 In your agenda, you'll see that now on the topic of role of culture and societal transformation. I'm Angie. I'm just going to let you all introduce yourselves really quick, just your name and your entity or the enterprise. Good morning. My name is Lauren Harris, Chief Program Officer at the Kenneth Brandon Foundation. Good morning. I am Jessica Norwood, the founder of the Runway Project. Great. I would like to actually start by actually asking Jessica and Noni to just tell us really briefly what each of your projects are. What is EPIPREC? What is Runway Project? Just an overview that kind of lays the groundwork for this conversation. I think in a very practical way, Runway Project, particularly early kinds of money to African American entrepreneurs and the type of money that we are giving these businesses is what we call friends and family money. Specifically, it's that early round of money that when people say, you've got a really great idea. You should borrow money from your friends and your family. Then when you look at the disparities inside of wealth, you realize very quickly that your friends and your family do not have that kind of money. What ends up happening is that the kinds of businesses that get put out into the world really start to look like one group of people, very much as they all are. So we step in and provide that kind of capital. We work with the entire ecosystem around businesses. So we're working with technical support providers, business consultants, and banks, depository institutions, CDFIs, the whole gambit to really get them putting money out in ways that are appropriate and friendly and responsive to those bars. So that's the sort of short version. So we really are thinking very deeply about the practices that we have with the way that we can do with our money, how we can pass that on off, and what we think about who we should take a risk for, who's worthy of those opportunities. All of that stuff is embedded in that, and these are cultural responses that we're challenging. So more broadly, this is also about culture, and then very, very quickly it's about culture because I'm also wearing the earrings of hand-to-art, which is one of the companies that we have supported. So it's very directly supporting the art and culture in that way, and the makers. And then very broadly challenging these ideas and norms and patterns that we have that underpin how we move our capital. And I just want to put, I'll do this a lot, because I feel like we have a particular perspective that I actually want to make super transparent, which is when we first sat down together, there was a part of me that just thought, huh, well, maybe the big picture of how we support artists in the, for instance, here in Oakland, African-American artists, business owners, et cetera, is maybe they just need more, there needs to be more intermediaries that support black business owners. But talking to you made me realize it's really important about who owns the ability to make those financial investment decisions, that it's not just transactional, it's really important that being of the community in that community, that cultural tie is what is actually going to create that sense of self-determination. And the thing that really kind of brought it home for me is that the, if I remember correctly, that the capital that you raise through these conventional CD products are also capital raised from the community, right? So that they themselves have this connection then to the very business owners who they should be shopping with, right? It's circuitous. It's another way that made me think about how money can be regenerative, right? That piece was for me an aha moment. Noni, would you go? Yes, I'm trying to figure out how to. Can I, can I lead into one and then you could talk about the work also? Yeah. So originally, when we approached Noni and the team, because I know you guys all work very cooperatively, you are a co-op, but you work very much in collaboration with each other, and we have to still unpack what we're talking about when we say East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, which I hope you will do. But at first we were like, so we have a whole funding category around supporting ownership of assets by artists. And at first we approached you because we were like, ooh, maybe this will be a good way to get into a little bit of the real estate issue because, hello, we're in East Bay, California, real estate is super expensive. And honestly, until we met you, we were like, well, there's no way that ownership of assets that will touch the real estate as an asset, because it is, it's a far more expensive game than what we can play with our smaller dollars. So it was actually, you mentioned it as you won't maybe remember, but you said I'm a cultural anthropologist by trading. And then suddenly I was like, wait, let's talk about it this way. And then it was like, oh, this is about empowerment, about kind of taking not even just control by a cultural community of real estate assets. It became more about like a process of how people can start to work together and reclaim a way of working together that over and over people have divided and, you know, I mean, people literally think you can't be in this community, either through prison systems or gentrification, etc. Does that maybe give you a pathway to kind of, okay. Yeah, we originally launched our vision on the basis of helping people of color, black, indigenous, people of color, and allied communities find, finance, acquire, and long-term asset manage land and housing in Oakland and the East Bay. We're doing this through this model. So we are the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, but we're piloting a model called the Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. And