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Convergence and Emergence: Chordata Capital

October 31, 2023

This is the second in a series of collaboration stories featuring JEI Fellows and alumni who have worked together to shift the flow of capital and power. This post features Tiffany Brown and Kate Poole of Chordata Capital–an anticapitalist wealth management firm with a commitment to support clients in redistributing rather than continuing to accumulate wealth. In celebration of their 5-year anniversary, Chordata released their first Impact Report, “Investment with a Backbone.”

Tiffany Brown (left) and Kate Poole (right). (Guy Ambrosino)

Some partnerships arrive out of the blue; some build over time. Others, like the one that emerged between Tiffany Brown and Kate Poole, Just Economy Institute Fellows and co-founders of Chordata Capital, feel meant-to-be.

Tiffany is an accomplished organizer, financial advisor and change maker. She first met Kate in 2013, when she was a director for Resource Generation, a community of young people with wealth and/or class privilege committed to the equitable distribution of wealth, land and power. She felt an immediate kinship as she learned more about Kate — one of the few members who shared her interest in investing as a form of activism. When she and Kate reconnected years later, through JEI’s inaugural fellowship cohort, “it became so clear, right away, that we were in the right place at the right time, with the right core values and commitment… just a very similar spirit coming from two really different places.”

Both Tiffany and Kate were ready for something new. In 2016, Tiffany had started working at a socially responsible investment firm and was seeking to build community with others who were integrating a deep commitment to racial and economic justice in their work.

Kate found herself in a similar struggle: “At the time, I was organizing with other wealthy people around investing, but it felt limited. I was hungry for relationships across class and across race, and for a different kind of partnership.”

Five years later, Chordata Capital — named after the phylum of vertebrates that resists, evolves and has a backbone — is modeling a new kind of financial activism. Values-driven and anti-capitalist, Chordata invests directly in local communities and focuses on racial and economic justice. With $135 million in assets under management, Tiffany and Kate’s vision of a redistributive approach to finance is translating to more agency and power for frontline communities.

The JEI fellowship offered Kate and Tiffany the time and space to explore how to create an investment structure they hadn’t yet seen in the world and knew was needed. “One of the challenges presented to JEI Fellows was to develop a plan for distributing $100 million in service of a just economy,” Kate shared. “I didn’t want to be a white wealthy person deciding how to ‘fix’ racism or inequality. I didn’t think that was a good exercise to go about solving as an individual. At the same time, being surrounded by so many amazing Fellows and faculty committed to racial justice within finance made me excited to help make that possible.”

**A plan and partnership comes together.** Kate and Tiffany presenting their vision for Chordata Capital to their JEI cohort. (JEI)

Since her early 20s, Tiffany has worked in donor and investor organizing, developing a clear vision and sharp analysis of what’s needed to build a just economy. She shared, “I was in activist spaces clearly understanding the problems and in donor spaces with people ready to choose a different path.” Tiffany knew that “without values-aligned advisors, these wealthy folks weren’t finding finance people who could support their vision for a radical approach to investing.”

For their JEI creative capital project, Tiffany and Kate decided to co-create an investment advisory firm that would help radical inheritors walk the talk. Tiffany was able to build on decades of organizing experience and the skills she developed working in socially responsible investing, and Poole was able to leverage her inherited resources and local investing experience. Chordata was born.

Advisors told Kate and Tiffany that it wasn’t possible to avoid investing in corporations or to build portfolios full of community investments that center racial justice. They said you can’t design investment portfolios to redistribute wealth — that financial advisors have a fiduciary duty to maximize wealth accumulation.

“That’s not true,” Tiffany shared. “You have a responsibility to support clients in meeting their values and their goals. If their goals are to redistribute wealth and to invest in the solidarity economy, you can and should do that, working alongside them. You just have to build the infrastructure, skills and relationships to make it happen.”

When Chordata launched, values-driven investors were interested. “There were people who really wanted to take their investments out of Wall Street and put them into community-controlled investments, but there weren’t advisors to help them,” Tiffany noted.

**Chordata Capital’s values**: Being an artist and creative are among Kate’s many gifts. These custom illustrations show and tell the foundational values that inform Chordata’s work. (Kate Poole)

Investment advising for individuals isn’t the only thing TIffany and Kate offer. Now in its fifth year, Chordata Capital also offered a cohort experience for investors to explore reparative finance. Communities of practice like JEI’s fellowship and the Chordata Cohort give people space for inquiry and a place to build fluency and confidence. “Finance is such a confidence game,” TIffany noted. “A lot of people act like they know what they’re talking about, but there are so many contradictions in this work. The whole sector is an unsafe learning space.”

