 Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute at 57 Post Street, San Francisco. I'm Laura Sheppard, Director of Events, and we're really pleased to welcome you to our program, Real Impact, the New Economics of Social Change, and we're very pleased to welcome our two guest speakers, author and investor Morgan Simon, in conversation with an activist and political fundraiser, Kath Delaney, of the Madeira Group. So tonight we're going to talk about how investment and activism can be partners, how finance and social justice go hand in hand, and how our capital, our money, can be used for social good and with a return. These are some of the things that we're going to be talking about this evening. But first, I'd like to find out how many of you are new to the Mechanics Institute? Who's never been here before? Any newcomers? Okay, everyone knows about us, so, out there, if you're watching, if you've never been to the Mechanics Institute, please come on Wednesday at noon and take the free tour of our library, our International Chess Club, and find out about our incredible history. We were founded in 1854 and continue to be one of the most vital cultural institutions in the West Coast. We have a beautiful library, and as I mentioned, the Chess Club has ongoing events, we have author programs, and many things are happening under one roof, so please come to the tour and become part of our ever-expanding cultural family here. So I'd like to introduce our moderator for the evening. Kath Delaney is the founder of the Madeira Group, a social impact agency based in the Bay Area. Her agency is dedicated to growing her clients' social mission and donor base across sectors. Kath is a prolific fundraiser for social justice, human rights, climate change and adaptation, conservation, and the environment. Kath is a longtime political activist and fundraiser and served on Hillary Clinton's national finance and policy teams leading up to and during the 2016 campaign. Also Kath and I have a long history together. We first met each other in Boston, taking leadership for the arts training at the Boston Actors Institute, and then onward we became partners as we were both producing for Earth Day in New York City in 1990. So I'm just thrilled to welcome you for the first time here at Mechanics Institute. It's been a long time. Welcome to our program, Kath Delaney and Morgan Simon. Thank you so much, Laura Shepard. Thank you so much for inviting us to the Mechanics Institute. I'm really excited to be here with Morgan tonight. I read her book in the last week and she's a very, very smart person. And for someone like myself who's been raising money for as long as I have in the non-profit sector and the social justice community to read a book that has so much insight and depth into how finance works, how difficult it is to raise money for issues and organizations and leaders that are doing frontline work. I think that Morgan said many things in the book that I don't know if I would have the courage to say, and you said them. So let me tell you a little bit about Morgan and then we're going to turn it over to hear a little bit more about Morgan's work. Morgan Simon is a widely recognized leader in impact investment who builds bridges between finance and social justice. Over the past 17 years, she has influenced over $150 billion in capital, Morgan Simon. Simon currently co-leads the Candid group. Did I say that correctly? Correct. Simon currently co-leads the Candid group, which supports two clients, including members of the Pritzker family, which is a very well-known Bay Area family, Chicago family who does great things in the world on behalf of their foundation, the Libra Foundation. She's the co-founder and chair of the non-profit Transform Finance, which I think we're going to get into a little bit tonight. Previously, Simon Morgan served as the founding CEO of Tonic, a global network of impact investors, as the founding executive director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition. She's worked for the United Nations in Honduras, in corporate reform with Forest Ethics, and in domestic microfinance with the Women's Initiatives for Self-Employment. She currently serves on the boards of the Restaurant Opportunity Center, the Working World, and Care Enterprises. As a graduate of Swarthmore, Simon serves as an adjunct professor at Millbury College, graduate school, and she lives in the Bay Area. So please give me a warm welcome, Morgan Simon. And for Kath as well. Thank you for being here. So I also want to say that the book is so tightly written, and I'm saying that in the best sense, that it is really filled not only with Morgan's life experience, but also case studies and insight about where we are and a path moving forward. And in part of the book, you talked a little bit about your youth, when you were a younger activist, and I could relate to that. I've been a young activist. I started my activism in high school as well, and went to Africa in my early 20s, and I think we have a similar shared experience where that early activism and traveling out of the U.S. and also working in specific communities in the U.S. really opened my eyes and my life and my heart to how most people around the world live, which is very different than how most of us in the Bay Area live. So there was a really wonderful story you shared about regarding your early work and on aid work. If you could maybe tell us a little bit about your early work. Sure. So I grew up in Los Angeles and did a lot of work with immigrant communities in downtown LA, and this I think was mostly an incredibly transformative experience for me, right? Separate from any good that I might have done for others, but really all work at the end circles back to ourselves and our own personal development, especially at that age. And I was really blessed that a number of mostly Mexican American families that were inviting me to their homes on the weekends for the parties for the Quinceañeras and really learn the difference between solidarity and charity in that time. And charity is the idea of seeing people as other and solidarity being about the fact that when someone is trying to hurt your family and friends, you will do absolutely anything that you can to defend them. And that was the way that I felt about these families who had taken me in and it meant that when I saw the mother come home from her job or as an undocumented immigrant to the US of just getting grossly mistreated or having seven people