it combines some of the most impactful elements of different social, socially driven organizations we find in our communities. However, as separate entities, these different elements that I'll name shortly have not really had the impact of stabilizing the most underrepresented communities. You could call them frontline communities. I'm talking about black people, right? And I'm talking about the communities that experience the same kinds of anti-black, anti-indigenous, anti-people of color. Or the other term you could think of it is racialized displacement. And there are lots of dynamics that flow into this phenomenon that we think of as racialized displacement. And so we combine several elements, primarily beginning founding in the community investment part of our model where you can think of what you'd be prepped up as a housing and solidarity fund. But it does so much more than that. So we bring in thousand dollar investments from community members, non-accredited investors, folks with a net worth of a million dollars or less for a 1.5 percent return over five years. However, that's not the end of the story because you've got to understand that assets in Oakland and the Bay Area are a million dollars or above, period. So we gather together 100 to 200 investors around a particular project and we use that community buy-in to move our projects through our mission-aligned lenders and investors' sphere of influence. So we take these projects that are put together in relationship to community members who bring us projects. So our first flagship project, about nine folks found their apartment building was going up for sale. So we created BIOS. We came up with the vision for how they are already impacting the community, how they would like to continue to create that ripple effect through stabilized housing. We supported them with a community investment campaign. So that's all the communications. That's all the outreach. That's all the financial management of the capital that we bring in. We expose that project to program-related investment, mission-aligned investment. We found that we even are able to expose the project to some government funds if we have the right partners. So we also bring together the other folks on this landscape of trying to stabilize and act in trust and in advocacy for the community. So our first project is in partnership with Northern California Land Trust. Our second is in partnership with Oakland Community Land Trust. Our third project is in partnership with a concerned community member who didn't want to see another million dollar townhouse built in the middle of West Oakland. Right? Our third project will be in partnership with about five different organizations. So we combine the community investment model, the movement building and organizing model, the cooperative housing model, the worker co-op model, and the land trust model to support folks who normally wouldn't have the time, the skill sets, the networks, the resources in coming from vision to long term asset management. And it's a recognition that the whole chain from beginning to end has been broken and underrepresented communities. Right? And wealth building for communities has to extend past the attainment of the asset itself. I was talking about this the other day where we mis-recognize the power of assets, the power of commodity goods and what actually has to happen outside of that because if you look historically, you can, you know that, that, that at the moment that emancipation happened, there were black folks who knew that you needed to attain land and housing and assets. But there are lots of other network, capital, political, personal, communal mechanisms that dismantle that generation after generation after generation. Right? So we're looking to extend past the moment of attaining the asset and recognize that there are durable networks that have to be built. There are skill sets that have to be reinvested into the community. There are long term, more complex financial management skills. There is, is land trust work that has to work so that it, it resists, if you will, mission drift. Even among ourselves as we're relearning how to build together, what to build together and how to face this transformation of our economy. So we're looking at from beginning to end to create something durable that every generation, you don't have to reignite a whole community to do so. And what I'm reminded of is that I, excuse me, I alluded to this earlier, which is in some ways I don't know if it's because we're still super naive and are new to this work. But it feels like a lot of this of the work that you guys are describing, both in your own community, but we're seeing, of course, because there are others of you in this room, pockets of this kind of effort in other communities. North Minneapolis is an example. Also, certainly in Boston, is that it's, it's so complex because what you're describing is it's not enough to do this work. And I want to start to unpack what this work is right through this cultural lens. It's not enough to just say, I'm going to just do a community land trust. You're talking about building an entire infrastructure and a way of behavior, right, rooted in a sense of people who are in it together. That is just deep layers, right? I mean, even just the sense of like, how do you get people to say, Oh, I'm in the community. I, my, my decision, my vote on how to deploy capital, for instance, that matters. That's not something that's ingrained into so many communities that have been disinvested from. So I also want to just also credit that you guys came out of an incubation effort. If I remember correctly, by sustainable economies law center. And I just point that piece out to say it would be unfair to rely, including