 Welcome SoCAP community to what is going to be a riveting fireside chat. My name is Taaz James. I'm the co-founder of Full Spectrum Capital Partners, and for 20 years, I was the director of an organization called the Judges Center. Through that work, I had the opportunity to get to know the two amazing people who you're about to engage in conversation, Regan Pritzker and Kat Taylor. If you know Regan and Kat, what you know is they're two of the most important leaders and innovators in philanthropy and impact investing for Kat and banking, and financial innovation and banking, and so we're going to have a really rich, rich conversation. Regan's the co-founder of the Cotelli Foundation, and serves as a board member there, and a collaborator with the Restorative Economies Fund, where one of my dear friends, mentors, and close colleagues, Nalaka Agbo, just became the CEO of that effort. So just really excited about the work that Regan and the team are doing there. Regan's been working in philanthropy for a while, through the Libra Foundation with her family since 2015, where she's currently the board president and co-chair of the Investment Committee, and Regan's been a real leader within the overall just transition movement, taking leadership from communities, to move progressive wealth holders and philanthropists, to rethink their ethical framework for private investment. Regan works with her family and advisors at Libra to move assets in alignment with real progressive radical values in investment in philanthropy and put it in giving. She's energized by the movement that's building to shift private investment in philanthropy towards the frame of economic justice. Regan's also an educator, and brings the wisdom of the educators to all of us working in the capital space, and there's so many lessons there. We have to learn from Regan, which you're about to hear. Thank you, Regan, for agreeing to come and be a part of this conversation with Kat. Turning to Kat, if you haven't read her recent profile in Forbes, I recommend that you do, because what we'll see there is Kat has been a leader and an innovator in service of restoring social justice and environmental well-being for decades. She's active in a variety of social enterprises and philanthropic endeavors. In particular, she serves as the co-founder and board chair of Benefits for Sustain Bank, Community Development, CDFI, which is a certified B-Core, and through that work works with others in community lending to try to shift capital towards community wealth. She's also the founding director of Tomcat Ranch Educational Foundation, which is really working to build a sustainable food system and working in particular with folks who haven't had access to the capital and resources to really bring justice to our food system. And so I've had the chance to work with Kat as a part of a broader Equitable Development Working Group, and we've been doing an interesting webinar series which we'll share some information about in the chat where we've been exploring some of these questions that Regan and Kat are going to dig into. In relationship to the question of what it's going to take for everybody to be able to access the good life as our partners in the Global South and the Just Transition Movement call it the Buen Verveer. And what Regan and Kat both have recognized is that access to capital is key to that shift, and they're going to share some of their experiences and stories about what they're learning, what they're experimenting with, and what they really want to call the SOCAP community into to be in partnership in this journey with to really figure out what we need to do to build real community wealth. So I'm going to turn it over to Regan and Kat, and I guess we'll start with Kat, and I think the beginning question for both of you is to just share a little bit of your journey, sort of how did you get from where you started to where you are, and what does the SOCAP community need to know about your journey? So we'll start with Kat. Thanks, Taj. And I feel very humbled to be a part of this conversation and really grateful to Regan for agreeing to do this. I think both of us are on journeys that are about experimentation and guidance, and I'm really just putting myself out here today not to say that I've done everything right or I have all the right answers, but just to show you a little bit of what I've tried to do. And I want to begin by centering this moment in the movement for Black Lives and in respect of the longstanding, longest standing peoples of the world and the BIPOC community stewards to whom, and this is the theme of my comments, we need to give stuff back. Assets, wealth, land, control, ownership, et cetera. So my story begins at the age of five, which is my earliest memory of what I call the civil rights funerals, the rapid succession of assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and realizing at an early age that something was seriously wrong in the origins of our country. And of course over a lifetime, realizing that was African enslavement, Jim Crow mass incarceration, native genocide, land theft, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, persecution of refugees and immigrants. And really a theme throughout has been the reeducation of Cat Taylor because we don't learn our history right in this country yet and I'm still learning, still reading white fragility, decolonizing wealth, race matters, et cetera. And I don't suspect I will be done learning until I take my last breath. But along the way, I have also tried to experiment in various sources of capital, originally probably looking at banking because the socially responsible banks, South Shore Bank, Ramine, Self Health Credit Union grew up at the time that I was going to high school and college and graduate school. And I was deeply interested in seeing how access to loan capital could rebuild wealth in the communities that have been hurt the worst. I also spent a lot of time on nonprofit boards, did a lot of philanthropy in a very passive way until the early 2000s when Tom Steyer and I reassessed how we were showing up in service to the great civil, human, and environmental justice causes of the world and decided we weren't doing nearly enough. So we decided to focus on good food, good money, good energy and establish organizations and companies at the heart of those very important and overlapping sectors in order to gain the insights of actual actors in those systems. So there grew up Beneficial State Bank, Radical Impact Partners, Bright Path