in a studio apartment trying to find the space and peace to sleep between those working hours that I became extremely passionate about how do we create conditions where everyone has the opportunity to thrive. And with that and I think learning a bit more of an international perspective was really excited by the idea of development. That was mostly what I studied and I had the opportunity to spend some time in Sierra Leone and West Africa a year after the war had ended, so very intense time in the country. And I believe the story that you're referring to that I write about in the book was that I was coming back from the countryside where typically people were only eating a meal a day. That it was extremely tough time in the country. And one of the things going back to the concept of solidarity that as an American who was used to eating three hearty meals a day it was pretty tough to try to adjust to that calendar of the 3pm meal but I was really trying to do my best to only like occasionally sneak wheat a-bix into my bedroom. And I was passing through this town to pick up some provisions and I saw this can of tuna and I was really intrigued. I had not been eating well for months. I was like, I could have tuna. This would be so exciting. And I go to talk to the woman of how much is the can and then when I pick it up I see that it stamped World Food Program Not for Sale, Gift of the Government of Japan. And I asked her like, where did you get this? And you know it says you not sell and you know I'm 20 I'm relatively naive and she kind of looks at me and it's pretty clear when she speaks Creole, she's from Beau, I think she spoke Mende. She spoke a couple languages fluently but English was not her first language nor could she read the can. And she sort of gives me this look of, are you going to buy the thing or not? So let me get on with my day. And it's about one US dollar and for the price of that can you could buy from the next lady over eight heaping plates of rice with ironically fish because that's what they eat locally, right? So you could get greens and fish and rice and it was this incredibly rational economic decision that this woman had gotten this food aid. She'd been donated ostensibly this can of tuna and she immediately turned around and said, how do I maximize the economic value of this to get eight plates for my children? And I thought that was a great decision on her part and I bought the can and I was very happy. I didn't eat the can, I kept it on my mantelpiece for the rest of my college career as this reminder of just the broken chain of international development because what I was calculating in that moment and for the months after the fact that probably 60 times as much economic benefit had gone from the fishermen in Japan to the government officials to someone working at the FAO in Rome to whoever transported that can of tuna to whoever handed it out on site, right? Most of the economic value of that transaction was not with the beneficiary, right? So you couldn't actually look her in the eye, hand her the can and say, the reason this is coming to you is for you to eat, right? But that was probably the least element of that can of tuna. And it made me really recognize how broken that system was and that I needed to do something completely different. And I had no idea at that point what that was going to be. But I think a lot of my history and I think for a lot of activists, it's this constant struggle of how can I be most effective given the place and space that I'm in? What's the right role? What do we need to do to think differently than what's been done in the past? Well, I think we're all grateful that you have that experience because your work has really navigated very complex systems. The finance, the economic system you talk about in your book and I think all of us here living in the Bay Area, the relationship around, excuse me, social entrepreneurs and social impact. Could you talk a little bit about how that's different? How that's different than Eid work? Excuse me. So it's different in a lot of ways and I think in general if we say more specifically people who are trying to solve social problems through for-profit businesses, right? As opposed to non-profits. What makes that different? And that often sometimes people use the term between both non-profits and for-profits but let's say specifically in the for-profit context I think it connects back to the larger challenge around philanthropy, you know, even beyond non-profits, right? So last year there was $390 billion donated to charities in the US and that's a phenomenal number but when you compare that to the $196 trillion that's circulating in the global economy every day you're locked into this David and Goliath fight of philanthropy is trying to clean up the messes that the economy is creating but it's never going to win, right? It's so under resourcing comparison and it kind of makes you wonder well rather than having all this economic activity that messes things up for people and makes the world more unequal and unsustainable and then we have to use philanthropy to try to clean it up what if you just got it right in the first place? Like what if you designed economic systems to serve people and to serve the planet and you could certainly make profit, right? And if we think of profit as kind of a reflection of people's desire to live good lives, right? However they choose to use those profits to live whatever they consider to be a good life we can still generate that for people and we could also perhaps lessen the need for the hoarding of wealth if we didn't leave people feeling so economically and emotionally insecure. Can you pour this for you? Compact investment is a better tool than traditional philanthropy giving and maybe for the audience if you could unpack it a little bit and just talk about how they're different vehicles and in your experience can they work together? Are you seeing them move more closely together to have better effects in the community as you're serving? So let's start with some definitions that impact investment is the art of investing with the intention of manifesting your social and environmental values in the process, right? So philanthropy, I give the money away, impact investing, I might be trying to achieve similar goals to my philanthropy but I'm going to receive some type of return, right? So in the same way that teachers who have pension funds, right, that that money needs to be invested to ensure people can retire