“I was really hungry for a learning community when I arrived at JEI,” Tiffany explained. “In some ways I expected to be taught the mechanics of better finance or economic models — a disappointing orientation because I don’t think there are many models that exist. There are a lot of people doing beautiful work, but there are also so many hypocrisies within our economic framework that we aren’t encouraged to explore. The Chordata Cohort focused on deep questioning, as well as collective action and power.”

“About twelve years ago, I wanted to redistribute my wealth,” Kate shared. “I asked advisors how to shift my portfolio into Black communities, but there weren’t any easy answers. [JEI Fellow] Jessica Norwood, who founded RUNWAY, was one of the first people I met who was using investing to build Black wealth. Fast forward to today, we’ve gone from not really having a visible way for white investors to redistribute wealth and power, to having many options flourishing in different spaces. I’m so grateful to be in this work with Tiffany. She took a really big risk partnering with me and building this wild firm. It feels so powerful to do this together.”

“For white people in particular, especially wealthy white people, it’s so important to get out of that individualistic, problem-solving mentality,” Kate said. “I invite folks to find others across class and race — especially if you’re committed to economic or racial justice — to build partnerships and trust.”

While it’s easy to see the insight and courage of these extraordinary first-movers, they shine the light back on their clients and partners. Tiffany shared, “When clients join us, they’re going against the grain, and I can see how courageous they are for doing something different. It’s beautiful to acknowledge and share that with them. We’re building community and a different narrative of what’s possible in finance — collectively, we are all brave. And, we’re just doing what fundamentally needs to happen to have a just economy.”

JEI Journeys: Janice St. Onge on Providing Entrepreneur-Friendly Capital for Sustainable Growth in Rural Communities

October 16, 2023

This is the fourth in a series of Q&As with JEI Fellows about the path they’ve taken to financial activism and what they’ve learned along the way. For this post, we interviewed Janice St. Onge, president of the Flexible Capital Fund, about strategies for building community wealth, her work in rural New England, how investors can be more effective partners to local entrepreneurs, and her lessons learned.

The Flexible Capital Fund invests in growing Vermont companies that fill a gap or strengthen the supply chain in sustainable agriculture and food systems, forest products, renewable energy, clean technology, and other natural resource sectors.

Janice St. Onge (third row from bottom, far left) with her cohort at Paicines Ranch. (JEI)

JEI: How would you describe your community wealth building work?

JSO: I run the Vermont-based Flexible Capital Fund, L3C. We are an impact investment fund and Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) whose mission is to create healthy food systems, preserve working lands, build resilient communities, and address climate change through regenerative solutions and by fostering equitable workplaces. Where others see risk, we see opportunity. At the Flex Fund, we believe that innovative financing tools, used with intention, can be a part of the answer to community wealth building. And we’re currently scaling our investment footprint to all of rural New England so that entrepreneurs who would not otherwise have access to risk capital can go further faster.

JEI: What are you doing that brings something new to the table in terms of community wealth building? What value are you seeing from that?

JSO: The Flex Fund takes an integrated capital approach and provides flexible financing in a variety of structures—from debt to revenue-based financing (RBF) to equity—to help businesses in New England’s food system, forest products, and climate change solutions markets grow.

When we started the Flexible Capital Fund in 2011, there was only one other organization in New England using RBF as an alternative to equity investment for growing mission-oriented businesses. We have had to do a lot of educating on what RBF is and how it can benefit growing companies in a rural state like Vermont. I got a lot of deer-in-the-headlights looks from the lending and investing community. On the entrepreneur side, I heard, “Wow, that seems like an expensive interest rate.” I’d explain that RBF loans don’t have an interest rate, and that repayment is based on a percentage of revenue over time. Our returns are really a function of the time value of money.

Our capital is less expensive than equity, though it can be more costly than a bank loan. However, a bank or lender has primary claim to a company’s assets, like equipment and real estate, and if a business can’t pay back the loan from cash flow, the bank has the right to sell the assets. With RBF, we don’t necessarily require a personal guarantee or hard assets. Payments are flexible and based on a percentage of revenue rather than a fixed principal and interest payment. And we don’t dilute ownership or ask for a role in decision making like equity investors do. This makes RBF a great alternative to equity for growing businesses in rural New England.

