 Dear Sokka community, please welcome poet Pousha Veyu. 1955, set the scene. A little black girl plays jump rope outside in the hot sun and becomes thirsty, walks off to find water passing by several fountains that could quickly cool her down so she finds the one just for her marked colored. Not far from her, a group of black friends enjoy their last week of summer with laughter and smiles and thanksgiving on their faces. Hungry for a bite to eat, they head to the safest restaurant they can find, the one where they get dirty looks because of their skin, but no real trouble, so it'll do. About five miles away, an elderly black woman sits at a bus stop, feet aching from a long day's work. After what seemed like hours of waiting, her bus finally arrives. She is met with piercing eyes and disdain as the pain in her feet settles, soon as she sits in an empty seat in the back. And one day, one day they all grew tired. Black Americans across the nation, the stench of segregation and separation in a land their ancestors were forced into had turned their stomachs long enough, the solution, keeping their money in their pockets. Thus, the legendary boycott was born. For one year, they walked instead of hopping on buses where wannabe superior people made them feel less than. They carpooled and used their feet like never before to send a message that the black dollar is oh, so valuable. And without human rights, without equality, without respect, America would not see a single black dollar spent on transportation. And in the midst of all of this, while facing oppression and lynching and trying to earn the right to drink from whatever fountain they pleased, black folks continued to make America great, continued to make the world a better place with no recognition, no fame, no investment, just faceless souls who created creations credited to faces that don't look like ours. When you think of computers, you think Bill and Steve, not Philip, the man responsible for advancing the speed of the very thing this society could probably not live without. Philip Imigwali, a man whose intelligence no doubt paved the way for technological advancement when he created the world's fastest computer. Today, we honor the dishonored, the forgotten, the masterminds behind our everyday lives, the ones who made social impact long before it was even a phrase, the ones who capitalism does not always serve, the ones who deserve recognition for their beautiful, creative minds. Did you know that the reason you can sleep well at night, secure in your home, protected by your alarm, is because of a black woman. The most disrespected, unprotected person in America is the very person keeping millions alive. How ironic that when your security is installed, bail arm or ADT, you should be given thanks to Marie Van Brittain Brown, a crime fighter in her own right, a soul barely known to many. Ain't it sad that this world would rather crumble into pieces and to acknowledge its need for blackness, for a black man. The reason a firefighter can fight fires and not grow tired, the gas mask created by hands dripping and melanin so hated that departments cancel their orders when they learn that a black man actually has a brain, that they would rather die than be saved by brown skin, rather die than confess how much of a necessity we truly are. So remember this the next time you're in your car and you get to a green light. Smile. Look up to heaven and send gratitude to Garrett Morgan, not only for the gas mask to protect our breathing, but the reason our vehicles don't collide in the streets of three light traffic system. When you see bodies on the brink of kissing death's lips, on the death beds waiting to exhale, think of Charles Drew. Drew up a plan to store blood longer than two days made away for this red elixir to remain intact so that hearts can keep beating until it is truly their time. We thank him for America's first major blood banks. In 2023, it is time we acknowledge the lost ones. Louis Latimer, the air conditioner. George Carruthers, UV camera for NASA. Patricia Bath, laser surgical device. Alexander Miles, automatic doors for elevators. Frederick Jones, refrigerated trucks. Lonnie G. Johnson, the super soaker. And the list goes on and on and on and on and on. Can you see that our everyday lives are impacted by things we take for granted, made by people we take for granted until they demand it? Respect, equity, recognition, investment into the very ideas and creations and inventions that keep this world turning. Burning in the hearts of a forgotten people is the desire to be seen, to be acknowledged for what we bring to the table, for the blood and the sweats and the tears invested into creating for a world that rarely says, thank you. Thank you. Hello, hello. That was poet, Portia Be'u. I was trying to pronounce that name right. She's a poet, an activist, speaker, educator and an author from Oakland, California. She shared her wisdom at TED Talks and Apple and Google and Adobe and many more places. She's passionate about God, social justice, black and women empowerment and mental health. She aims to unite faith and social justice, foster brave conversations and inspire others through speaking, workshops, poetry and music. Please give it one more time to Portia. Thank you. So hello, Socap. My name is Chris and welcome to Brief and Bold. I'm the senior content director here at Socap and I shared yesterday and I will share it again. My love language is the actually two are hats and avocado and I'll be your emcee today. So what a powerful way to start. So I will bring up our next speaker. So our next speaker has been working hard to save our planet, one tree at a time. Dr. Kathy Key is the president of World Tree who won the Impact Crowdfunder of the Year 2023 award for groundbreaking farming programs. Kathy has a PhD in anthropology, lives in British Columbia with her husband and four cats. She's a yogi, a vegetarian and is very proud to be called a tree hugger. Please welcome Dr. Kathy Key. Hi, Socap. Hi. All right. So how many of you have heard that many doesn't grow on trees? How many of you have heard that? All right, most of us. Well, what if it did? Have successfully monetized the destruction of Mother Earth? What if we were to reverse that and monetize the creation of healthy ecosystems? The world needs more trees. Demand for lumber is set to quadruple by 2050. Climate change coupled with deforestation is putting so much pressure on our forests that 30% of tree species are at risk of extinction. That includes trees that you know and love like cedar, ash, birch, redwood. The problem is trees take a long time to grow. So if you think of a cedar, for example, that takes 40 years to mature. We're simply not growing trees fast enough to keep up with demand. We have a solution. The Empress Blender is a super fast growing hardwood tree. So this here, this is a six month old tree. You can see it has huge heart shaped leaves. These are 18 month old Empress Blender trees. They are already over 20 feet tall. The Empress reaches maturity in just 10 years. Those huge leaves are carbon crunching machines sequestering massive amounts of CO2. But not only that, the leaves absorb nitrogen and provide rich organic matter to the soil. The flowers of the tree are high in nectar and support pollinators. And perhaps the most amazing property of all, when you cut an Empress tree down, it will regenerate without replanting. This means in the time it takes to grow one generation of cedar, you can grow three to four harvest of Empress trees. Now, I know what you're thinking. This sounds a little bit too good to be true. Is it some kind of bionic tree, some kind of invader of the worst kind? And if you're thinking that, you would be wrong. Mother Nature created this tree and she created nine species, most of which are totally benign. World Tree, we grow only non-invasive varieties that not genetically modified. However, they are really hard to grow. World Tree has been doing eight years of research, learning the best varieties to grow in each of our growing regions and the best ways to grow them. One of the things we've discovered is Empress trees are really responsive to regenerative agriculture. You can plant them with cover crops and food crops. You can even integrate your livestock amongst the Empress trees. The Empress produces a beautiful, sustainable, hardwood lumber that we call the aluminum of lumber because it's light yet strong, it's water resistant, it's warp resistant, and it's highly versatile. You can use it for furniture, cabinets, sailboats, beehives, tiny homes, a wide variety of applications and it's an excellent replacement for those at-risk species such as cedar and ash and birch. We've created a program that we call the Ecotree program that's designed to unite impact investors with farmers in growing Empress trees. And our model is actually really simple. So, world tree, we provide trees and training and support. Our farmers, they grow the trees and the whole thing is financed by our investors. We grow the trees and in 10 years, we harvest them and share the profits from the lumber. Thanks to the Ecotree program, we have planted 300 farms across United States, Costa Rica, Mexico and Guatemala creating about $240 million of assets. And this picture here, this is actually taken in Alabama, it's our US farm team. In the sign in the front, it shows the trees when they were planted in 2020. The trees behind them are just three years old on the same farm. One of our best growing regions is Costa