or 401K or even your bank account, right? We think a lot about the votes that we make with our dollars as consumers, right? Anytime that you buy organic milk or cage-free eggs, right? You are making a moral choice in that moment and similarly you are every time that you put money in the bank, right? But we don't think of it that way. We don't really think about where does our money spend the night and what's the opportunity for us to have that money be doing something more socially responsible in the way. So impact investment is the idea that you can align a lot more resources with your value set. And from that perspective I think of it fantastic. I think of it as a compliment to philanthropy that it's not about saying either or but it's that we need both, right? And I would say in general I think philanthropy is exceptionally good at two things. It's great at disaster relief that there are times where there's just not going to be an economy functioning in a way that's going to allow the normal transport of goods and services. You're certainly seeing this right now in the Puerto Rican context and that there's just the need to get water and food to people, right? That from a humanitarian perspective it's our obligation, whatever that costs. And then secondly I think philanthropy is great for advocacy, right? So recognizing that it might be in a policy context or social norms on issues like racial justice where you need to have a massive cultural shift on an issue to take a long time and doesn't necessarily have a clear economic upside, a clear business model to that. Now there's a lot of stuff in between like economic development that often gets seeded philanthropically but ultimately is only going to succeed if investment dollars step in and elevate it, right? And it goes back to if I've got 390 billion on one side and 196 trillion on the other, right? It's very difficult to think I'm going to achieve those goals. So that's why philanthropy and impact investment it's really about working in partnership and that's part of why you're seeing for instance foundations, right? Legally you're required to give away just 5% of their money a year and the other 95% can be invested in absolutely anything, right? And that means that it can often be invested in things that are completely counter to the values of the institution. So just one more story that back in I believe the LA Times published a fantastic series of investigative articles about the Gates Foundation looking at where they were investing and then where they were donating, right? So in Nigeria they were giving something like $218 million quite a lot of money annually towards some of the health problems that were happening in the region, things like asthma that were caused largely by the oil companies and at the same time the Gates Foundation had $423 million invested in those same oil companies, right? So when you're investing twice as much money in the problem as you're funding the solution don't be surprised when you lose, right? If you keep going two steps back, one step forward, right? Don't be surprised if you don't arrive. And the Gates Foundation has changed their tune they've become one of the leaders in Impact Investment and I think that's one of the transitions you've seen amongst the foundation sector over time that it's just become less and less socially acceptable to say well, I only spend 5% of my time or my money on my actual mission, right? You know, I'm a partner of a firm. If I told my business partner well, I'd like to actually spend 95% of my day hiking in the Berkeley Hills and I'm going to spend 5% of my time actually doing the mission of our firm like I think I'd get fired, right? And it should be the same way for foundations in terms of saying they're only going to dedicate 5% of their resources towards their stated mission. Who else in society gets away with that, right? It's a really interesting conundrum. It is. It was a moment for me, I was at a conference where Melinda and Bill Gates were speaking about their work in Africa and they were talking about the malaria delivery system and Melinda said something on this panel that was a life changer for me. She said, you know, we realized after a year that it wasn't working because we were giving medication to people, to women and children who were hungry. They couldn't digest the medication or their bodies couldn't absorb the medication. So they realized that they had to address poverty. They had to figure out how do you feed people before you give the medicine. But it was so simple and it was so profound for me that it really made me think about my work in a different way. And you also brought up Puerto Rico and I was thinking about our talk tonight and I don't know if people saw in the New York Times, I think it was a few days ago, but there was a family business out of Montana that just secured the $300 million gig to build the electrical infrastructure in Puerto Rico. And I mean it's going through congressional channels now but I don't know the gentleman in his son's politics or anything like that. If you just put it aside and look at it from a quick investment he said, we were the first people to get electricians and power line workers. It's actually what my brother does who's done it for 30 years in upstate New York, which is a really hard job but they were able to deploy workers into Puerto Rico faster than anybody else. First hiring Puerto Ricans who were already there, which perhaps would have been another option, but yeah. Well I think they're actually doing some of that but it's also imperfect is my point in this, is that it's also imperfect and in some level in your book it was daunting because how do we figure out vehicles and if you could talk maybe about some of the shortcomings that you've seen in the field we've seen it in the black lives movement, we've seen it in the resistance movement, we see it in poverty alleviation that you can't deploy funds as quickly as you really need to most of the time in my world. You have to go through program specifics, you have to meet with foundation executives, you have to go through the calendar and we really need to change that process and we need to figure out how do we deploy large sums of money so I guess my question has a couple points. What are the shortcomings? How do we get more families involved? I mean the families that you're working with are incredible people, I know some of them and they're doing great work in the world but we need hundreds of