you do eventually put your foot down and also decide not to spend your energy on people who are just not interested in what you have to say. So I've gone through periods where I worked with 200 investors and now I work with two, right? And part of it was that I came to a point in my career of feeling like there was very specific work and values that I wanted to follow and I wanted to build that model to show that you could really do it and that I wasn't just spouting out all these radical notions of what you could do with capital but that I'd actually built portfolios that were doing it, right? And hopefully that that helps in the process of calling in rather than calling out of like here is this amazing thing that you could be a part of and then there's other times where I'm from Oakland, California which is right next to the Chevron headquarters which is why I pick on Chevron a lot in talks but I remember some of my early activism in the early 2000s was around what was happening in Ecuador and being at the shareholder meeting and an indigenous woman got up to the mic, opened up her shirt in front of the whole board of directors of Chevron to show the incredible rash she had on her body from Chevron's refusal to take responsibility for cleaning up the oil spills and talking to their CSR person who's saying we're so sorry for those poor people but it's just not our fault. They need to talk to the Ecuadorian government. I don't have patience for that woman. I wish her and her karma really well but I hit a point of deciding I wasn't gonna put my energy there, right? That I was gonna put my energy in building the positive alternatives so that people can have control of their land and say no to the oil companies, right? So I think when is it the time to love? When is it the time to fight? And sometimes you can't love everybody and just have to be okay with that. So we were gonna break into small conversations with folks but I feel like we're a small enough group and we only have about 10 or 15 more minutes. So is everybody okay if we just kind of continue this conversation of the whole? Is that all right, Elliot? Can people give their names when they give questions? That's Elliot. Part of it, hi Elliot. Yeah, I mean I have always felt that business is a tool to create positive good in the world, I'm not gonna go into a deep philosophical sort of descriptor of that. Like I don't know that I necessarily have an answer deeper than that but I do think it's shameful in this country that we have so much money and yet we have not figured out how through commerce we can actually take care of everyone in our country. So I see the juxtaposition of however you wanna describe it that wealth gaps, the income gaps, the incredibly shameful racial wealth disparities we have in this country. So the purpose of business should be to make sure that we are taking care of each other like plain and simple, including taking care of the planet and the broader purpose but that's how I feel about it. Islam does not, let me rephrase, Islam encourages earning profit but it's done inside a certain framework and the ultimate purpose is benefit and prevention of harm and echoing both the beauty as well as the magnanimity of the divine. So business, while we engage in business to earn a profit it's to fulfill responsibilities, right? In and of itself, the profit or the capital I would say it's useless but if it's fulfilling responsibilities that one may have towards one's dependence, loved ones, one's neighbors, so on and so forth now you begin to speak about business in a more complete sense. I really appreciate one of the pieces of writings from Paul Hawkins that talks about how commerce is this really ancient practice, right? Which is just the exchange of goods to make sure people get what they need. And I think about that from the perspective of when the revolution comes I don't wanna make my own shoes, right? Like there's things that trade can be really positive for in terms of getting the things that we need and if we're able to focus more on that element of commerce and the capital accumulation piece of it or capital accumulation to the extent to which it enables us to make things that are useful to people then that to some degree takes the ownership piece even out of the question altogether because then it's just about commerce being activity that gets people what they need as opposed to business being it's kind of own purpose I think is what happens that it gets really divorced from the idea of taking care of human needs. That's great. Other thoughts, please. So it's kind of a higher order understanding of the license to operate. Other thoughts, please. So how did you all wake? I'm sorry? Oh, I'll go last. I'll go last, but please. You know, I feel like I've been pretty lucky in that back to the North Star like my North Star has been.