Rica. The trees here are enormous. The trees you can see in this video are just two years old. And this region of Costa Rica called Limón is one of the world's biodiversity hotspots home to a wide variety of animals, birds and insects. However, only 13% of this region is under conservation. It's also a region where there is a lot of poverty, low wages and poor job prospects. For this reason, we've chosen Limón for our first large-scale institutional project. Partnering with Earth University and RRG nature-based solutions, we've created and designed a truly amazing 3,000-acre project that we call Lacobanya. Starting with degraded land, we're planting empress trees with food crops to generate three layers of revenue, food, carbon credits and sustainable lumber. And in parallel, we're generating multiple levels of impact. The project is designed to restore and enhance biodiversity while drawing down carbon and generating profits. And this project will create 80 jobs in the local community, training farmers in regenerative agriculture and giving small holder farmers land where they can plant and grow their own food crops. We change the world when we change the way we farm. Climate, community, carbon, biodiversity, profitability, these are all a product of how we manage and relate to our agricultural landscapes. World Tree is proud to be part of the regenerative movement and we know we cannot do this alone. It takes capital, it takes commitment and it takes action. I know that's why we're all here. This conference is about urgency, it's about connection and making things happen at the speed of trust. So I invite you all, let's get growing. Thank you, thank you, Kathy, for that inspiring work. Our next speaker has been working hard to save humans from ourselves in the era of technology. Aaron Purnell is an expert in vitality and health and healthy aging. He has written four books, hundreds of articles, essays and lectures. He's the founder of Vitality Life Anti-Aging Wellness Center where he assists people to lead a wholeness, fulfillment and optimum vitality. Please welcome posture genius Aaron Purnell. Hello, there are over 50 health conditions related to poor posture, ranging from the easy ones like tech neck and chronic back pain to the more challenging ones like erectile dysfunction, incontinence and sleep apnea. Chronic disease costs the US over 4.1 trillion dollars I have to look at my notes. By contrast, the better your posture is, the more attractive you are, which leads to the better opportunities for professional and social advancement, the better your health is, the stronger your bones are, which makes you more resilient against disease and pain. And you'll feel better about yourself and people will feel better about you. As radical as it may sound, improving your posture is an act of risk management. And that's why it's important to make sure that you have the best opportunity to have the impact that you intend to have in the world. Today, let's delve into the deeper reason why we all need to take action to improve our posture. So, sit up straight and let's get started. Throughout history, having good posture always meant strength, confidence and beauty. And for 40 years, there was even the miscorrect posture contest sponsored by the American Chiropractic Association. And when the clock forward, there was the lady named Twiggy. Anybody remember Twiggy? Yes, Twiggy somehow made slouching cute and the notion went viral. Within a few years, in 1969, the American Chiropractic Association canceled the miscorrect posture contest. Why in the clock forward? The computer age began, people started sitting at their desk to work all day. And now, why in the clock forward again? And today, people have elevated slouching to an art form in some parts of the world. But nobody is talking about the end result, the consequences of having a life of poor posture. We sit to eat, we sit to drive. Many of us even sit to work out. Our technology-driven sedentary lifestyles give us so many problems we can't even count them. But that's not the problem. The problem is, we don't have a system to restore our uprightness and our good posture. There's no medicine, no surgery, no gadget, no brace that can truly fix our posture problems. You actually have to do something. Now, wouldn't it be great if the body just went into upright alignment easily and naturally? My name is Aaron Lloyd Ulysses Parnell. I served on the first Olympic sports massage team at the Los Angeles Olympics where I helped athletes optimize their performance. I decided to make a career out of helping people get the best out of their bodies. The solution to our poor posture problems lies in posture optimization and fascia-focused fitness. Oh my gosh. Posture optimization is the art and science of being able to make the bones through the work of weight-bearing. And fascia-focused fitness leaves your body free and effortless to make it easy to have great posture. 100 years ago, fitness pioneer Joe Pilates introduced the notion of core strength to the world. And I believe that he changed the course of history. Where I think he left off is with core flexibility, which leads to posture optimization. Now, in a world where posture-optimized bodies are the new normal, you'll have people having a simple workout that helps them go into their natural uprightness, keeps their bones strong. In the beauty industry, posture-optimized beauty would affirm that the entire woman is beautiful and she's not just a pretty face. People working and studying at home with their computers and working in businesses would have a simple workout that would restore their body's uprightness and their movement freedom. But I make a distinction between good posture and great posture. Good posture is what you do when your mom walks in the room and says, hey, sit up straight and you put your chest up high and squeeze your shoulders back, you suck your stomach in, hold your breath until she leaves the room. That's why I say good posture is not good enough. Great posture, on the other hand, starts at the hips in the low back and it leaves your body free and open, gives you flexibility and helps you become fit, flexible and fabulous at any age. Once you and I get to know each other, you'll know that I love music. I love to dance, music is in my bones and for every day, there's some kind of music that is the soundtrack of my life. And what happens for me is I'm here because there are people suffering because they can't do what they love to do. And I see I'm running out of time so I'm gonna jump to the end and I say, when I look at people who are suffering with the inability to do what they love to do, I think to myself, this is like a freight train that just ran into their life. Didn't anybody hear this freight train coming? And I'm here to tell you today that there's a freight train of posture problems heading in our direction. And this is a bad thing because there's no surgery, no drugs, no brace that can fix our problems, you actually have to do something. And if this matters for you, please see me at the break, there's lots more. This turned in from a 12 minute talk into a five minute talk and so here, talk to me at the end and we'll explore what's possible for you. Thank you. Thank you, Aaron. How many of you sat up straight when you said sit up straight? Yeah, so our next speaker recently completed a one day, 12 hour, 207 mile bike race over the Rocky Mountains with his son. As chief investment officer at Advantage Capital, Scott Murphy oversees the firm's entire investment portfolio, he's a seasoned impact investor and successful entrepreneur, co-founding three high tech companies with successful exits and managing investments in hundreds of small businesses. Scott has also served in the US House of Representatives and in the administrations of two Missouri governors. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Scott Murphy. Thanks, Chris. So Carmen Tapio worked in call centers for 30 years and in 2018, she decided she wanted to buy a call center. She was working in a little call center in North Omaha with 40 people. Now there were some challenges to this though. First, the call center didn't make money. Second, it didn't have any collateral to get a bank loan. Third, Carmen didn't have any money to buy the company. Fourth, her business plan was to grow aggressively but nobody thought there was a workforce in North Omaha to do that. And fifth, Carmen had never been an entrepreneur before. She'd never owned a business. So she had to bring a lot of vision and energy to convince people like us to give her the money but convince us she did and what a great decision that was. When we see what she has done with this company now, we are able to see an amazing transformation. She has built a company that went from 40 people to 300 people bringing in an amazing amount of work. And she's done that by giving people in that community the hope that they can do something different. There was no transportation, people couldn't get to work. So she has buses, pride and joy that go pick you up at your house. She has a lending program where they give people money to buy their first car, to buy their first home. She has an apprenticeship program to teach people the skills they need. She sends people to college. She has made a transition in this community and she's been giving people a second chance. One of her senior executive members, the leadership team used to run a gang in the neighborhood where they're working now. Carmen's impact though has gone way