 Well, hello everyone. It's a pleasure to be here and to have this conversation about changing the culture of money And this is a conversation I've been privileged to be in with Derek Morgan for the past close to two years since we first connected and We're excited to really get to stage that in a live way for everyone today So Derek can you start off and share a little bit about how you entered this conversation about the culture of money? And where you've taken that into the land of impact investing Yeah, sure. So first off happy to be here. Thank you all for coming out so I just finished up a nine-year career in the NFL playing with the Tennessee Titans and it was a career in which I went through a lot of transitions a lot of changes and The one thing that I did not want to have regret about when I hung them up was did I take advantage of my time in the league? did I maximize my influence on my platform and I was always analyzing like was I doing enough You know, I was doing the football camps and the back-to-school drives and I was just like man Is this really making a dent and it wasn't I go back to my hometown in coastal, Pennsylvania And everything still looks the same in which the way I left it 10 15 years ago And so, you know, I kind of started on this quest of trying to figure out how I can be more intentional about making an impact in my communities and started to really educate myself watched the documentary called the 13th and It really went into the private prison industry of probably a lot of you in the audience have seen it And I was completely oblivious to this. I had no idea that my money in my You know ETFs and funds could be unknowingly invested in these companies core civic geo group And I'm like that didn't sit right with me And so I called my advisor and I was like hey John make sure I'm not in any of these companies And he said you're good, but to me that was alarming. I was you know, not really taking an active role in my finances I was doing all this stuff over here on the philanthropic side and doing the charity and the donations But my private capital was in a completely different bucket And so I started to really educate myself watch that picked up a book called real impact who the author is right here by the way and You know just read that and it really opened my eyes to this industry of impact investing When I first heard of it, I was like, oh, that's just another fancy word for charity And the more and more I read this book it started to Enlighten me and so I reached out to Morgan on Twitter through email and I was like, hey, we need to get together and talk I want to learn more and She hit me back like right away and she flew out the Nashville We sat down and spoke for about five hours in some hotel lobby and she was just really just scolding me on it and I was just asking so many questions and She really started this started the process of of educating me and and giving me a new understanding of what this meant And that was a really exciting day in the office You know, we're sitting around at Candid group in Oakland and huh this subject line interest from NFL player Okay, cool. Let's see what this is about But it fit in really well with our broader interest in changing the culture of money and in general Candid group works with families foundations and increasingly athletes and cultural influencers who want their money working for justice and Really what we often say is that we have one client that client is social justice and if you want your money working for that client then we're happy to help you invest and In the past six years since we started the firm myself and a near Ben and me We've supported investments in over 70 companies and funds and we deploy about 30 million dollars into impact deals a year And as proud of that as we might be We also know that there's 96 trillion in global capital markets And that means that we are barely making a dent in the incredible Opportunity that we have to change how money is working in the world and that's why we got interested in this question of culture You know I grew up in Los Angeles and in the late 90s Where SUVs and big gas-guzzling cars were a big deal, right? And then Leonardo DiCaprio bought a Prius and a couple other celebrities bought Priuses and all of a sudden this like ugly Dorky looking car became incredibly cool, right? And we were thinking how could you have that same moment for money, right? How could you make the idea that your legacy is not just about how much money that you made or you know now? We're based in Oakland. So Tupac is a local hero, you know You made a dollar today, but you don't have to do it in a sleazy way, right to paraphrase him and essentially that When we think about building a legacy for our children for our grandchildren We don't want to say I built wealth for you by locking up someone else's family Or by harming someone else's family or by making the planet a place where you can no longer live, right? So that's really been a driving force for me How do we shift that culture of money and that's something that we've really been able to work on together and Derek You've been doing phenomenal work in in really establishing your legacy in shifting your portfolio and then also leveraging your influence So it's wondering if you could share some of the investments that you've been making. Yeah, so From the conversation that me and Morgan had I really started to look intentionally at my finances And I would call my advisor and like hey Do you guys have impact investing products? He's like, yeah, let me check into that Derek and he sent me an email back like a week later And it had like McDonald's and like American Express and I was like no this ain't what I'm looking for bro And so I'm like Morgan like let's continue this conversation. And so slowly, but surely They started to share their their deal flow with me and we started to really just kind of do due diligence on companies and like talk