those people so the shortcomings and how do we get this call to action to get more investors and philanthropists to let go of some of their money basically isn't that what we're talking about and redirect it to people with issues and concerns that matter and are more urgent? Sure, so I think one of the things that's been really exciting in the last decade impact investment really had to prove itself because the other thing that I don't want to be at all flipping about is that foundation trustees have a very serious obligation to preserve and grow the assets of their institutions the same way that if I run a pension fund I better make sure that there's money available for workers to retire and I need to send my child to college in 15 years so there's certain financial goals that I think are completely viable and that for a long time there was a lot of uncertainty around well if I invest with my values am I going to lose my money that might be a nice thing for really wealthy people to do but can everybody really do it and what's been really fantastic has been that over the past decade from Deutsche Bank to Harvard Business Review there's been just study after study so that you can actually more perform the market by using social investment strategies so one of my favorites from Harvard was that they tracked over 18 years companies that had high sustainability practices and low sustainability practices both on the social and environmental side and those higher social and environmentally performing companies had twice the market cap over that 18 year period and 4% productivity gains a year and there's not a lot in society the computer that's been able to achieve that rapid of a productivity gain and that consistent of a productivity gain so I think we've now shown that you really don't have to make that trade off of saying well is it my values or my money no you can have both it's okay and that there's been increasingly across all asset classes from community banks that people can simply move their money over from a mainstream bank to private debt funds from derivatives to CDs to public markets that there's so many different opportunities that people can do over the internet or at home and get to be part of the movement so I think a big part of it is that we had some growing up to do we had to prove to the financial world that we could actually make this work and now that we're here it's amazing to see how much capital has been moving into impact so at the broadest level when you look at all capital there's actually one in every $5 that has some type of social screen about $8.7 trillion and that might just be the sin stocks like tobacco and alcohol not a deeper impact focus but it's still pretty significant and then $119 billion that was invested in impact investment just last year according to JP Morgan and the Global Impact Investor Network so I think we're seeing a lot more activity and then the challenges as you alluded to is that as something scales as we scale impact investing we have to make sure that the impact practices scale just as well as the impact and one of the things that I write about in the book if people are familiar with microfinance and the history and growth of microfinance it really is one of the few financial like social finance sectors that most people on the street will know because of the exceptional work that Kiva did to really socialize the concept and as microfinance scaled you started to see a lot of emphasis on building the financial infrastructure right can we make this a banking product like anything else that people can get and that you can get funds of funds and this whole sort of financial system that grew up around it but the impact didn't always grow quite as fast enough right that we didn't pay quite as much attention to what are the right practices to ensure that the impact is made every time and I feel like the impact investment is at a similar crux point that we're scaling rapidly there's so much opportunity to put so many dollars to work we've built that infrastructure now how do we make sure that it's going to be real and a lot of that is about who gets to set the agenda who is the ability to participate it can't just be you know only people who have an MBA it can't just be people in the global north right that there needs to be a much broader community of practice and a real commitment to accountability right so core social justice values things like nothing about us without us that I think the impact investment community really needs to learn and build together so I think the thing that gives me a lot of hope is that it's clearly a community that's great at solving challenges just as we've solved some of the financial challenges and now we have the opportunity to solve those impact challenges to really grow impact side of impact investment over the next decade how do we get more women involved in the and being the actors I I've spent a lot of time in my career working with women who are running for political office and what we have found consistently is that they have not had the professional networks or the family networks to underwrite their political aspirations and so reading your book it was a take same story right different sector finance business and I know from women friends in the Bay Area who have started investment funds or a few women I do know that are VCs it's so challenging it's so challenging and I didn't I mean I you have some unfortunately painful stories that that of your own experience of you know being the only woman in the room being the only woman on panels you know navigating all that I mean how do you do it how do you keep doing it mostly you do it because it's so much fun I mean I think that's the main reaction right you have to do things because you love them and I think that you learn to kind of gain confidence and you know what you're doing and why and people are either going to want to be a part of that or not so one of the things that I've really loved you know the times that I've gone to learn pretty young in my career not to wear all black to events because I kept getting asked by men if I could bring them water which you know it's a story I've heard all the time from friends or people of color as well and at the same time when someone asked me to bring them water and then I'm the keynote that's kind of fun right it's fun to turn people's expectations around and well in beauty as we call it so I think with that yes there are challenges and as you alluded one of