beyond North Intelli Services. She's now the chair of the Omaha Chamber of Commerce. She's on the Federal Reserve Board of Kansas City. And right now she's working on the next project which is to redevelop a blighted block in the urban center of North Omaha where we are hopefully gonna help her put in retail, low income housing and an office for hundreds of employees of North Intelli Services to drive that energy and keep it in that community. I still remember meeting Neil Lane for the first time. Driving down a small road, two lane road in rural Ohio, trees everywhere. All the trees we saw in the earlier presentation they were all right here. And all of a sudden you're going down the road and there's a little building carved out with about 20 parking spaces and a few cars. No town, no people, nothing else around. So I go inside, I meet Neil at Global Cooling and I say, Neil, why are you here? And he said, because people in this community need good jobs and we're gonna bring them here. It's pretty impressive, pretty interesting. Their technology was a new 50% less energy usage way to make a freezer, a very cold freezer for research labs at Stanford and at Berkeley and other places where they needed biotech research. So we met Neil, we got excited, we got involved in the project. We invested and with all small businesses like many, many of them, almost immediately everything started to go wrong. The handles fell off the doors, the next generation the product wasn't done, it didn't work. They tried to outsource the manufacturing, the new manufacturer couldn't make it. The freezers were breaking, they weren't staying cold. Everything went sideways. It had worked really well before we got involved but then everything went sideways. Along comes the pandemic. That seems like it could be a disaster but it turns the other way for this company. Moderna, Pfizer make these two great vaccines but one of them needs to be at negative 30 degrees and one at negative 80. The only freezer with the capabilities because of its environmental friendliness, its smaller size and lower energy that could do both was global cooling's freezer. Every Walmart, every CVS, every Walgreens in America needed one of these so that they could take the vaccines and make them available to people. The company goes up 300 people, it's a rocket ship, we're trying everything we can to keep them making these as fast as people need them. We got another one of our portfolio companies in Ohio involved making wire harnesses for them and the whole community rallied behind global cooling. They sold it to a big public biotech, it was a huge success, people are at work, money was made and everybody in America got their vaccines a lot faster than they would have without global cooling and there's a picture of them. So Tim Hayden was a graduate student at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the rural Shenandoah Valley. One day a farmer comes to the school and says, is anybody here that could help me with a business plan because I don't know what to do with this little farm. My partner died and I'm just at a loss. So Tim made it a class project for that semester and helped him write a business plan. Fast forward a year, Tim was the CEO of this farm. It's a tiny little farm with a few acres and a small greenhouse growing herbs. That was in 1992 and over time they built more greenhouses, they built, they got more land, they created a distribution business and they bought herbs from other people. They grew to be a dominant player in the local community. They had a big, big presence there. Then investors like us got involved and we took it nationwide and they became the biggest herb supplier to the whole country and they kept innovating in their greenhouses. They started putting lights in the greenhouse so they could grow even when it wasn't beautiful outside and you weren't able to see the sun on those days. Got more and more interesting. They developed their own organic nitrogen which used a ton less energy and replaced all the fossil fuels that are burned to create nitrogen outdoors. And all of a sudden the technology got better and they started to be able to grow in the dark and they started to create vertical farms. And today their general process is that they have six layer vertical farms, millions of plants growing inside each facility that they build. These indoor farms are now using 95% less water, 95% less land. They're using less energy. They're climate resistant because they can grow year round no matter what happens outside. They are able to do this locally in your local area and bring organic food to your local markets. But what's crazy about what Tim and his team at Solely Organic have done is they're doing it for less money than you can grow in the field. So they're able to bring organic produce to the masses. Walmart is their biggest customer. They're doing $150 million of sales. They have 1,000 people working at the company and it's all driven by an entrepreneur with a vision for his local community that was able to execute and deal with all that change. That's what we see at advantage. The end of the day, the secret to every successful business is in the leadership and the people on that leadership team. People are way more important than the business plan and entrepreneurs are the ones that produce the impact that we're all aiming to achieve. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, Scott. How are you feeling? Good? All right. Let's keep it rolling. Now we have a duo. We have two people coming on. Kerry Forma, our next speaker, and Barr. We'll be sharing the stage together. Kerry is the managing director at Monitor Institute by Deloitte. Brings over 20 years of experience in guiding organizations through transformative change. She's passionate about finding innovative solutions to complex social and environmental challenges with degrees in psychology and business. She's intrigued by leadership, leadership's power to drive change. Outside her work, she enjoys gardening, horseback riding and boxing with her two daughters. That's awesome. The other speaker is Barr Parag. Barr is an impact innovation expert with 15 years of experience. She founded Poly Labs, a startup studio focusing on mission-driven for-profit companies. Previously, she worked at Monitor Deloitte and engaged with organizations like the United Nations. Barr has an IDF background holds an MIT Sloan MBA and researches FinTech solutions for Sub-Saharan African farmers. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Barr and Kerry. Hi, everyone. We're gonna start with a little story. Four years ago, Jasmine Chen, an MIT student, witnessed the harrowing effects of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. She was compelled to get involved. And as she did, she saw firsthand how difficult it was to supply relief to the communities trying to rebuild their future. And what she noticed most was a glaring gap of information. NGOs and community leaders didn't have the information they needed to support their communities. They didn't know who needed help or what they needed. And what could result is millions of bottles of water showing up, but no baby food or diapers. So Jasmine, relying on her skills in building environmental data tools, set out to build a solution. She recruited her classmate Azuri, a product designer, and what emerged was RePlus Connect and the opportunity for impact and financial return. But when they set out to raise funding to build a pilot, they were met with barriers and closed doors at every turn. Their experience is the experience of most underrepresented founders. But imagine if we can tap into that potential and accelerate the problems that we're facing, the world's most pressing problems, build wealth for communities, and value for all of us. We can. We need to invest more, do it differently, and do it smartly. So let's talk about all three of those. Invest more. Last year, Crunchbase reported 1% of VC funding went to black-owned businesses, 1.9 to women-owned startups. 2%, how can that be? If you're generous and add them together, 3%, how can that be? Especially when you compare it to graduation rates across all areas of STEM. Black students represent 7.5% of graduates, women 35%. Even with those woeful statistics, what if we could get closer to those demographics for VC funding? Imagine the potential. Without funding, founders can't access capital to launch pilots, expand to new markets, lease office space, or attend conferences to market their solutions. And in an environment where nine out of 10 startups fail, underrepresented founders are often having to roll the dice with the money that they need to pay their bills and support their family. So can we agree we need to invest more? Yes, we can agree. We have to invest more. But it's not that simple. You see, let's go back to Jasmine and Azori example. On the paper, they're a sure bet to very qualified founders going after huge market size. What's the hiccup? To exemplify, let's talk another example. My friend, let's call him John, finished a prestige service in an intelligence unit and wanted to start a cyber company. He then talked to his roommate from the same unit who partnered him up with a VC you guessed it, from the same unit. John as the VC sat down for coffee and the VC said, you know, I like it, I like you, let me just help you refine the problem and I'll put the first check. Few weeks later, John closed his $4.5 million round pre-seed and pre-product. Now, this is not a bad story. It's actually a really