Capital Partners, at the heart of good money, Tomcat Ranch Educational Foundation and Ranch at the heart of good food and numerous political organizations that Tom started, including Next Gen America, Need to Impeach and ultimately a presidential campaign. And we did learn a lot. We really did learn a lot. But if you think about it by definition, all of those organizations were white led because we started them and operated them for some time. So that experience, which is ongoing, led me to think about how do we shift, not just loan and philanthropic capital but equity capital through venture, through private equity but also by simply giving it back, making equity grants, pledging donor advice fund assets in support of bond financings. How can we get that capital back to the communities from whom it was stolen and give them the control and community ownership and stewardship and engagement that they so richly deserve? So I am involved in philanthropic reform. I think we have to pull all the levers at once but I'm gonna make a call in at the end of this today about ways I think the SOCAP community can be part of shifting assets back to the communities who deserve them. Thanks so much, Kat Regan. You wanna share some of your story? Well, first I have to give a huge shout out to Kat. When I first learned about Beneficial State Bank, I was really inspired by that intention of creating a community facing bank and it wasn't until you gave your intro that I remembered that my mom set up my first savings account at Shorbank because I grew up in the south side of Chicago where I thought was started. So I guess my impact investing started when I first got allowance when I was about the same age that you described Kat, about five in the 70s but I came back to it many years later after spending time working in education raising three kids. You saw one of my teenagers walk behind me earlier and when my parents started the Libra Foundation it was kind of a reckoning for me because I had grown up really immersed in wealth privilege but not really recognizing it as such it wasn't centered in my family. We were about community and about relationships and about being good people to each other and to our friends and just what I think of as like just good family values but I don't think I even totally realized the access I had until much later in my life. And when my parents started the Libra Foundation in 2005 they my parents really called me and my siblings into a conversation about how do we represent our values in philanthropy and I was actually really reticent and didn't want to be defined as a wealth holder didn't want to be defined as a donor felt like philanthropy was for you know I didn't see myself reflected in my concept of philanthropy and so it took me a while to find a place there but we were focused on human rights and I found myself increasingly inspired by the grantees we were funding and the opportunity to go to learning spaces and over a period of time got interested in this idea of the responsibility that I had as a steward of this wealth whether I liked it or not and started to be increasingly inspired by being exposed to first of all more explicit analysis of the past that Kat was talking about in terms of where wealth comes from and the history of genocide and the invention of whiteness to justify racial capitalism and as a result wanted to think about well how are we investing this money that is in an endowed foundation and the more I looked into investing well or investing for human rights or investing for social justice the more I found how impossible that seemed and that the very structure of our current financial system is designed to be extractive and exploitative and it doesn't have to be that way but that's the way it's operating right now. And so as I hit different milestones in my journey I've been trying to as Kat said like keep learning keep pushing myself to make bigger plays to take agency to step into the power that I have used it responsibly to push the field of philanthropy forward and ultimately transform the systems of our economy because you can't separate out environmental health and wellness from wins you wanna make in terms of gender equity or incarceration without looking more holistically at the systems that we're working inside of. So in 2018 I learned that I was going to be inheriting a significant amount of money and my husband and I had already been talking about making a really intentional experiment around redistributing wealth and I had originally decided I was gonna give away $10 million in a way that was working in partnership with movement leadership and to move that capital not into an endowment that would drip drab little bits to communities but that would really like transfer it completely into either community governed projects or land ownership or other forms of like regenerative projects that could then help build wealth, power and cultural wellness in communities. And at the same time that I had made that decision I found out that I was going to be inheriting $445 million and so we made the commitment to give that money away. We're doing it through a foundation structure but we think of it as a transitional container for that project and have really been trying to experiment with different ways to move decision-making to different, to communities that are closer to the issues we're trying to address and then to keep my role as a trustee for now and a founder of this project to really be about talking to this community, to my peer community of funders and investors about really rethinking the ethical framework and the risk assessments that we do to really think about if we want to move and live into a world of justice and peace and equity, then we can't play by the same rules where we're always expecting other people to take on the risk or other people to accumulate income generation and wins that are gonna accrue back to us as the wealth holders or the investors. So that was, I said a lot all at once and I'll stop there and wait for some more direction from my fireside compatriots. Yeah, one of the things I really appreciate about both of you is the way that you listen and the way that you build relationships and as I've had a chance to see both of you, your work evolve, it's very much informed by the community leaders, the movement leaders, the organizations that are leading the work forward and you both sort of take your direction in many ways from the partners that you're building relationship with. So I thought it'd be interesting to just