those main pieces is how do you get your start up capital and that's true for nonprofits for for profits for any type of industry and there's this concept called systemic bias which is the idea of rules that seem really neutral on the surface right that never mention race or gender but are implemented in a way that winds up reinforcing inequalities right so for example if we say we're only going to fund entrepreneurs who have already run three businesses or we're only going to fund a fund manager if they've already been around for three years and have invested at least ten million dollars that sounds like a neutral rule but it tends to systematically exclude 90% of the women and people of color trying to trying to start funds and I think it's really important I recognize I'm white, Russian, Greek, Jewish and I'm often asked about being a woman right I certainly don't speak for communities of color but I think that the issues that women and people of color face within the investing world are one very similar and very aligned and that we really have the opportunity to take on both of those questions simultaneously as opposed to putting them into separate boxes so I wanted to just note of why I'm kind of linking those two topics even in questions about being a woman in the field Thank you, I have one more question then we can open it up to folks here I read recently about a new generation of philanthropists and I'm not remembering any of their names right now in the moment one I know well in New York and I felt a different type of urgency around their investing and their philanthropy and I didn't know if you were feeling that as you move through the world and you're meeting with younger investors if you're feeling like they get this that they resonate with this framework in this pathway or do you feel that we've also got to bring them along I think people of all ages coming out of Texas and Florida and the Northern California fires and Puerto Rico that this idea of urgency is being felt in a new way and I know that there's certainly a crop of scientists out there who continue to negate the concept of climate change but I think even as the mayor of Miami who said if this isn't climate change I don't know what is so I think there's a certain urgency that's being felt by all of society as we recognize climate change is a human problem not just as an environmental problem and that we actually need to change the way the economy is functioning if we want to do things like have children and feel confident there'll be a world available for them so I think everyone is starting to feel that urgency I think you're seeing a lot of movement of young people and also recognizing the trends around intergenerational specifically right that the next generation of wealth is majority held by women and that's a shift that have tended to adopt principles of impact investment much more readily that's fantastic to hear absolutely well folks we would love to open it up to anybody who has a question yes sir we should pass the mic I don't know that you can mic yourself but okay okay okay as somebody who's been involved with what I call because this is what it used to be called socially responsible investing for a long time I guess two parts one is how impact investing is different from what used to be called social responsible investing and then also one of the problems with social responsible investing is there are a lot of companies that are doing a lot of terrible things at the same time it's like for example McDonald's hires people that might otherwise be able to get jobs so how do you deal with those kinds of issues sure so socially responsible investing thank you for that opportunity to talk a little bit about the history of the field in general which is that the idea of aligning your money with your values it actually goes back to the 1600s it goes back to the Quakers who didn't want to profit off the slave trade so divested from companies that were engaged in the slave trade and even when as far as in northern New York to start their own maple tapping facilities so that they wouldn't have to use cane sugar from the south really fascinating stuff and it was those religious groups you know along not just Quakers but Catholics and Methodists and other groups that didn't want to be part of the sin stocks tobacco firearms alcohol pornography and that practice then 1800s forward is what largely evolved into what was SRI which is usually public equities right so people investing in the stock market with an eye towards social environmental values and it was typically a mixture of screen funds right saying that I want to take out the bad stuff that I don't want but then also using vehicles like shareholder resolutions to challenge companies on their actions right and that's actually how I got started in the field in one of the stories that I tell in the book about filing a shareholder resolution at Lockheed when I was still a college student getting them to start giving domestic partner benefits so I think there's been a lot of really powerful work that's been done through SRI and then going to your question around well how do you manage the fact that quite frankly if you look at most countries companies in the Fortune 500 sometimes they feel like countries you're going to dislike something that they do right and it might be you know Walmart has been fantastic about renewable energy and is terrible to its workers so how do you deal with that if you're an environment fund right and what people will do is what they call the best in class approach which is that I'm going to take the best players within a certain industry so it might be the fossil fuel companies that at least you're doing the most investing in renewable energy but I'm still going to use shareholder advocacy to try to improve their track record on human rights on other issues so that might be something where there's been a number of fair hiring campaigns so encouraging corporations to not do background checks or to do them much later in their process given that that's another form of systemic bias if you say that you won't hire people with the prison record that's a really wonderful way to exclude a lot of young black men so really looking at how do we use advocacy to improve practices within companies so and sorry then the final piece of your question what's impact investment for socially responsible investing socially responsible investing was usually as I mentioned right more about the stock market whereas