through investment opportunities and so I slowly but surely started to transition my whole portfolio in the market into more Meaningful investments that align with my values like I understood I understood where this dollar was going And so it's companies like bitwise and which you know gives Technology training to underserved communities and jobs and so that to me was something tangible Okay, that's a gateway as a pathway to success and escaping one circumstances in a negative way So that was something that meant a lot to me and it resonated another company is a macro and they tell stories of you know Minority positive stories of minorities and so it's all about changing the narrative on a lot of these things and so minorities have been cast in a negative light and a lot of film and so this is one objective of their main objective of their company and so that made sense to me and so Really, I've been you know in my my last couple of years in the league I turned into more of like an evangelist in the locker room and talking to guys like hey like yeah you're doing these football camps over here, but did you have you ever heard of impact investing and They're like nah, that's charity, right? I'm like no it's actually not and it's kind of relevant because this was like around the same time that Kaepernick was kneeling and all the NFL protests were going on and so we were talking about all the issues the mass incarceration the the police brutality and all these things Which are symptoms of what the actual issues are in these communities and like what are different ways that we can be proactive about it And we weren't really talking about that a whole lot and so for me It was I felt like an obligation almost to start a start to play a role of being an advocate for this industry and to really educate people I came in contact with And one of the initiatives that we've done together from that perspective is Connected to the nonprofit arm of Candid group called real money moves where we've been bringing together athletes artists Actors and everyday activists who want to learn more about how they can make their money Work for justice and we'd started on this question of private prisons It was right around the time that family detention was really kicking off and given that over 70% of immigrant detainees Are in private prisons you have this Bizarre incentive right to lock up more people in order to make more money and knowing that particularly a lot of folks within the Players coalition or otherwise did not want to be making money off of this phenomena So we organized together over 30 athletes and actors largely cast members of oranges a new black Who wanted to make sure that their money was out of private prisons? And then a select few also committed 10 million to social investing and we felt that that divest Invest side was really important so that we're not just playing the whack-a-mole of divestment right of like which company is Going to do some terrible stuff today But if you're invested socially 100% of the time then you just don't have to worry about that Right you can sleep much better at night, and that's why we put out a series of educational videos and a lot of social media presence together Of how everybody can make their money work for justice whether you have $10 or $100 and I know the lot of folks within the impact investment community have been curious of how do you Partner better with athletes, and I'm wondering if you could share, you know some tips on how people can think about that Yeah, so it's a unique dynamic that professional athletes face in terms of Having such of an intensive career where you don't have a lot of availability to really Explore other things like a lot of guys just go home and play video games and watch Netflix and I was the same way The first few years of my career I had kids now end it But it's like you got to have an access point, and I saw I think that different things like a documentary or different ways in which you know We can play on a conversation that's going on around family detention At the at the border and you know a mass incarceration that resonates with guys they see that but then it's like hey You know let's play off of that But like there's an action item athletes are action oriented people that they got to see a target if you can see that target We can hit it and so for this it was very easy to explain to my teammates to say hey look Y'all see what's going on in the news like it's a black person getting killed every day It's a lot of people getting locked up like what can we do? This is one thing tangible thing which we could do and so that translated well And so in terms of like the accessibility that's one way you can kind of like shorten the learning curve for a lot of these things and Really understanding like the availability I mean I know I wasn't the easiest to get a hold of during this campaign But like it's almost like working around the athlete's schedule as bad as that sounds out loud But it's like you got to accommodate for that because it's a huge resource like social capital and I feel like we've been Untapped in that respect people come to us to write checks, right? But not a lot of people come for us to say hey Do you want to be the face of a of a private prison divestment strategy like that's powerful? And so the more that we can leverage that social capital the better And so I think that more and more guys are waking up to that fact and more and more people Are starting to capitalize on that Absolutely, it's true. I'm to be honest. I live in Oakland. We're warriors people I didn't know much about the NFL, but I knew every Titan schedule To make sure we were talking on the right days and making that conversation really accessible And I think that in general that something is a field that we don't often think about is accessibility And when we think about you know that word or in the context of disability rights, right? of what does