good story. The investor did what he should do. He invested in a founder he really believed in, in an opportunity he understand in a very streamlined process. If the same investor would have tried to invest in a Zuri and Jasmine, it would have cost him more time and effort. It did not make economic sense. You see, and that's the problem with many VCs. They truly don't have the economic incentives to invest in underrepresented founders, especially when they're solving what we called underrepresented problems. So that's a systemic issue. And if we want to change the systemic outcomes, we need to change the input. So we need to invest differently, not just more, but different. We need to use different form of capital, different partnership to incentivize different types of behavior. But, and this is a big but. Different must still be smart. Our system is not perfect, but there are elements that we don't want to lose. VC investment is not just cash. It's feedback, it's validation, it's signal to bigger investor that founders will need. So we need to make sure that whatever form of investment mechanism fulfill these roles. This is where partnership comes together. This is where we as an ecosystem need to think how to pull different source of capital with different types of objectives and different types of risk appetite. And this is where we as Deloitte have ambitions to help. Deloitte's made a $1.5 billion commitment to equity to those facing the greatest barriers and a strategy around financial inclusion we believe is a key way to do that. We believe supporting underrepresented founders has a multiplier effect. It builds family sustaining wages, supports communities in need and helps us make progress on our most pressing issues. But as Barr said, we also know we can't do it alone. So we're committed to partnership, building and supporting ecosystems of lots of different players to make this change happen. We at Polylab, we have the mission to accelerate the speed and quality of solution to global challenges. We do this by leveraging existing technology. We also recognize that we wanna unleash the power of technology to fight the fight of our time. We must partner with founders that have lived experience in the problem areas where we wanna tackle. This is why we're so happy and excited to partner with organizations like Deloitte to think creatively and collectively about this problem. Now let's close the loop on Jasmine in a story. I am happy to announce that earlier this summer they finally were able to secure the funding they needed to run their pilot. It took them four years. Now this is a good story and it's gonna have great ending I can promise you but let's just run the scenario. Let's just imagine a world where four years ago they met an investor who said like, oh, I like you. Let me just refine the problem with you and I'll put the first check. My bet that today we had much better tools to handle the devastating disasters that are increasing in severity and in frequency. Let me be more clear. I can personally say that their product could have saved lives and reduced economic losses, particularly this month. Investing in underrepresented founders will pay dividends, financial, economics, environmental, societal. They will, we urge all ecosystem players, whatever form of capital you're owning, invest more, invest smartly, invest differently. And if you want a partner on this journey, please reach out. Let's circle back here next year and view better stats. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you, Carrie and Barr. So our next speaker is Frank Road. He is the CEO of Onify, helps first-time home buyers live their dreams. Before Onify, he led NOMI's solutions in the world of mortgage pricing. Frank's a seasoned entrepreneur who started an Oliver Wayman and FICO. He hopped over from Germany to attend Wharton and now he is in San Francisco with a family of five. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Frank. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Socap, for having me. Good afternoon. I want to talk about housing and housing affordability. There is a big problem that we have in the US. It's really a global problem, which is that homes are more expensive than they have ever been. And first-time buyers in particular, young people entering the market are facing the toughest environment in over 50 years. And I think everyone kind of knows this anecdotally, but I want to take you on a little journey into some of the underlying reasons and then discuss how we can potentially solve for this. The average house in the US, the average home in the US today costs 4.3 times the average income. That compares to 1.9 times the average income in 1970 and it's the highest number since we have records. We have this data going back to 1946, that's 77 years. Houses are more expensive now than they have been in 77 years. If you live in San Francisco, like I do, it's even worse. Most of the coastal cities, this number is significantly higher. So not just San Francisco, but places like Raleigh, Durham and Nashville and other cities have this problem. We also, in addition to home prices, now have the highest mortgage rates in over 20 years. The 30-effects rate mortgage, which is the traditional first-time buyer product just topped 8% last week. We have a regressive tax policy that was enacted in 2018 that basically did away with the mortgage interest tax deduction for first-time buyers. This is a little known fact that most first-time buyers do not qualify for the mortgage tax deduction anymore. So what used to be support from the federal government via interest tax deduction is no longer available. We have student debt that's putting pressure on first-time buyers and as you all know, in October, this month, after three years, student loan repayments have started to kick back in, putting again more pressure on budgets. And we have institutional buyers, basically Wall Street, buying about 25% of single-family homes in the US and turning them into rentals for investor benefit. So in that environment, the ability for a first-time buyer to go out and graduate from renting into owning, even a starter home, a $200, $300,000 home, has significantly decreased. We did a deep dive here in Raleigh Durham, our launch market, and we looked at the win rate for the average first-time buyer which used to be roughly 15% in 2017 has gone down to 2% last year. So 50% of first-time buyers get help from family. And these folks, quite frankly, don't need our help. What about the other half, right? What about the people who don't have generational wealth to help them buy homes? And then you look at the effect, home ownership has been regressive in the US for a number of years and we're stuck, right? We're stuck with a home ownership rate in a system that favors generational wealth and disproportionately disfavors minorities, recent immigrants. So why do I care? I spent 15 years as a CEO of a software company here, venture-funded, selling a pricing engine to mortgage lenders. So I spent 15 years in the bowels of mortgage pricing, which is super exciting if you care about it. And one of the things I learned is that the system isn't really engineered to support first-time buyers and there's really no incentives in the system to solve this problem. So I sold this company, moved on, started a new company, and we tried to sit down and said, why should we solve this problem? Why should we all care about ownership? Ownership is the single largest contributor to wealth and I'm not talking about independence and huge wealth. I'm talking about the nest egg of the average American is largely contained in their home. Homeowners have better access to schools so there is, in our educational system, a progressive effect here where home ownership actually allows parents to have better access to schools which benefits their children. And we have crime rates, whether that's correlation or causation, you can argue and I'm happy to do that. Crime rates are lower in areas with higher home ownership. And it's also part, a deeply personal part of the American dream. People like to own their four walls. So how do we solve this problem? It's a massive generational problem. We can solve it with socially conscious capital and the opportunity we think is somewhere around a million people per year, first time buyers who are entering the system who need help. So what we've challenged is the traditional choice between renting and buying and we've basically aided a path in the middle and in between that we call fractional ownership. So the ability for first time buyers to buy a home, not the whole home but fractions of the home over time. We calling it buy your home brick by brick, zero debt, no surprises. So how does that work? Well, you can pick a house, any house on the market and we turn it into 10,000 bricks. Bricks are ownership shares or interests in that real estate. The customer buys 200 bricks on day one and then progressively buys 13 bricks every month and he pays rent on the bricks that they haven't bought. So looking at the single home here, I can own a fraction and I can rent a fraction but I have the perfect flexibility to decide how much I want to own, how much I want to rent. And the innovation here is that we can turn a brick into a security under an SEC exemption and a security becomes a tradable instrument that any individual can invest in. So what we've done here is we've created liquidity in an otherwise illiquid asset and we have bricks that are being bought by family