Now, 12 years in, RBF is gaining momentum as a type of capital that can help entrepreneurs grow in a more sustainable way at the pace that makes the most sense for them in the rural areas where they operate and in the communities they support.

Janice St. Onge (Isora Lithgow Creations)

JEI: Can you tell us about a project or aspect of a project that you’re proud of? We’d love to hear a community success story.

JSO: I’m proud of all our portfolio companies that are doing the hard work every day of providing products and services that feed us in a healthy (and delicious) way, create healthy living spaces, produce renewable energy, reduce waste, and cut down the carbon emissions of infrastructure materials. They’re paying living wages and creating wealth in the communities where they reside.

Encore Renewable Energy, based in Burlington, Vermont, is a great example. Encore’s revenue was inconsistent. Its solar projects required up-front work leading to construction and sale, and its project timelines often changed. Encore was in a steep growth phase and there were holes on the team that needed filling. In the past, Encore had self-financed new hires, but it was bumping up against its capacity to self-fund relative to the opportunity it saw in the solar development market.

We provided RBF-structured financing in 2016 and 2019 that allowed Encore’s payments to mirror its cash flow. Following our integrated capital strategy, we also brought in mission-aligned CDFI partners and a private investor to ensure Encore had the capital it needed.

Encore’s team viewed our capital as catalytic, and during our investment, the company more than tripled its revenue, quadrupled the number of high-quality jobs, grew a more diverse workforce, and raised significant additional capital from other lenders and investors.

Encore’s environmental impact to date is equivalent to eliminating 1.6 million barrels of oil.

JEI: What lessons can you share about what it takes to be an effective partner to people seeking to build community wealth?

JSO: First, invest in people, not companies. Be more than a checkbook. Relationships matter. Get to know an entrepreneur and their team before you write the check. Then keep in mind that entrepreneurs and their teams are doing the hard work. When funds and economic development entities say, “we created X number of jobs,” let’s be honest—they didn’t create the jobs, the entrepreneurs did. And sometimes job creation isn’t a good measure of success. Sometimes stuff happens. To keep the doors open, entrepreneurs may have to let people go. That’s a really hard thing—for everyone.

Janice St. Onge (center) at Paicines Ranch. (Alicia Arcidiacono, Chasing Chickadees)

Second, financial returns aren’t the end all, be all. There is no Planet B. While growth is good, growth for growth’s sake is not sustainable. Investors’ goals need to change to include social and environmental returns. And more investors need to take a systems-level perspective if we want a future for our children and their children on this planet with limited resources. Failure is part of this work. As investors, we need to talk about it and learn from it. When things don’t go as planned, and a business needs to wind down, we can find ways to do this with dignity and respect for what the entrepreneur built.

And third, our experience over the last decade—through a recession and global pandemic—has taught us that impact companies need more time than a traditional venture funding model offers to build their business and create the change that we and our entrepreneurs envision. Systems change takes time. This quote from an essay by William McAskill on longtermism sums it up: “We live at the very beginning of history, in its most distant past. What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people. We need to act wisely.”

Janice St. Onge (third from left) with members of JEI Cohort 2 at Paicines Ranch. (Alicia Arcidiacono, Chasing Chickadees)

JEI: What other advice do you have for leaders who want to support community wealth building?

JSO: Invest with diversity in mind. Diversity among investors and entrepreneurs leads to better financial, social, and environmental returns. If you haven’t read The XX Edge by Patience Marime-Ball and Ruth Shaber, M.D., pick up a copy. Data shows that gender-inclusive and diverse teams are 21% more likely to outperform their peers in profitability, and new companies with a female founder performed 63% better than those with all-male teams over an observed 10-year period.

Entrepreneurs are not superhuman. Mental health is important. We need to bring empathy, understanding, vulnerability, and humanity to our work as investors. Entrepreneurship is a deeply personal journey, and it can be difficult for entrepreneurs to separate their identity from the business they’re trying to create.

We need all kinds of capital across the continuum. We found that taking an integrated capital approach—using a combination of financial, human, and social capital—ensures our companies have the right financing as they grow, at whatever pace makes sense.

Finally, you can’t change systems without saying goodbye to those that aren’t working. We all—philanthropists, investors, lenders, policy makers, government, individuals, and entrepreneurs—need to take risks with our capital and activate our voices.