accessibility mean for a community and that means how do we make sure that everyone gets to participate in a certain space and Ultimately at the end of the day, I see a lot of my work as being an educator and 80% of my time within that right is in doing investment work of educating Heinewerth families and foundations on how they can make investments in great companies But over time about 20% of my time has been translated into trying to really reach Millions of people and whether that's as a Forbes contributor and writing about the money story behind the story write the idea that Every story has some financial connection whatever social issue you might care about and the fact that the public doesn't often see those Connections makes it harder for us to be economic activists to see opportunities to really take charge and make a difference And that's where as part of the families blonde together coalition We've been working hard on taking money out of the private prison system, and then I've been writing pretty prolifically about this in Forbes Which caught the attention of Elizabeth Warren of Alexandria Ocasio-Cartez, right? Who've been retweeting the work and really getting this out to a much broader audience, which has been phenomenal And at the same time I'm keenly aware that not everyone is even going to read an article, right? That we're busy in the morning. We're trying to read the newspaper get our work out in get our breakfast get out the door And that's part of why a project that I've been working on and excited to launch for Thanksgiving It's called woke out and it's combining political news with a great workout. So think sit-ups in Syria Push-ups in private prisons Intervals and impeachment right that we can get these sort of workouts and information you can clap. It's okay. It's all right And I know that some people might say, oh, that's not serious. You're an investor What do you do and do in that sort of thing? And yes, that is pedagogy of the oppressed. Thank you very much How did your body get like that? That would probably break my kneecap I mean, I only had to hold it long enough for the shot to be clear But I think it's really important to say we need to meet people where we are at and it means that and where they are at Right and it might be that a couple thousand people participate in the so-cap conversation But millions of people are looking for interval training videos, right? So how do we activate those folks and how do we make sure that we have people who have that financial knowledge? Getting out into the popular conversation Helping people understand the money story behind the story And I think that that is the sort of opportunity that we all have here today to really embrace And I want to note that as Derek has been entering his next steps, right? And after having a very successful nine-year career in the NFL moving on to his next platform has also been about enhancing accessibility in Creating Kingdoms so if you could share a little bit about that that would be great. Yeah, so I was telling Morgan the offline basically there's like this unique nature in the NFL Where it's so highly competitive and everybody's fighting for a roster spot That the collaboration factor is always missing and so we are doing good work But in silos and so for me like My mission statement one of my mission statements in life is to to use my platform to create equity and opportunities for those who don't have it And so that's a lot of what I've been doing on my own But Kingdom is just basically an extension of that doing these efforts but at a larger scale and Finding a way in which we can collaborate and create communities like this of like-minded peoples to attack the world's Biggest problems and so we launched an opportunity zone fund and you know really When I started reading about opportunity zones. I wasn't a big fan of them. I just thought that okay. This is just another incentive for gentrification displacement and The more and more I thought about it. I'm like, you know, this is going to happen with or without me So I might as well step up and and and do my part and play my role and You know use these different You know theologies around Creating empowerment access empathy inclusiveness and ownership within these communities I look on a map and everywhere I've ever lived is an opportunity zone So for me, I was like, oh, well, this is a great tool to get people to care about Coatesville, Pennsylvania Nobody in this room probably has ever heard of Coatesville, Pennsylvania Wow, okay. We got to talk after this I've got some projects going on but um It's uh, it's a tool right so a way to get people to care about investing into these communities But done in the right way. It's all about how you engage with the community not top down But bottom up and so kingdom is just an extension of kind of some of the things I've been doing on my own But at a larger scale Absolutely So at the end of the day, you know, not only do we have the same name But we're becoming more and more like each other all the time as we're making sure to merge those conversations between cultural influencers and impact investors Yeah, and just to close out. I would say that you know If you're wherever you guys are located in your communities like a we got to get very creative and continue to advocate and evangelize For the impact investment space like this needs to be the standard It can't just continue to be some taboo thing that only a select group of people know about and b would be to Look at the different influencers whether it be athletes celebrities or Whoever in which you may have access to or one or two degrees of separation away from to tap that resource Like we have social capital that we can leverage For the good of others and if done in the right way, it's powerful And so I would definitely encourage you all to take that upon yourselves as you leave and continue to do the great work that you've been doing Thank you so much