us on just these leaders to be like, do everything. We actually have to start, I mean, we, I'm just talking personally, we have been having to really also look at what creates a soft landing. What what's tools to soil. There's a whole nature of ecosystem sort of funding that is necessary. And I will say falls out of so many foundation guidelines, right? It's not coming from a health funder exactly. Right. It's coming from someone who can appreciate in a way like this takes so many different things. I don't want to get too far into it, but just at coca, somebody was talking about the indicators of a thriving community. And so many of us understand that, right? There's a lot of work on that in the last decade around like, do you have, you know, what are your health indicators, whether your housing indicators, like all of these things, like maybe seven and nine of them. And I actually find that I used to really appreciate that because sometimes you could then weave arts and culture into that. And I'm actually finding that indicator model to be super problematic because it once again reifies funders ways of saying like, well, we'll work on just that lever to depress without actually being like, this is a people endeavor, right? It's a community endeavor. So I just want to point that out. I just want to say I was glad you came back around to ecosystem as opposed to infrastructure, right? Because it's the systems approach that really makes a difference. So even if you're talking about funders and benchmarks, the question is, what are the outcomes that the process will create? It's less about your mission alignment and more about your actual inputs into this space that you want to make an impact on, right? And as you point out, you can't just talk about health inputs, right? You can talk about, for example, Arthur Mission Pillar is Hill People Power. And it really, it not only takes into account the historical, social and interpersonal healing that is necessary to support communities to move into a place of cooperation and durability. But it also refers to the internal social, psychological and organizational illnesses that we produce, reproduced as practitioners ourselves. So there should be this whole constellation of questions that each organization asks about the organization they want to fund, whether or not they're ready to press all the levers. The question is, are you considering all the constellations of relationships in your impact area? What do you perceive those necessities to be? And how do you plan to draw them into your ultimate project goal? That's it. And I'll credit Nia, who's in this room from Boston, Ujima, for pointing something out that I was sort of like, I'm still, you know, I feel like I have to translate even inside my own brain. There's the part of me that's like 20 years as a grantmaker. And then there's the conversations that I have on the ground. And I have to kind of do this like little switcheroo, because then I also have to translate it to our funders and the funding field, which is she said that a lot of the work in terms of how culture manifests is around healing work. And I was like, well, I kind of get it on a theoretical level. But then it was like, oh, that shows up in how they structure their governance. That's with the community. Right. It's like a whole thing. So Lauren, you've done years of work in economic justice, et cetera. And the reason I wanted and I'm appreciative of you being with us is that you've also helped hone my own language and thinking around the concept of cultural finance. And you also shared something very powerful, which is we don't talk about it this way because we're so siloed, but that economic systems are by nature cultural. Right. And I was wondering if you could share a little bit about your frame, like how did you get to your point of view about cultural finance? Because I think that would be really helpful for those of us on this journey. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. And it was in the field. I have a lot of respect for the work they've been doing and monitoring it for a while. And for me, the reason why this is really deeply cultural work is because what cultural finance to me means is a set of agreements among a group of people about how they access capital, how they use that capital and how they regenerate that capital in their community for community benefits. And there are lots of examples of this. We in this room are probably familiar with ones that we've heard on this panel, but ones in our own communities, whether you're from a community that uses something that's called a rotating savings and credit association or commonly referred to as a SUSE in some communities. I see people nodding heads. That's a very common reference point in lots of communities. SUSE or rotating savings and credit associations exist in all kinds of communities, particularly among indigenous people and people of color. People who come to the United States from other places bring their savings and credit norms with them. And they have a set of agreements about those norms. It isn't only that they have a culture about how they access the cultural norms in their community around performance and the arts. It's also about how they access and utilize currency and how they use that currency to build power, to build economic power. Now, why was that necessary? It was necessary for the same reasons that Noni talked about because the chain, I would say the chain was never intended to be working in those communities. I would say the chain was always intended to be broken and it has been a perpetual systemic approach to breaking the chain in communities that have come to the United States, that were brought to the United States, there were indigenous to the United States