impact investment was saying you can do this with all of the assets right from cash to fixed income to public equity to private equity to venture capital etc right that you can really have 100% of your portfolio aligned as opposed to just the public markets and then the final piece is that it usually tends to be more focused on proactively investing in the good as opposed to screening out the bad so that's where hopefully right we get to be part of creating the future and the final note I'll say in that is activists I think there's a point where we get sad of having to fight all the time right there's so much that's terrible in the world that we're trying to prevent and sometimes you want to get to be a lover right rather than just the fighter and get to focus on building positive alternatives and that's where I feel like by screening out the worst stuff but then investing in the good stuff you get the opportunity to be both fighter and lover by doing impact investing I'm really interested in the payout question the philanthropy and I've been kind of obsessed with this since Florida since the hurricane in Florida as the obvious you know marker for climate change and especially environmental foundations that deal primarily with environmental work and any other investors that are in that space I just feel like what is it 10% 15% what should the payout be now because we are running out of time so I think it goes back to I'm more interested in the question of how do I get 100% of that institution's resources working towards their goal all of the time so I can increase the payout from 5% to 10% but 90% would still be invested in crap that doesn't work so when you look at institutions like the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation who have been doing a mix of philanthropy and climate advocacy but then also incubating and supporting and funding impact investment strategies within climate then they are able to continue to have a renewable resource that is the corpus of the endowment because I think that's still critical that spend down doesn't work for everyone and that if we can let's presume if we do manage to make the world continue past the climate crisis that we would want to have some philanthropic resources available how can we first focus on getting it all moving funding into perpetuity let's talk about what perpetuity means today come on well I think it goes back to if your starting place was how do I solve this problem as opposed to how do I reach X budget or X goal that's been determined sort of arbitrarily by the IRS if the IRS had said 6% then everyone would do that so I think there's opportunities for a lot more creativity and it goes back to they say in the investment management world no one gets fired for buying general electric if you do what everybody else does then no one is going to get mad at you similarly for foundations it's really hard when there's been that groove set of saying it's got to be 5% it certainly can't be 4% but no one ever said it couldn't be 10% so how do you think about that as an institution I think it's an important conversation to even have I feel like my approach to impact investment and otherwise isn't about me trying to be really prescriptive on what people should do it's saying here's some questions that you should think about don't just assume that something needs to be a certain way because the IRS said it but what is the opportunity that you might have to be more creative to leverage more of your resources towards your stated goal and that might mean a larger payout it might be more connection to impact investment it could mean any number of things I want to ask the question taking off from that I'd like to get back to square one and ask a little more about the strategy and the models I first got interested in this listening to someone who was working on a water project talking about the fact that it would need to be commodified and made something that profit making companies or individuals could invest in so what is the strategy who are the targets and is it coming mostly from the field end or as you were just essentially saying from the Wall Street end and what's the balance that we should be looking for exactly and I think that's where we do need to be a bit careful if you even look at the word impact the Merriam-Webster definition to impinge upon especially forcefully that doesn't necessarily sound that good that it's up to us as imperfect human beings to figure out what impact is and how to implement it and who even needs to be at the table to make sure you know and that means that it can't just be from the 40th floor in Wall Street that it needs to be much closer to the ground and at the same time it still needs that financial skill so I think that's the opportunity to kind of marry those two communities in terms of finance and social justice to come to the right opportunities so for example one of the organizations that we've been close with working with an indigenous community that wants to do their own wind farm where that takes a lot of capital a lot of technical expertise but is certainly doable and could provide not only renewable energy for their community but also this strong economic engine moving into the future so I think there's a lot of really interesting opportunities that kind of marry the best of both worlds and sustainability which charity doesn't always do as well right that in that case they might do the one year grant to put the turbine in but then who's doing the maintenance and what's going to be the model that makes it subsist right so that's where having some sound business planning around these projects can really help to make sure the resources are best leveraged and that communities continue to to flourish over time so there's a ton of other examples in the book in terms of the types of projects that are happening can you talk more about that I just wanted to say that I really appreciated the thread in the book around natural resources as we have a finite number you know we have a finite amount of natural resources and I think this gets a little bit to Barbara's Barbara's concern that when people for many decades have been working from a mindset of urgency and now we're moving into adaptation I think are you seeing investors I think you mentioned it earlier do you think they see that it's a different type of urgency now because of the confluence of these natural disasters the political environment species it's overwhelming most days of where