hear from each of you, like who are some of the people, what are some of the places that kind of like inspired you, continued to inspire you, helped to move you forward. Those of you who watched the lightning talk yesterday with Doria from Urban Tilt and Cooperation Richmond and the Climate Justice Alliance, you got a chance to hear from Doria how she's moving some of this work forward and Kat and Regan, both of you have been supporting that work in Richmond in different ways over the years and some of you may have heard from Anasa about the work she's doing in Memphis, but they're Harold and Spartansburg, they're a set of leaders in communities who've really formed and shaped how you put your work. So I would love for you to share a little about who some of those people are and how you build those relationships and why you think doing the work in that way is so critical, like through those relationships. Yeah, Regan, maybe you can start this time since Kat jumped out the last one. Thanks, Tash. Yeah, this is such a rich and emotional topic for me because I really feel I've been given an incredible privilege to be in relationship with our grantees, with the folks that we're rolling with and it's an ongoing process. I think building a relationship is an ongoing process. It's not like you check the box, like, okay, I've accumulated a relationship, I'm done. It's like, how do you work through problems? How do you lean into conflict? How do you represent the needs and interests of others when there's conflicts or confusion? So it's a place of a lot of vulnerability and need to build trust and that's an ongoing thing, especially as a white person, as a person who grew up with wealth privilege to know how to navigate those spaces. I in particular was in for educated and got a lot of my kind of worldview framing thanks to movement generation and Doria and Urban Tilt and Cooperation Richmond were very connected to that work and just the basic framing around just transition and thinking about how connected the systems of extraction and exploitation are and therefore we need an interconnected solution that also looks at a regenerative, restorative, caring economy that's based on relationship and trust and deep democracy. So yeah, I think that extended networking includes also Boston Ujima project. It includes Climate Justice Alliance, as you mentioned, and so many other partners. So that's been a really important place for my education. And then yeah, I think looking at the katali.org website is a good place to start and just look at, we just launched that website. We're really excited about it and the restorative economies funds, which as Taj mentioned, really represents the work of our CEO, Amaka Agbo. We're happy to be able to highlight there all the grants we've made and you can really see some of the complexity and interconnectedness between that work ranging from the folks we've mentioned and also projects like Restore Oakland and I hate naming things because then I know I'm leaving things out, but I'll pause there. So I'm gonna be lucky and get to follow in with any support I can provide for Doria and Urban Tilt and Cooperive Richmond and I'm very excited about that. I too have formed relationships that are critical to my own personal development and professional aims through the work. I actually grew up pretty segregated as a white middle-class girl in California and even the elite schools that I went to were not sufficiently exposing me to the stories of all the communities that I cared so much about. So it's been just a treasure to me to get to meet people along the way and some of those, including Doria, are Harold Mitchell in Spartanburg, South Carolina who I met through the presidential campaign. Turns out that's an interesting way to meet a lot of people too. And Spartanburg is an incredible story, the Regenesis Project from whom we took our name in the Regenesis community of practice. They're parlayed of egregious environmental assault on a black, brown and white community and a $20,000 EPA grant into $300 million of investment into community ownership, engagement and wealth. And they're still on that journey. About to lay in a hydroponic facility where formerly a fertilizer plant poisoned everybody. Also working with Anasa Troutman now in Clyburn Temple and following Regen there as well, hoping to lend support as they develop their community wealth building strategies and implementation. Allen's Worth, California, the first black community in California started by Colonel Allen's Worth, intended to be the Tuskegee of the West. Beautiful, self-fulfilling vision, a vibrant black community built on mutual self-aid and self-determination, then attacked by white supremacists and our economic system to be torn down. Now in rebuild mode with the leadership, the next generation of leadership in Allen's Worth, centering their redevelopment on regenerative agriculture that is Denise and Coyote Kedera and Dennis Hudson. And then Felicia Gaston in Marin City, who has been running youth leadership development programs for almost 30 years, thinking about COVID response and get out the vote and census and everything else. And we're working on a black history project for the West to make sure that we reveal the stories of Allen's Worth in Marin City, in Port Chicago, VanPort in Portland. Then finally, and I agree with Regen, it's dangerous to start naming communities and people because I may be leaving somebody out but I cannot not also speak about Catherine Flowers who just received a MacArthur Genius Award for her incredible activism around the right to clean water and sanitation systems in Lowndes County, Alabama, which is the birthplace of the Black Panther Movement and of course, a very historic civil rights location. And all of these communities have come together to share best practice and to me to provide inspiration to change the way that we're making resource shifts. Certainly, we're going to continue making grants, particularly those that allow communities to develop their capital absorption ability, but we intend to shift assets so that those communities can hold their land and communal ownership, can develop their business space with their own equity, not with outside investment and so that they can build thriving communities for the good life, not just surviving communities as we've seen in the past. Beautiful, beautiful. I wanna give you both an opportunity to say a little bit more about that for folks who are curious and inspired to understand what it really means to shift assets