 Hello, so as you mentioned, my name is Melanie Tharp. I'm here from Atlanta today from Center for Civic Innovation. I ask you to excuse me because I'm actually not that great at giving speeches. I was asked here to come and talk about some issues we see in the sector. So I will get going. So some of you might be a bit confused by the tone of this talk because usually when we talk about equity, particularly in comparison to impact investing, we think of financial equity. But that's actually an issue. Because that's not the only thing that term means. And I think that kind of points out something that I see happening. So equity actually means fairness, equality, justice. And when we talk about the impact sector, you know, what is it we're actually really talking about? There's this weird mix of money, meaning, innovation, social change, floating around that we hear people talk about. But what does that actually really mean? Well, what I think this space is founded on and what I think a lot of us who work in the grassroots of this space kind of believe is this this diagram. So looking more at, you know, how are we unlocking the overall human potential while simultaneously providing a good human experience for everyone? And at the center of this is where I find our definition of equity, which is about justice, equality, and maybe even more ownership for more people. So we as a group, as a movement, should be moving together, you know, maybe in fits and starts, but moving together towards the center of this diagram. The questions to ask are not, you know, can we keep up with market rate returns? Can we find new buzz-worthy technologies? Or is this company even scalable? That's really short-term thinking and what I think should be a really long-term game. With each investment, each donation, and even each expenditure of kind of social and political capital that we use, we should be asking things like, how is this helping to unlock the potential of humanity, while also making individual human experiences more enjoyable? And when we ask these types of questions, historically, we've gotten really great answers. We've gotten people who dedicated their lives to eradicating diseases like polio or Guinea worm. We've gotten great things like infrastructure investments. We've gotten inventions like benefit corporation law, which is something totally new, a new corporate form. And we've also gotten exciting things like crowd-investing and crowdfunding, which are empowering communities to actually make decisions and invest in the types of economies they want to see. But instead for, you know, the past few years, whether it's here, it's OCAP or somewhere else, I've heard what I like to call the shiny object syndrome. So I've heard a lot of rhetoric about what is the next big social entrepreneur? What's the next big innovation? The next big mainstream firm to jump into the game. But these aren't actually goals. They're not what we're asking to achieve. They're just means that might, you know, maybe just might get us to where we want to be. And when we get caught up in finding the next big entrepreneur, the next big innovation technology, we get a lot of this. So I'm sure everyone has seen, you know, posted note rooms before. And I can't say much because this is actually from my office, from the work that I do with my social entrepreneurs. But I think it speaks a little bit to this atmosphere we've created, where we build tools and accelerators and events to empower what we think are our next big stars to do what we think is really innovative. You know, they display their creativity on these posted notes. They sell us on the potential capitalization of the technologies and the cool products they're making. Yet, we aren't really challenging them on the types of impact that we really, really need them to be working on. So this is an innovation. It's not really anything. It's just a lot of fancy paper, but I think people think it looks really nice. But it leads a lot of people who are pouring their heart and souls into this sector, into this movement to feel like they don't fit into these highly designed activities and they don't have a seat at the table where they can actually make a difference. So instead of asking people to challenge themselves and create new systems, new structures, new empowering ideas, we're actually asking them to compete with each other to create projects and services and technologies that are only investable. And these aren't the only things people can contribute to our sector. But they do attract big traditional investment firms, which isn't bad. It's just not what we could be and should be working towards. We shouldn't reward or congratulate ourselves that the big investors show up at the sector. They were here this week. It was awesome. It's great. But we should challenge ourselves for what's next. So I want to look at when we look at just the bright, shiny objects and investable objects, we're missing bigger pictures. We're not creating streams of support for those doing great work and others who are moving us, even in really small ways, closer to our end goals, like these folks. So this is Eugene and Giovanna. I work with them in Atlanta. I think they get really tired of me picking on them because they're my favorite. So I use them a lot. But they have a really incredible story and a story that I think a lot of people relate to. And they believe a lot in the sector, mainly because I tell them it's a great place to be. It has great people. Eugene grows food. He grows incredible food. He sells it to the top restaurants in Atlanta, the ones you guys see in magazines and get awards. And then he also creates free and low cost classes for people in some of our most disadvantaged communities to learn how to grow their own food and grow their own food businesses. Great guy. His wife, Giovanna, she also owns her own business. So she takes this fresh food. She makes it into healthy, affordable, reheatable meals for postpartum and pregnant mothers and their families. Because she believes that those mothers should have more time to spend with their families instead of in the kitchen, even if they can't afford, you know, some of the really expensive products that are out there. But neither of these businesses will ever scale to the million dollar mark. Neither of them are very sexy, especially when you compare them to some of the stuff we see here this weekend, some of the new technologies that are coming out. Yet for their communities, they're a lifeline. They're creating better human experiences for the individuals they work with, and they're really unlocking the potential of the entire communities where they serve. Yet what types of equity do they see from the sector and from their work? You know, these companies have very limited financial return. They're not going to scale. They stay small. And there's actually not many available structures for them to fund their work and get it to a sustainable place. On top of that, they don't get invited to powerful tables. They don't have their voice heard often and they can't afford to come to conferences like this one where they could actually learn quite a bit. But they are improving lives. So they're improving lives that the families they work with and they're actually cutting health care costs for the communities in which they serve. Health care costs, which in poor communities are sometimes paid for by governments, yet we don't have a way to reward them for this work and this impact. And they're not the only ones, you know, they represent many people who pour their time and talents into what I would call our sector. Who are not being offered a way to reap the rewards, ways to get equity, whether that's financially, socially or otherwise. So our challenge is this. Our challenge is not to lose sight of kind of why our sector was started. Our challenge is to start thinking bigger about where it can go. We must create better and more inventive funding structures to democratize and reward these type of folks in the work that they're doing. We must look for ways to empower the voices and the collection of knowledge of those doing work, giving them a seat at the table so they can actually help move us forward. We must stop looking just at deals and technologies as the end game and start working together to build out a bigger picture. And we have to keep moving forward. You know, impact investing is not enough. It isn't the end game. Blackrock, Goldman Sachs being here this weekend. It's great, but their funding isn't for everyone. It can't fix everything. It can't invest in really great companies, helping those companies and those products scale, but it can't create new infrastructure. It can't create more open financial policy systems. So we have to keep moving towards what our ultimate goal is of unlocking potential we see in humanity, challenging ourselves to create inventive structures and systems to do it. So my name is Melanie Tharp from the Center for Civic Innovation in Atlanta, and I hope you will take up this challenge and kind of finish out this conference by thinking what's next for us after impact investing. Thank you.