and make sure that they don't have a stronghold of economic power. And so that has necessitated people devising their own ways when their communities have been redlined and shut out and disenfranchised and capital withdrawn from those communities in an intentional systematic way. It's been necessary for those communities to come to the US or arrive in the US and devise their own way of managing currency, of managing resources around their own cultural norms, around their own set of agreements. And that set of agreements has led folks to really thinking about how they infuse culture, how they infuse ritual, how they infuse normative behaviors, how they deal with disagreement and dissonance and discord around money, how do you show that they have scalable projects that they invest in? What are the norms and rules around when money is used and the purposes that money is used for? So for me, cultural finance is really an encompassing notion about how people in a community, however they define themselves, agree to use currency to improve their community and power their community. There's a thing that you're reminding me of that I say often, but I have to say it's pretty quietly. I've never been taped saying this. But I also feel like when we talk about these kind of normative behaviors in the dominant system, and I mentioned this particular moment we're in of how to interpret capitalism as the highest amount of profit at the expense of planet and people, that it's not just relegated to the commercial sector. It's actually in the nonprofit sector that we have this particular Western European hegemony that gets deployed. And I very overtly often say over the years I've been working in this field a philanthropy that nonprofit work is inculcating people into a particular behavior. Just the nature of competition based grants, being able to sort of show up in a certain way that makes sense like people who get rewarded for being academically conferred. So much of foundation work today is also about rather than really starting with the people and what they need or communities and what they need, it starts actually with like well let's get empirical back data to actually justify why we would be funding in this area and then have everyone who is seeking our funds conform to these, to the kind of goals made explicit in that program design work. And that is actually for the work that you guys are doing and for so many who are trying to actually create financial independence from those systems, a lot of just even the most innocuous behaviors in foundation work are really undercutting and undermining on the ground efforts. So you don't have to comment on that. That's just my own point of view, but oh you will. That is cultural. Exactly, right. Cultural. Yeah. So when we're talking about the role of culture and social transformation, we have to recognize that Western bureaucratic power practices are cultural frameworks that are built up with symbolic production, human concern. These are not objective structures. These are not scales that simply apply to reality. These are human beings creating these outcomes. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe that's a good segue to I want to actually start to get explicit because frankly we haven't yet gotten explicit and ambitious in our own initiative about what we mean when we talk about you all and others of course in this room have helped us learn that systems change again at the opening, we thought about systems change purely through an economic lens. And it wasn't because we were we thought economy is more important than health. It wasn't that it's just that we kept trying to go as upstream as possible around just one problem, but it's a big problem which is for so long we've been trying to help artists be financially sustainable in the pursuit of their practice in America and current systems of support just don't cut it. So we just kept going upstream and finally came all it went all the way up to like economic systems. But in conversations with all of you, we've been becoming more aware that it's actually about black empowerment, that it's not just about like a theoretical. This is why we've shifted from like, well, let's go in an academic route. And I'm wondering how you interpret cultural work and what it means for you in terms like if you saw it forward for over the next 10, 15 years ideally like what would that economic system look like and who would be the leaders of that system? Oh, I know you know. Maybe I just touched it in a confusing way. You know, I don't know that I'll land on the exact question, but something that's been said that's sort of been percolating right now is one of the things that we thought about with the runway project and purchasing certificates of deposit because there are lots of other ways this could have happened, but we thought about the cultural sort of relationship between institutions and things that are already there, what you already know about how you speak to each other and what the perceptions of risk look like for everybody differently. And we were trying to find a way where we could all show up and be investors, where we could take out some of those layers of privilege and access that have been rewarded inside of the financial institution because of proximity to whiteness. We wanted to remove a lot of those things and say, OK, my dad can do this and UBIC institution or foundation can do this and we can actually be together because some of those layers of power dynamics that we keep perpetuating are inside of who gets to be named this thing and who's not. And then what does that do for the power building of that community, the base of the building, political building and power building in that community when automatically you're saying I'm not