Janice St. Onge is President of the Flexible Capital Fund, L3C (“Flex Fund”), a mission based investment fund providing flexible risk capital to Vermont’s food system, forestry and clean technology businesses. As President of the Flex Fund, Janice manages all facets of the Fund’s operations, including raising capital, deal flow, due diligence, and portfolio/financial management. Janice brings economic and business development as well as financial expertise to the organization, having served in the technology, financial services, higher education and state government sectors during her 25+ year career.

Previously, Janice served as Director of the Vermont Business Center at the University of Vermont and Technology Business Development Director for Vermont’s Department of Economic Development. She received the 2001 National Tibbetts Award in recognition for her outreach work with the Small Business Innovation Research program in Vermont. As Assistant Vice President at Peoples Bank, she originated and managed a $21 million commercial loan portfolio. Janice is a graduate of the University of Utah with a B.A. in Marketing and is an alumnus of the Snelling Center for Government’s Vermont Leadership Institute. She recently helped launch the Vermont Women’s Investors Network, and serves on the Vermont Small Business Development Center Advisory Board and the Clean Energy Development Fund Board. She is a founding member of Slow Money Vermont’s Organizing Committee. A Stowe, Vermont resident, Janice was co-founder of the Stowe Energy and Climate Action Network and a former International Ski Federation (FIS) World Cup Freestyle Skiing Judge.

Connections Across Generations and Borders

September 13, 2023

This is the first in a series of collaboration stories featuring JEI Fellows and alumni who have worked together to shift the flow of capital and power. This post features Joel Solomon of Renewal Funds, Manuel Vega and Matilde Olazabal of CO Capital, and Jasmine Rashid of Candide Group and forthcoming author of “The Financial Activist Playbook: 8 Strategies for Everyday People to Reclaim Wealth & Collective Wellbeing.”

Manuel Vega (left) and Joel Solomon (right)

“I consider myself a modern elder,” shared Mexico City native and JEI Fellow, Manuel Vega. “That brings me great joy and motivation, and keeps me oriented to the future, and the present.”

Learning and working alongside one of JEI’s founding facilitators, Joel Solomon, these “modern elders” are nurturing the emergence of an economy that is more just, connected, and joyful in Mexico and beyond. “Everything’s more fun when it matters,” said Solomon, “There is a lot to do, and I’ve tried to live my life in a way that embraces the responsibility of that hard work, while having as much fun as possible.”

After decades in mainstream finance, and as a grandfather, Vega found himself seeking something more in his work. When he discovered JEI, he sensed it was a community where he could learn and unlearn. He participated in the 2018–2019 fellowship cohort and discovered a kindred spirit in Solomon, whose own family was growing in Mexico, through marriage and grandchildren. It didn’t take long for a vision to come into focus.

Vega, along with his wife, Matilde, also a JEI Fellow (2019-2020), their partners and associates, designed and hosted the first CO_Day, an in-person gathering of investor families in CO_Capital’s first impact investment fund in February 2023 in Mexico City. They also participated in the Latin American Impact Investment Forum (FLII2023) where more than 700 people gathered in Mérida, Mexico, to consider new ways they might have a positive impact in their communities, and in the world, by activating their capital differently.

As the keynote speaker in both events, Solomon shared his own journey, of his privilege inheriting some wealth, and then being asked to manage the wealth of another. Decades later, the investment firm he created, Renewal Funds, remains one of the largest and most vibrant mission capital funds in Canada.

“Joel’s guidance has been invaluable, helping to design our impact investment fund,” Vega shared. “Along with my wife, Matilde, and our partners, we continue to accompany other wealth holders as we all try to give a different meaning, mission, and purpose to our money and our assets.”

JEI advisor Joel Solomon shared his story of wealth activation as the keynote speaker at the Latin American Impact Investment Forum in Mérida, Mexico.

Vega appreciates his role as a “modern elder” in his new fund, working with his partners in their early forties. “In the last four or five years that we’ve been together, they have seen, we have all seen, the benefits of having different generations on a team. It is so powerful to have multiple perspectives, as we break from ‘business as usual’ prejudices and taboos, about who does or does not have wisdom, or the best idea.”

“When you are in your sixties or seventies, retrospect and perspective work in mysterious ways,” Vega went on. “It really helps if you engage with joy and respect. And with your heart in resonance with your brain. It can mean a lot to younger people who are struggling about how to go about business and leadership.”