members, circle of friends, the community, church, other folks who are interested in helping that individual. Bricks generate rental income, home price appreciation and therefore there's an incentive baked into the ownership and the investment in those bricks. So we're effectively creating a crowdfunding mechanism for purchases of single family homes in the United States. Thank you. Now, once an only has accumulated enough bricks, they can qualify for a traditional mortgage, buy out the remaining investors and own the home the traditional way. And what that does is it puts homeowners and investors on the same team, effectively having them jointly own the asset and that has a number of benefits, savings for the first time buyer and then return for the homeowner. Return, sorry, for the investor. So being on the same team means sharing the rewards and one of the things that we're very proud of is activating socially conscious capital in the markets where we started. So for example, we have a UNC professor who is funding homes for refugees in his community in Chapel Hill. We have other folks who have social mission and objectives around funding homes and funding bricks for individuals that they care about. So we've raised a bunch of money. We're live in Raleigh Durham. We've had a large amount of traction early on. We're looking for capital to fund homes and if you want to join us in giving first time buyers an affordable path to home ownership, please take down my information. Contact me, happy to talk. Thank you. So the other day I walked around cactuses. Ooh, cactuses. Cactuses, cacti. Do you say cacti or cactuses? Why would you say cacti? Okay, okay, you know what? I'll say them both. I was walking around cactuses and I was like, poor cactuses. What must have happened for this guy to cover up his body with spines? It's like throughout million years of evolution. He probably got hurt again and again and he was like, go away, leave me alone. And so he thickened the skin and he pulled out a few thorns here and there but he didn't help. And so he ended up, look, like completely covered with knives. You know, I wish you could tell him Mr. Cactus, relax. Everybody here is trying to figure it out but I can't because it's a cactus. Cacti, don't talk. Wait, now I have to check if it's cacti or cactuses. Why can't I finish one thought before I have to Google something? Okay, great. Apparently you can say both cactuses and cacti. I wish I was less distracted. Woo! I wish I was less distracted. I wish I was less distracted. I wish I was less distracted. I wish I was less distracted. Woo! I wish I was less distracted. Anyway, yeah. Ah, I love that video. So Brief and Bold is super cool. You never know what you're gonna get. So I'm excited you're here and thank you for being here. So our next speaker delivered a speech and the US presidential candidate, Senator Obama, famously said, I'm glad Okendo is not running for president yet. Okendo Lewis Gale is the author of Harambians and founding partner of Harambians Prosperity Fund. He chairs the Harambi Entrepreneur Alliance, a community of 350 plus young African leaders. They've fostered tech unicorns like Andela, Flat-A-Wave, and Go One, creating 3,500 plus jobs, raising $2 billion from investors like Google Ventures and others. Okendo is a Harvard graduate and has advised the Vatican, Rhodes Trust, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Okendo. Aloha, everyone. Aloha. Aloha. Aloha. Well, beautiful people. As Chris mentioned 16 years ago, Senator Obama had the audacity to believe that he could upstage me at my own graduation. Only to learn the hard way that that could not be done. But the message he shared with the class of 2007 is as relevant today as it was back then. Because Senator Obama told the graduating class of 2007 that we could now take our degrees, the piece of paper that we were about to earn, and simply go in pursuit of the mighty dollar. But if we were to reduce our life to the simple pursuit of wealth, we would suffer from what he called a poverty of ambition. Senator Obama told us that if we really wanted to fulfill our true potential, if we really wanted to be all that we could be, we had to hitch our wagon to something larger than ourselves. And I share that because 16 years ago, I thought the biggest wagon I could think of was Africa. Here we have the richest continent on earth that is home to some of the poorest people on the planet. 16 years ago, I had a hunch. My hunch was that if we could harness the entrepreneurial potential of Africa's youth, we might just be able to help change that reality. And so my dear friends, 16 years on, the hunch has now been backed by a growing number of evidence. Oops. We now have a book called The Prosperity Paradox. They were co-authored by a Harambian. It falls out with Jomo, along with Professor Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School. And what this book does is it reminds us that across Africa, you have a series of innovators who are developing products and services, not just for the 80 million Africans in middle class, but the 800 million who are not currently participating in the global economy. What this book reminds us is that if we can figure out a way to serve the underserved, a way to deliver healthcare and education and finance and basic services to people who cannot afford it, well, that will enable us to build resilient business models that could be of value, not just to people in Kinshasa, Lagos and Nairobi, but for people in London, Beijing and San Francisco. What this book reminds us is that there are global implications to African innovation. I like to joke. Before China had Alipay, in America had Apple Pay, Kenya had Impessa. And Paula's crazy. We are bold and crazy enough to believe in this alliance that that's just the tip of the iceberg. Over the next few years, you're going to see a whole host of African bread innovation that is going to simply spread across the world like wildfire. Well, 16 years on, as I've mentioned, we don't just have a book. We now have over 300 Harambians, as we call the innovators who've joined the Harambia Alliance. They are a competitive bunch. Each year, we select 30 out of 5,000 applications. They are a diverse bunch. As you can see, we have Harambians from across the continent in a variety of industries. They are impactful. As Chris mentioned, they've now raised over $2 billion and built some of the most iconic unicorns across the length and breadth of Africa. But two years ago, the Harvard Business School challenged us. Professor Sikkochi wrote a case study about our alliance. And in this case study, he reminds us that while it's great that we have hundreds of Harambians, the challenges and opportunities of Africa are so vast that they require us to have not just hundreds of Harambians, but thousands of them. Well, according to our admission process, we won't even get to 1,000 Harambians until 2060. So obviously, that's not the way. But imagine a world in which not only we may not have thousands of Harambians, but hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innovators across the continent can learn from the insights of Harambians. Imagine a world in which the makers of African unicorns can create masterclasses and share their insights with a growing number of innovators across the world. They can tell us how do you build high-performing teams when you don't have a deep bench of expertise? How do you raise capital when you don't have deep-pocketed investors? How do we transform Africa's challenges into opportunities? How, in a sense, how, my dear friends, can we ensure that the hindsight of Harambians become the foresight of the next generation of bold African innovators? How, in a sense, we can get the Harambians' lab off the ground? Now, my dear friends, here we go. I would like to simply invite you. My invitation to you is very simple. I would like you all to hitch your wagon to the Harambians' lab. Now, Dr. Martin Luther King told us years ago, if you wanna be great, wonderful. If you wanna be important, wonderful, or recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. And I believe that, as you can see from the selfie, I've slightly modified it because I believe everybody can be great because everybody has a phone. Now, do you have a phone with you? Please pull out your phone. Come on, take your phones out. Everybody got a phone? Yes, we can. Take your phone out now. Please take a picture of the QR code. Can we see them? There you go, yes. People in the back, I can see you. Do you have a phone? Oh, there you go. Well, people, there are four simple steps we can do. If you'd like to access the Harambians' lab and let the hindsight of Harambians be your foresight, join us. If you'd like to nominate users or communities, whether they be accelerators or whether they be portfolio companies in your portfolio across Africa, join us if you'd like to sponsor content and maybe mine the insights of Harambians to figure out how do we measure impact. Join us. And if you'd like to join, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Oppenheimer at the Allingray family and help us shape the Harambians' lab by being one of the founder partners, please join us. Now, I'd like to believe, as I said before, that everybody can be great because everybody can serve. Thank you all. Now, you will allow me, if Pope Francis allowed me to take the selfie, I'd like to believe we can do this together, yes? All right, now the people in the back gotta raise your hand so we can see. Wave high, there we go. Aw, mission accomplished. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Okendo. Our next speaker, Raul Pomeraz is the founding partner of Son & Capital where he operates across the firm's overall business activities with a special focus on client strategy and industry leadership. For over 20 years, his career has been centered on the development and delivery of investment solutions for clients seeking social and environmental impact portfolios. As a testament to his pioneering role in the field, Raul, get this, was on the first SOCAP panel at the very, very first SOCAP event. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Raul. Let's try it again. Good afternoon. Excellent, wonderful. Thank you all. Great to be here with you. Really, this story today begins back in 2000 when I was challenged to think differently about the wealth that a client I was working with came to me and the challenge was how can we use this wealth to do something good in the world? At the time, and imagine it kind of as a global, an allocator of globally diversified portfolios, I was kind of inspired but also challenged and concerned about how to make those two things work. Because as we know, especially at that time, the ideology of the modern investment world was singularly focused on the idea that it's all about investment performance. That's it, that's all that really mattered. The outcomes, the impact, the accomplishments that my clients were really trying to seek from this capital had to come back. This ever complicated and technical investment ecosystem that was really designed to maximize fees and slash a path to maximum returns. So, that's the world I inhabited. That's where I worked. That's where my, and so it became really clear that this, and my client appreciated the extensive undertaking to transform this work into investments that could actually deliver both returns and impact. Given this rare opportunity to transform my practice, as well as recognizing that this was something that resonated with my philosophy, my ethos, and candidly seeing this as a business opportunity, I did what most people do with these types of challenges. I just dove in head first. And so, as a result of that work, arrived Sonin Capital. You know, the name Sonin Capital is simply a modified acronym to define the idea of social and environmental capital. And Sonin really stands proudly today as a firm for those who feel the same passion, the urgency, the conviction that there must be a better way to invest as a place to be. You know, our clients often come to us with kind of rekindled dreams. Dreams that haven't really been forgotten, but for far too long have been sidelined by the financial industry's insistence that the only thing that matters is investment performance. That simple conjunction of and is what separates the traditional capitalists from those of us who want to do good in this world. That is the power of what Sonin Capital seeks to deliver competitive financial performance and positive social and environmental impact. But investing with social environmental considerations, it adds another dimension, a shared reality that we have to acknowledge that there's just an interconnectedness between companies that we invest in and the world we actually inhabit. The truth is, in simple terms, all investments have an impact. And over these past decades, what's happened is investors have been given dozens of ways to research, evaluate, analyze and investment to the point where they've lost sight of the world that these investments occupy. We all know that the price of an investment is up to the market. And yet the true price of that investment is borne by all of us. If you think I'm exaggerating, consider one of the most water-intensive crops that is grown on thousands of acres of farmland, generates $350 a ton and has grown in one of the driest places on earth. I'm speaking about alfalfa, grown in drought-stricken Arizona to feed cows on the other side of the world. All investments have an impact. This notion that we must yield on our values in order to achieve competitive returns and have impact is tired and outdated. Rest assured, however, the absolute traditionalist has no compunction about using their resources to undermine the industry. All around us, we see in the deconstruction of ESG and the rise of green hushing where companies are downplaying the social or environmental impacts that they may be doing an incredibly great work at generating all for fear of irrational responses. Sadly, this now is also a trend within those that are putting efforts forward towards addressing racial equity. Our work in this field matters even more so today, whether it's environmental catastrophes, racial gender inequity, sustainable efforts, all of these policies, policies that make sense, the powers that be have not stemmed the Malay that they are creating, and our leaders certainly have not demonstrated their ability to rise up to these challenges. Fiduciary responsibility is most often what is quoted as the rationale for the singular focus on financial return. But sadly, the world has lost sight of the origins of the word fiduciary, which stem from to trust. So what's the point of trusting the board of a retirement plan who only worries about having the funds to pay retirement benefit without any regard for the world they're leaving for their retirees? Imagine, here's your check to enjoy retirement, sorry for your health problem, the lack of access to healthy foods, oops, you have to move, all while potentially lowering your life expectancy. The best intentions often obscure negative outcomes, those foundations that create more problems with how the majority of their assets are invested than what they're doing for good with those earnings or in the context of a family that focuses on preserving wealth for future generations without recognizing that those investment decisions are robbing those future generations of long fulfilling lives. As I look across this audience, it's all dark in here, but nonetheless I can still see some familiar faces, I see many of these familiar faces who have been on the front lines of innovating solutions to the social environmental challenges that we face. I also see some new faces out here, which I imagine are awakening to these new vital opportunities our industry offers to the veterans of the ecosystem. I thank you for all your tireless effort, for your courage to pursue innovative business models that embrace the notion that embrace the notion that commercial business can be a force for good. Please continue to be willing to share your successes, but also your failures so that we can attract others into this field while saving them, making those same mistakes, that we have made. To those just joining us or early in their journey, I welcome you. To be clear, we still have a long road to go. The good news is that there are many of us here today and at this event that have the battle scars from which you can learn and accelerate your own journey and path. And lastly to all, please don't take this time together that we've had here at Socap as a place to generate more topics for longitudinal studies or theoretical exercises, but use this as a framework for action. So join me in reclaiming the narrative of our time and reclaim assets as a force for good in this world. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you. Our next speaker loves karaoke, a roll of blading, and is on a quest to master the perfect poached egg. Nisha Desai, a trailblazer in the energy industry, she begun as a management consultant, later pioneering energy storage and renewables integration over 20 years ago. With expertise in solar microgreeds and decarbonization, she's now the CEO of Intention, expanding the realm of climate impact investors. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Nisha. Have you ever seen a trillion dollars of cash? Now, me neither, but that's the scale of capital that needs to be mobilized to invest in climate each year. That's a rather daunting task. So it's understandable that we might focus on the deep pips pockets, the billionaires and the family offices, but what if we were to act more inclusively? And in fact, what if we were to, instead of talk about mobilizing capital to invest in climate, we talk about mobilizing people to invest in climate. And what if in addition to the 1% of the people who have lots of money to invest, we also mobilize the 50% of people who have some money to invest. Actually, why don't we just empower as many people as possible as we can to become climate impact investors, even if they have teeny checks? Oh, I know what you're gonna say. You're probably gonna tell me that it's easier to pick up a few big checks than lots of little ones. And you're probably right. And we definitely need to invest a trillion dollars in climate solutions. But we also need millions, if not billions of people to deploy those solutions in their cars, in their vehicles to change their consumption habits, to vote for climate-friendly policies, and to join the climate workforce. We need mass market behavior change to tackle climate change. And behavior change is tough. I mean, think about how hard it was for you to change your diet the last time you decided to eat more healthy. Behavior change at the scale we need is even tougher. So we need to deploy all the tools that we can. And investing has proven to be an incredibly powerful catalyst for behavior change. Let me show you. And look, we've all had experience with behavior