investing in this place. I shouldn't I shouldn't have an ownership stake. I shouldn't talk about this as my thing. And so how do I really get engaged in the ballot at that point? How do I how am I then engaged across these other layers of things? How am I engaged as my own health advocate? If you're already telling me that there there should not be any place for me to show up the way that you get to show up. And so it was really a very intentional thing for us to think about how we keep pressing that lever of who gets named what and what does that look like? Let me stop there. There was a soapbox and I was about to get OK. And then I had to I was about to black out and I realized there are other people here that I need to make space for. You know how you get on. It's like, well, right? It's up. And that was me. Right. So let me. A breath and just sort of let that land for a moment. We'll marinate. Right, right, right. Thank you. Yes, I say yes. Lauren, you've you've done so much work over the years where I don't know. I mean, share with us like do people who are working, especially out of the foundation sector really overtly and intentionally think about that cultural finance term? I don't know that it's a term of currency in the sector. I don't hear the colleagues that I'm aware of who do economic justice, for example, using that as a frame necessarily. And I don't know that you need to. It works for me because it helps me to just it gives me some language and a framework for understanding what I see happening really all over the world and all over the United States, which is whether you're talking about Grameen Bank and the work that Muhammad Unis has done or Aaron Tanaka and the work they're doing the Ojima Project or work that, you know, runway and Jessica is doing. Yeah, this is Mia's over there behind the pole. You know, all these there's some common threats here. You know, what Muhammad Unis started to do, there was really recognized that there was a consistency of norms and expectations that he was already could build on. Like there were just norms and a set of relationships and social capital Western term, but this notion of social capital already existed and provided a basis for thinking about how you could move capital in a community to support microfinance, right? Mondragon, you know, colleagues and I were visiting Mondragon and did a study tour earlier this year. Same basic notion. An international, very complex enterprise, over a hundred actually businesses within this enterprise, but around but centered around a set of common norms and expectations and agreements that really what they're all working for is Basque country that every enterprise, every country, every company is created with one single mission in mind, benefit Basque people. Now there's a lot of there's a lot of different businesses and a lot of different industries that Mondragon operates, but they all operate for a common purpose, Basque, right? And so there's a set of expectations and agreements around that. And similarly, in the U.S. context, what I see in communities of color, particularly all over the U.S. is people organizing around a notion of what we can do to benefit ourselves because nobody's coming to save us. We have to save ourselves and have to figure out how we're going to empower and build the kind of economic pathways for meeting the needs in our communities and not expecting people to come and do it for us. The historic record shows that no one's coming to do it for you. In fact, if they come, they may come to destroy what you built. All right. And so the notion really is in philanthropy is how can we use all the tools of foundations, all the resources? And I mean all the 5% that we grant and the 95% that is invested to really make a difference in elevating the work that Jessica and Oni and others like them are doing in the U.S. and around the world. I'm challenging thoughts. I think that there is a silence around the fact that black Americans, black American communities, at least me being raised on the West Coast, it's not the South, cannot be said to have a very specific to their needs, frameworks and history, cultural approach to using, circulating and recapitalizing, if you will, money. That is part of this structure of disorganization that causes black American communities to be so vulnerable and to every movement of the market, to every cycle through communities, to every need. Because the cultural approach that we are told to use and cause to use, first of all, is a Western capitalist approach. And that approach structurally excludes our usage. So if we're talking about cultural usage of money, we have to not just say, like, oh, we'll look at those black folks down there in the lower bottoms. They could use the SUSU because they are descended from the African folks from some very specific region among scores of countries. What we have to think about in relationship to culture and the use of money is rebuilding, reaffirming, and even recreating something that is very specific and functional for the people that we're engaging with. You point out from the very beginning, friends and family, I cannot call my cousins and ask for $1,000. I actually have to give that to them because they need that from me. And in terms of financial organization, even, oh, my God, the panel, Annie McShures, was on where her panelmate mentions, do not give a black bank $100. The cost of transaction costs so much more than that $100. That's the way to destroy a black bank quickly. There are very specific exigencies of black dispossession in the US that have to be looked at, taken apart and understood in order to speak of anything like a cultural convention around money, finance, and capitalizing. And that's what we're trying to recognize through