to look I'm working on a project right now on species extinction I mean I thought I knew about the fields it is ah such bad news so how do you keep the story and the engagement with these donors and investors and point them in directions that you feel that you can see results or see impact because there's so much you know I think one of the things I was going to ask you is you wake up tomorrow morning and what do you do I mean someone that has you have so much knowledge and you have so much life experience and I wish we had lots and lots of you in the world but I don't think we do I mean it's pretty incredible mind she has I mean it's incredible really I would like to give morning there's a lot of us can we give morning a round of applause it is really phenomenal to hold all that you're holding I know I just said 14 things in my style but you know I'd love for you to talk about it we'll open it up and I think we have time for maybe one or two more questions well I did want to know one of the fights I kept getting in with my editor in a kind of fun way was that I kept saying we when I was supposed to say I I was like confusing the reader but I guess I don't feel like there's a lot in this that I could say is an I story it's always a we there were five co-founders in both of the nonprofits that I started responsible endowments coalition and then tonic but it's kind of always been a collective effort and that's part of what makes people successful right so I think one of the challenges sometimes in the culture of entrepreneurship is that there's so much glorification of the soul entrepreneur because we want someone to kind of point to as a leader and then we've been seeing you know in instances like over we're clearly that's not working right in that much more inclusive leadership styles tend to do better at the end of the day why did you call the difference that one was servant and I'm not remembering servant leaders yeah a little about that I loved the way you framed that sure I think sometimes people talk about leading from behind which is really about listening and then acting and then I think the other is about having structures of accountability because a lot of what the financial system does is it gives us the opportunity to act with relative impunity that you don't get a lot of challenges to your behavior when you're on that 40th floor in Wall Street so sometimes you have to create that for yourself right and I think that's through relationships within the activist community it's something that I've tried hard to cultivate and then it means that I can kind of take that extra check with any investment project I'm doing of is this actually serving the people it's supposed to serve in the way that they want to be served and the know that I'll make on that as well you know there's in terms of what do we do when we get up in the morning there's three main principles that we try to really embrace in our investment practice with Candid group and then that come out of transform finance and nonprofit we try to add more value than we extract in any project that we do so it's one thing to make people a little better off but it's another to really focus on fairness right to make sure that communities are the predominant beneficiary we try to engage communities in design governance and ownership of enterprises so they're not just the workforce but are actually the protagonist and we try to balance risk and return across investors entrepreneurs and communities so those sound very broad and they are and the point is that they can apply to any sector geography or type of project of really looking at how do you structure fairness into an investment deal every time so that that I really try to hold is my true north and I think the opportunity with the book was to really put that out to community for feedback right that's still in that questioning mode of okay well how do I add more value than I extract and can I verify that numerically and what might that look like in different contexts and you know how do we make sure we're asking these types of questions consistently I think that's really been the goal thank you yes oh sorry Laura's got the mic so in the SOCAP conference last month here in the city one of the conclusions that came up was that in order to spread out this you know impact investment especially from institutional investments point of view is to have some sort of common language because there's really no way to compare the social impact or environmental impact mostly the social impact probably among different investment alternatives but the other thing that I heard that those days there was also this more activist type of presenters and I love the activist but I've been an activist myself and I still am you know when the situation makes to do so but they seem to be saying we really shouldn't care for that we should just do it because it's right and it's like saying impact at all costs even if we cannot measure it so to understand you see those two situations as an impediment or as actually a need or a risk to I want to make sure you understand that so both sides are saying one is people who are saying you need to really measure and name every bit of impact and then the other groups that are saying that you just need to it doesn't matter just do it just to like get it happening yeah I think that's it comes back to that marriage issue right of you need people who are focused on the financial innovations and products that'll get it to scale really big right so TPG recently closed a two billion dollar impact investment fund it was like the largest impact investment fund ever right two billion two billion which is interesting I don't know if it's exciting it's definitely interesting in terms of really thinking through how do you do that at scale and how do you think about it and what I really love about the team there is that they are so actively engaged in that question right and I think to some degree it's maintaining that quality of inquiry in everything we do because on the flip side you also don't want to be you know you check the box of how many people got served or but what it served me in anyway right like how do you know that's actually making a change in people's lives and that that does wind up being a qualitative assessment and what we've really been interested is well then how do you make sure that assessment is happening by affected communities right as opposed to us just from the outside saying oh here's what we think you