and resources in the ways that you're talking about, how in addition to sort of just going on to the Cattelli website, the groups are there, deliver them resources. It's simple. It's there, there's a pathway laid out and the groups that Kat mentioned as well. So there's always that just curious if there's more you can say about any challenge you wanna sort of put out to the SOCAP community in terms of how this community thinks about the question of investment because Regan, you sort of early on describe your experience of kind of challenging this notion of investment and there's some aspects of that that can be really problematic in terms of the impact. So both of you are talking about a different approach and I just wanna give you a chance to say a little bit more about any invitation you wanna put out into this community in terms of how they can also start thinking about this work a little differently and approaching it differently. Yeah, well, I think the idea of using the tools of finance to empower other communities and moving the assets and the ownership into those communities rather than assuming that the people who currently hold resources and have fiduciary responsibility don't confuse your fiduciary responsibility with an inability to move resources permanently into the hands of others. It is also, especially if you're in a philanthropic setting it's your duty to stay close to mission and the tides are shifting, the time is now you have permission to give that money away you do not need to have a perpetual endowment you do not need to give away 5% you can think bigger, you can do more on the investment side, I really think we need to start thinking of ourselves as allies for social change and movement evolution and not as gatekeepers or people who need to hold on to that power, so it's a mindset shift and I just challenge people to really think about what is the role you have to play in pushing a more transformative agenda that breaks us out of the internalized cultures and expectations that maintain the status quo. Couldn't agree more and I think the challenge that I wanna put out there is the one that I'm gonna try to achieve myself and it's multiple challenges. So we did, Tom and I took the giving pledge which is a commitment to give half your resources away during your life, but honestly it needs to be more than that and I'd like to hopefully, given the assets under my control shift a third of them to community ownership not so that those communities who know the best of how to heal and solve for the hurt that's been laid upon them the worst have the power to do that. One of the ways that I intend to do that is I have made a commitment of $100,000 to the communities that I spoke of, plus one more, the Friendship House New Village based on self-healing in the Mission District of San Francisco, Peter Bratt, the community steward who I count as a dear friend and a longtime colleague in the leadership role there with among others. So to use them as an example, I'm committed to giving $100,000 for their pre-development and capital absorption strategies to get the project ready to take over a block in the Mission building treatment centers, tribal spaces, support services and so on in coalition with black and brown communities throughout the Mission. And then to follow on the pledging of a million dollars of DAF assets to a non-profit bond financing so that we can leverage that money into four or five times that amount of low-cost capital. I'm gonna do that with five communities total, including certainly Urban Tilt Co-operative Richmond and Anasa and Cliver Temple efforts, but likely two more beyond that. And I'm calling out in this moment in time that I would love for four or more donors to join me in that strategy of $100,000 grant for capital absorption purposes and a million dollar pledge of a DAF asset over a 10-year period to back that kind of access to low-cost capital, which all wealthy people already have. So we're just opening up finance markets in a more egalitarian way. I'm very busy with leadership mostly black in financial innovation. I think Regan's absolutely right that capitalism is part of the problem. If we don't change it, it's going to kill us all. And we need to take back financial instruments to be public purpose in nature and community benefiting in outcome. I also would like to be a part of policy moves to make it more possible for us to reenact long-standing business models and new ones so that we can get to new definitions of property rights like land should be owned communally and kept in the hands of those who steward it properly. Like the big natural monopolies of the world, the Netflix, YouTube, Google, everything should be owned by platform cooperatives where each of us who shop, share, query, create content, earn a tiny micro equity share so that when everybody owns a little bit of everything and nobody owns too much of everything, anything, we thrive. So I intend to be very busy on the policy and innovation front as well in allyship with black and brown communities who stand to benefit from changing these massive systems. There you go, SoCal community. There's the call. And I'm going to close us with two words of wisdom from colleague and mentor, Amaka Agbo who leads the Coteli Foundation. And she's charged us with two things, disaggregating capital from capitalism which is what both of you are describing all the ways we need to do that. Amaka shared today just how clear it is that wealth is not something that's meant to be accumulated but something meant to be shared. The sharing feels good and regenerated across communities and generations. So just had to bring in more of Amaka's wisdom into this in support of all the less because we never do that too often or too much. And just to appreciate both of you for coming into this conversation, Aspire Chai Chat and really challenging this community that really put new and different people in charge of capital resources in ways that repair the harm that needs to be repaired and helps us to build the good life from the point of the gear for all. So thank you both. Any last comments for all the time but any last thoughts before we close? Just appreciate this conversation and it's very weird to not have an audience all will be on chat. So if people have things they wanna ask, please do. And I live in San Francisco in here. I'm not that hard to find. Happy to continue the conversation in other platforms. And let's all get together and launch a good life pledge and campaign. Beautiful. Thank you both.