using cooperative principles. Because I definitely believe in the Mondragon model. But there's a homogeneity. There's a national as a coherent national identity. There is a land base. There is a notable, at least now in the beginning, they were so poor that this is probably not the case. But there is a notable absence of systemic interference with their ability to create financial unity. And those conditions are all hold in the opposite in black American communities. We're coming off of the 90s of predatory lending. That was racialized, right? When you go and look at actuary tables for risk factors, out of the box, not being a white-skinned person downrates you by certain points, that is racialized and systemic. So in order to make any of these claims that we're making for our work, there has to be a courage to talk about the fact that I cannot walk my brown behind into just any obank, whether I am degreed, whether I am name executive director, whether I am on the page, front page of the New York Times, and receive a loan with the same kinds of asset-based under me as my white counterpart. You cannot disappear that, yeah. There's also something about, so in this conversation where we show up is, I think about the legacy of just arts and culture philanthropy over the past two plus generations. And to this work of changing, not only economic systems, but building back up communities who have been so extracted from, arts and culture done a lot of damage. And here's why I'm going to share with you the frame for how we come into this conversation. Is that we're, it's very easy to say that. Largely, arts and culture in America through institutional support is very much about Western European hegemony and inculcating others to that. And it happens in very specific ways. It's, artists in America have to be degree conferred that they look a certain way, practice a certain way, et cetera. Oh, I wish my water was up here. I'm sorry, but that the, but what I'm also seeing is that right now we have this moment where there's a lot of efforts within philanthropy for, and I really hate that it's become an acronym, DEI support, diversity, equity inclusion. And I'm always like, equity work, it looks so different than those other two, right? But the reason I say all this is just to say that I'm still right now dismayed that when people talk about, oh, we're doing inclusive economy work, oh, thank you. We're doing inclusive economy work or we're doing just transition work, et cetera. It's devoid still about acknowledging a lot of the damage that even our own industries have done to participate in actually taking away power from certain communities. And even in the grant making, even if it's to really good, whether it's activists or movement organizations, the way they structure the funding to me is highly problematic, right? Asking for your time to do a specific project or whatnot rather than investing it in a way where it's just like you guys actually, in some ways it's redistribution I'm asking for, right? Like where all of that is, it's not dictated by the funder, right? And so just my long-winded way of just acknowledging that we don't clearly have the right answers but that we all actually need to be thinking about how we can actually support work of, that you guys are leading and others, or we actually have to start to step back, like very deliberately. Can I challenge whether or not we don't have the right answers? You know? I feel like I don't. Yeah. In the sense of, I'll give you an example in that this connection between the sort of my work, my background is in non-governmental organizations internationally and then the US nonprofit industrial complex, if you will. And there's a continual generational, like every generation through these fields there's some sexy term, right? So if we go to international development we were talking about structural adjustment and then we were talking about austerity, right? And so right now we're talking about diversity, equity and inclusion. And if you look at, for example, the intentions of the city of Oakland to add 5,000 housing units to downtown Oakland under the banner of diversity, equity and inclusion. And these household units are going to reach 80% of AMI, right? 80% of AMI is about 80 to $85,000. The average white Oaklander makes $85,000. The average black Oaklander makes $36,000. So then under the banner of diversity, equity and AMI you are using funding to build 5,000 new units that if you look at the naked, clear-cut numbers are specific set-asides for white Oaklanders. Specifically excludes black Oaklanders. There is no question or confusion around whether that is the right approach or not. But you can go, my co-operator can pull the document out that shows those two things on the same piece of paper as a diversity and equity inclusion goal. So we may not know all of the nuts and bolts we're all experimenting in R&Ding, but there's some stuff that's really clear and really naked that could demonstrate the right pathway into supporting folks. And what I'm hearing you say is, at least from a funder perspective, we need to be asking better questions. If we really are trying of ourselves, like if we're really trying and genuinely interested in whether it's DEI or whatever, social justice, et cetera, if we're not asking those questions and seeing it clearly, we're intentionally, at this stage of all of civil society, we're intentionally obfuscating. We certainly don't want to ask the question of a $200,000 capitalized consultant who has never walked through a pile of trash and seen a human that they were in high school with. Those are the wrong people to ask those questions of. I'm gonna just say that at this point, if we could just go into group discussion, so we'll just turn off the live stream.