change at some point when money is on the line. I mean, how many of you have watched a sports game where you didn't really care about the outcome until you placed a friendly wager? Even a small bet can transform a neutral observer into a full-throated fan. I've seen this happen in my own house with my daughter, Annika. So I wanted to teach her a little bit about personal finance, so I gave her $200 to invest. And she picked a few stocks and started following them. When Russia invaded Ukraine, she tells me she wants me to sell her stocks and buy other ones based on a list that she had researched on the effects of war. Well, I'm thinking to myself, wow, I'm a proud mom here because my apathetic teenager is finally paying attention to world affairs. Now, what happens when people get involved with climate impact investing? How does their behavior change? Well, in a lot of climate positive ways, as it turns out. I'd like to tell you about Steve. He's a seasoned impact investor who's always been mindful about his carbon footprint, but he lives in Austin and there's always room to do better, especially when you live in a Texas-sized house. So it was after he invested in a home energy monitoring company that he started deploying that technology to optimize the heck out further out of his own home energy consumption. And I'm sure that those savings came in quite handy during the recent heat wave, the record heat wave that we experienced this past summer. And he also got his community involved with his climate investments. When he put money into a solar and storage company, he encouraged a lot of other people to put solar on their roofs, including his local church. So even newer climate investors are getting inspired to make big changes in their lives. Like Chris, he works in finance for a consumer goods company, but he lives in California, so he's surrounded by tech. He got started with angel investing and one of his companies happened to be a climate tech startup. And by getting involved with the founders, helping them with intros, giving them feedback on their business plan, he got really inspired by the climate startup mission, by the startup's climate mission. And that got him on his own journey. He started leading efforts within his own company to switch banks and look for climate-focused banks to put their cash deposits. And then he's working on an even bigger investment with his own career by essentially switching jobs and looking for a job to working directly with a climate solutions company. So for younger folks who might not have enough wealth built up to comfortably make high-risk investments, they leverage that with their time instead, like Deanna. So Deanna is a young professional in the energy industry. She's surrounded by a lot of people who have, don't believe in the business potential of alternative energy, but as much to kind of carve out her own path, she started investing some of her time to help a few climate tech startups, reach their next set of milestones. And as she got involved with a few startups, she started to learn about many others. And she realized just how many viable climate solutions actually exist. And she became not only a climate optimist, but a climate tech evangelist. After electrifying her home and finally going out of her own way to recycle, she started writing about climate technologies in an effort to encourage more industry investment. And so that's something that she has in common with Chris and Steve. You see, they've all engaged their respective communities as they've gotten involved with climate investments of their own. And I think that's really powerful because it's not about the climate impact. It's not just about the climate impact that we enable when we invest our money. It's about the climate impact that we can magnify when we change our behaviors and we take climate action in our personal lives and in our communities after having been educated, inspired, and empowered by the climate projects that we invest in. And what if we can catalyze this behavior at scale? There are millions of people who have some money saved up, but they don't have easy access to climate impact investment opportunities that are truly additive. But they have the appetite that my startup intention, we've talked to hundreds of people who are frustrated with greenwashing the stock market but who really, really want their money to be contributing to solutions to climate change. So we've built an online investing community, a climate investing community to help connect regular people with investment opportunities that are climate positive and climate aligned. And to connect people with each other. I mean, we're building a climate investing movement. Just think about it. I mean, what if half the population could be climate impact investors? Because then a lot of people will have skin in the game and with more people who have that climate impact investing experience, we'll have a better chance of solving one of the greatest problems affecting our planet today. So please join us in our community and help us build this movement. Thank you. How are you all feeling out there? You good? We are to our final two, final two. You're ready? You got the energy? Let's bring it home. Okay, so our next speaker is Yulia. She is a global citizen with a passion for finance and a mission to close the wealth gap. Born in Belarus, she is on a journey to use financial innovation for economic development and equality. She co-founded CNOTE. She's helping invest in underserved communities across America with Wall Street experience and work in Kenya. She believes finance can be a force for good when community voices are at the table. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Yulia. Depending on what definition you use, the size of global impact investing market is evaluated to be between $500 billion and $3 trillion. Just to give you an idea, it's somewhere between the size of annual GDP of the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. This is an enormous force accelerating in its velocity. They all impact investors here and we like patting ourselves on the back and give each other a cheerful approval. You can proudly cite all the statistics to show the impact of our work and like competing on whose impact measurement framework is better, stronger, and broader, that's all great. But what about another side of the coin? Today, I want to give a space and time to talk about unintended consequences of impact investing. According to McKinsey report from May 2020 to October 2022, Fortune 1000 companies announced $340 billion in new commitments to five racial injustice. This is all great news, isn't it? Yes, except that the majority of those commitments were allocated as loan and deposits in when to limited number of community finance organizations around America. No organization could have large enough pipeline to absorb all this new capital. So the dollars are left undeployed, risking the financial stability of those organizations. What could be an alternative solution? I would advocate for a needs-based matching approach. Around the country, there is more than 650 minority-depositive institutions. If each of those institutions received a portion of that large commitment, the dollars could be getting deployed into communities faster, more communities are being impacted, and financial stability of the recipients would be intact. MasterCard is one of the organizations that went about this in a very intentional strategic way. They used needs-based match approach to connect to deposit institutions that were in need of deposits to support lending activities in undisturbed communities. As a result, 20 million dollars were deployed around the country. In the last couple of years, CFOs and treasures put on their agenda to align cash management policies with corporate DNI and ESG agendas. Netflix is one of those organizations. They announced that they're gonna put 2% of its cash and allocate it towards minority-depositive institutions that serve BIPOC community around the country. But here's the twist. Short term within the treasury definition, sorry, cash within the treasury definition means short term. And short term is not always impactful within the scope of work of mission-driven banks and credit unions. As president and CEO of Aptis Bank, a minority-depositive institution, Saras Carolina, mentioned what happens in three years if everyone calls their money back. And meanwhile, I've made a bunch of 10-year loans to black-owned businesses on Main Street. What a bank like ours need is patient investors. So what would you do? Well, you meet both parties in the middle and get creative. You can add side letters to money market deposits. You can incorporate liquidity windows in a long-term loan agreement. You can add loan loss reserves in guarantee in the promissory note. And the list goes on. The idea is to create something that can fit within the investment policy or cash management policy of an impact investor and actually provide helpful capital to mission-driven deposit institutions and community finance institutions on the ground. In the last couple of years, corporations made large financial commitments to fund construction or preservation of affordable housing in the communities where they have their presence realizing that they actually might be contributing to gentrification problem. In spite of great efforts and intentions, some of the early actions were actually met a lot of criticism because they were very far removed from actual reality that