should want for your life right so I think what I appreciate is that we need those debates right I don't think there's ever a day that people just say oh we have found the one definition of social impact I guess I can retire because it's just going to happen automatically right the world is a really dynamic place so I think the best that we can do is to make sure that we have enough relationship and inquiry to be asking those questions and not just sort of stop at what the label might be but also not stop and say oh well impact I know it when I see it right so I don't need to do the work of actually being accountable to the communities I'm serving Morgan you mentioned the investment into the Native American community they wanted to build that's going to build the wind farm which I thought was very inspiring can you give us another example of something that is was a really positive and interesting and or very on the edge something that is the next the next generation of investment areas sure and I'll note that the wind energy example is actually indigenous Mexican so from the state of Oaxaca but I guess one of the investment organizations I really love which I would actually say is reviving a very old concept is called the working world that invests exclusively in worker owned cooperatives and some of that is helping to expand existing cooperatives some of it is converting businesses into cooperatives and one of the interesting trends that we're starting to see is that a number of elder business owners writer factory owners they've been running a family business for 30 years ready to retire they don't want to sell to some private equity shop that's going to gut the business that they so lovingly built and that exiting to their workers right by converting it to a co-op can be a very taxed advantage way to divest yourself of your business right so it's been interesting to see that even separate from kind of a workers rights approach or ownership of just being a really good succession plan particularly when you have workers that you've trained that you trust that you feel great about so the working world it actually started in Argentina around the time of the peso crisis where a number of factory owners had fled the country with whatever they could put on their backs and these factories kept operating but didn't have much access to capital as workers came in and turned them into cooperatives so the working world has funded over a thousand loans in Argentina with the 98% repayment rate they then came to the U.S. and have financed a couple dozen cooperatives with much larger checks on the U.S. side and I think what's really critical about that work is thinking about what actually solves inequality right so going back to the let's start of the big question and the narrow in so when you look at inequality in the U.S. black men make 80 cents on the dollar to white men that's terrible but the bigger issue is that black families have 22 times less assets so even if you had wage parity 200 years later it would barely matter right because you wouldn't have solved that asset gap so the fact that rather than just creating one business owner you can create 20 or 30 business owners makes a really big difference in terms of that family safety net and access to something to pass down to their children I think we have time for one more the gentleman here Laura? Well now I'm curious what was the question Okay so maybe you could just say a little bit more about how an investor can approach like asset ownership and the crazy growing inequality that's like a global trend on a lot of levels and maybe you know more in the U.S. context or in a developed country context or not in places where there's extreme poverty and there are a lot of things that you could do but maybe places where people are being squeezed because they find themselves owning less and less and people who are owning stuff own more and more. Yeah and I would definitely qualify U.S. poverty is extreme poverty it's extremely challenging country and times and I definitely think funding cooperatives is part of that solution. I think the other in the community development space is focusing a lot more on quality job creation so we focus a lot on job creation or when you look at things like CRA credit for banks so banks are required to invest a certain amount in the local communities and they evaluate success by the number of jobs that were created which might be for example if it's restaurant work in the U.S. $2.13 an hour that's the national minimum wage for tipped workers in the U.S. which I think a lot of folks living in California don't know but it's true in 38 states I think it still sits on the books which is really unbelievable so the fact that you could get economic development credit for giving someone a job that's $2.14 an hour is pretty unreal and that's one of the policy fights I think we really need to step up on of how those standards get defined and does a quality job just mean that I get a nice uniform or is it that I have access to a living wage to health insurance, the ability to take care of my kids if they get sick and potentially ownership in the business so I think the other piece that we often forget sitting in the Bay Area for tech businesses the idea of options that you want quality workers to be able to own part of the business is absolutely standard as a tech investor you wouldn't invest in a business if they hadn't set aside the employee option pool why is that any different from the person who is educating your children or cooking your food or whatever it might be why would they be any less motivated to want to own and to want to do a great job because they're actually going to reap the economic benefit of what they're doing so I think there's a lot of opportunities to actually maximize economic benefit even separate from the social idea of solving inequality even if you didn't happen to care about that you might care from a societal optimization perspective financially and otherwise of what makes people productive and happy and effective citizens well I want to thank everybody I want to thank Morgan Simon for coming tonight I want to thank Laura Shepard and the institute and everyone from the institute that worked on making tonight happen I want to thank everybody on our Facebook tonight that watched us live please buy Morgan Simon's book Real Impact you can learn more about morgan at morgan simon.com book signing that's correct thanks again and join us for our next program