was happening in the community and ended up benefiting high-income groups. Probably the most well-regarded corporate housing effort was initiated by Amazon in Washington region. Amazon leaders chose to hire local staff that knew the circumstances of the communities quite well and made deals directly to local developers. The Washington state is known to have quite well-connected housing community with founders, administrators, developers, and politicians. And so Amazon money was leveraged by local developers to attract other resources and investors. Well, good news is that impact investors don't have to recreate this essential combination of local network and expertise and knowledge and trust in the communities. It's actually achievable with just one partnership with one of the organizations. For example, Inclusive, it's a membership organization for 400 low-income designated credit union that represents the voices of 18 million members around the country. As we navigate the world of impact investing, I envision the future where we break free from the patterns of the past. It might be uncomfortable to realize that doing the same things and expecting different results is actually a sign of insanity. It takes courage to challenge the status quo. It might be uncomfortable and conventional and feels lonely, and yet I'm inviting you to join me in this new journey, to take this new path. It's not a wealth page pass. It has a lot of unexpected turns and twists and obstacles along the way, but I encourage you to stick to it, to commit to it. And it will lead us to a new future where every investment decision is going to be taken with care and consideration, where we can proactively address unintended consequences of our actions and where we can fund intentionally the diverse range of initiative that uplift our communities and safeguard our planet. Join Manda's journey. We can all do it together. Thank you. We are down to our final card. So, at Socap, with taking risks, trying new content, new material, please give us feedback and let us know if this style of content is awesome or there's room for improvement. So, we're seeking your feedback. Our last but not least, our last but not least speaker is Kevin Adler. Kevin believes in a future where everyone is seen as invaluable and interconnected. Kevin is an award-winning social entrepreneur and an author. He's the founder and CEO of Miracle Messages, a nonprofit aiding people experiencing homelessness. His groundbreaking work on homelessness has made headlines in New York Times, CNN, and is given a TED Talk. Look out for his upcoming book when we walk by addressing the issue of homelessness in America. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Kevin Adler. A few years ago, the New York City Rescue Mission staged an experiment where they had people dress up to look homeless as unsuspecting members of their very own family walked by. In every instance of this experiment, not a single person recognized their own son or daughter, brother or sister, or in this lady's case, her father and mother. Would you recognize your loved one if you walk by them on the streets? Probably not. Neuroscientists at Princeton and Duke have found that the part of our brain that activates when we see a person does not activate when we see a person experiencing homelessness. When we walk by, we tend to see problems to be solved, not people to be loved. For 30 years, my uncle, Mark, was one of the 600,000 Americans who sleep on the streets every night. But I never thought of uncle Mark as a homeless man because he was just a beloved member of my family. He remembered every birthday and was the guest of honor at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And it wasn't until uncle Mark passed away at the age of 50 in a halfway house that I started thinking, gosh, everyone I'm walking by, that's someone's son or daughter, brother or sister, some kid's beloved uncle. And so in 2014, I decided to stop walking by and start listening. I spent a year having conversations with my unhoused neighbors as neighbors and getting to know their stories. And I invited 24 unhoused individuals to join in a storytelling project that I created where a GoPro camera around your chest and narrate your experience of what life is like on the streets. I just walked by you, you're still here, what's it like to be you? I watched hundreds of hours of truly heartbreaking footage where my new unhoused friends were scorn, pitied and often ignored. But in one of the clips, I heard something that changed my life. And it was really encapsulated by this quote. I never realized I was homeless when I lost my housing, only when I lost my family and friends. I never realized I was homeless when I lost my housing, only when I lost my family and friends. You know, this made sense to me, but I had never heard any government agency or homeless service provider articulate something like this. So I thought maybe I could just walk down Market Street, go up to every single person who I see who's visibly homeless and just ask, do you have any loved ones you'd like to reconnect with? And that's how I met Jeffrey. Jeffrey said he hadn't seen his family in 22 years. I sat down with him and I asked if he'd like to record a video to his loved ones and he said yes. I recorded a message from him to his niece, his nephew, his sister, his dad. I went home that night and I found a Facebook group connected to his hometown. So I posted the video there with a little note and within one hour that video was shared hundreds of times. It made the local news that night. Classmates started commenting, hey, I went to high school with Jeffrey. I work in construction, does he need a job? I work at the congressman's office, does he need healthcare? In the first 20 minutes of the post, his sister was tagged. We got on the phone the next day and she told me that Jeffrey was a missing person for 12 years. Broad daylight, downtown San Francisco, a few days before Christmas. Within a few days, Jeffrey and Jennifer were able to reconnect on a phone call. Within a few months, they were able to reconnect in person for the first time in 22 years and I started doing this work full time because I knew Jeffrey wasn't the only one and this shouldn't be happening. And so I started a nonprofit called Miracle Messages to help end what we call relational poverty as a form of poverty, relational poverty, isolation, loneliness, disconnectedness, stigma and shame that accompanies it. And to embrace our unhoused neighbors as neighbors as the brothers and sisters, friends and classmates, aunts and uncles that they are. Miracle Messages helps people experiencing homelessness, rebuild their social support systems and their financial security. We offer three programs that are cost effective, humane and scalable. First, our family and friend reunification services where we have now a network of volunteer digital detectives that make phone calls, write letters and do internet searches to find loved ones, deliver messages, help people reconnect to their loved ones. That's led to over 800 family and friend reunifications. Second is our phone buddy program where we have volunteers all around the world who have committed 30 minutes a week for phone calls and text messages with an unhoused neighbor. One to one phone calls, text messages and we currently have more unhoused individuals looking for volunteers than we have friends. So if anyone would like to volunteer you can do it anywhere in the world. And over 150,000 conversation minutes have been logged. And third, direct cash transfers in which we launched the first basic income pilot for people experiencing homelessness in the United States. In 2020, when we launched that initial pilot we gave $500 a month for six months to 14 individuals who are in our phone buddy program. No questions asked. Within six months, two thirds of unhoused individuals secured staple housing. They use the money better than I could have used it for them. Housing, food security, healthcare, mental health, childcare and other essentials. And today I'm excited to share that we have received an expansion of our basic income pilot to the tune of a $2.1 million randomized control trial funded by Google.org and other individuals and foundations and in partnership with USC to give out $750 a month for 12 months to over 100 unhoused neighbors in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles. Thank you. So we've seen thousands of miracles already at Miracle Messages. Lives transformed, tearful reunions, person to talk to when there's no one else and two thirds of people getting housed from $500 a month over six months. This work has transformed my own understanding of this issue and I think it could inspire and empower you as well. And I share this in my upcoming book when we walk by, which is coming out in just a few weeks, November 7th, but I'm not here to sell books, I promise. This issue is really big and we know that in order to do our approach of nurturing relationships combined with direct cash transfers, it requires a lot of experimentation and unrestricted resources and that's where you come in. So I invite you to go to our website, MiracleMessages.org, say hi, reach out, we're a friendly bunch, invest in our work and join our movement to offer a model that's cost effective, scalable and humane to embrace our unhoused neighbors as neighbors. Because when we embrace people experiencing homelessness, not as problems to be solved, but as people to be loved, problems get solved. Thank you.