Connecting across generations is critical to how JEI supports emerging leadership, at all ages. JEI Fellow Jasmine Rashid, the youngest in her cohort at 26 years old, shared, “I have so many deeply intentional, intergenerational relationships with folks who I otherwise wouldn’t even have met. Even if we work in different sectors or have different approaches, we’re all working towards this shared goal of a radically better economy.”

Manuel Vega (front table at left) gathered colleagues and friends for the first CO_Day, a gathering of investor families in CO_Capital’s first impact investment fund, in Mexico City.

Along with a brilliant team of co-facilitators and advisors, Solomon helped launch JEI and has participated in the first six cohorts. A lifelong learner and financial activist, he reflected, “There’s a lot of blood on our money. How do we get people to pay attention to that or care about it? We tend to accumulate and concentrate power and repeat cycles that a lot of us don’t pay attention to, and we don’t reflect on who suffers on our behalf. Every opportunity for conversations, insights, and commitments that are about something more than simply accumulating power and wealth is so critical. Communities like JEI, where people gather and support and challenge each other to go deeper and with more meaning, and to be more responsible for our lusts and our greed, can balance the complexities of this existence towards long-term futures and future generations.”

As Solomon shared about his life’s journey with those who gathered for the two events in Mexico, Vega could see hearts and minds opening. “I could sense that the feelings of immense gratitude and immense hope that I get from JEI were beginning to spread.”

“We work with Mexican families with wealth who struggle in difficult conversations, across gender and generations,” he said. “It means so much to have others accompany them in the process of asking new questions about old habits. Being present and sharing our conviction and our experiences as a multigenerational, multiracial, multigendered team helps everyone get a small sense of what I have been grateful to experience in the JEI community.”

JEI Profiles: Jasmine Rashid, The Financial Activist Playbook

September 12, 2023

Jasmine Rashid at Paicines Ranch, the host site of JEI fellowship immersions. (Alicia Arcidiacono, Chasing Chickadees Photography)

“At a young age I was already acutely aware of economic and racial segregation, growing up in a divided community on Long Island,” shared Jasmine Rashid, Director of Impact at impact investing firm Candide Group, and a Just Economy Institute alum. “I always had this interest in social justice and racial equity — and in the background, the role that money plays in all of that — before I had the language for it.”

An emergent financial activist was born.

“I started college as an economics major, but I just couldn’t wrap my mind around these concepts that felt so detached from reality,” Rashid said. “We weren’t talking about people and power, we were talking about numbers and equations. I decided to craft a special major in Peace and Conflict Studies instead, focused on social change theory of larger systems, and things started to click into place.”

After leading and participating in grassroots campaigns to divest investor capital from extractive industries, with a focus on mass incarceration, Rashid came to realize that as much as she honors and appreciates divestment work, she gets more energy and comes to life when she’s working with others on the investment side of things. In other words; co-creating real alternatives to the systems of inequity she studied in college. “It’s more sustainable for me to work on building new systems and contributing to that hopeful, joyful future and economy that we deserve.”

The Just Economy Institute fellowship was a perfect fit — a community where Rashid could hone her critique, and more importantly, develop the connections, insights, and courage to embrace her own voice and expertise.

After that, there was no looking back. Hard at work on her first book, tentatively titled The Financial Activist Playbook: 8 Strategies for Everyday People to Reclaim Wealth & Collective Well-Being, Rashid credits the JEI community with giving her the confidence needed to pursue such an ambitious goal. “The idea of myself as a book author — at the time I was 26 — was overwhelming, and that imposter syndrome still shows up. But by the end of the fellowship, when I was presenting my creative capital project, it was really just naming what seemed obviously mine to do: like, I’m doing this book, because the other Fellows helped me see I was the right person for that work.” When she signed her book deal with Berrett-Koehler Publishers in April, the JEI community were among the first she shared the news with, in the spirit of a collective win for financial activists everywhere.

Jasmine Rashid (top row, fifth from left) with Cohort 5 Fellows at Paicines Ranch. (Alicia Arcidiacono, Chasing Chickadees Photography) The idea for *The Financial Activist’s Playbook* existed before Rashid’s participation in the JEI fellowship; her time in the community has turned it into a proposal and manuscript that is becoming more real every day. Stay tuned for more about the book release in Fall 2024.

You might be wondering, what exactly is a financial activist? Rashid spends a lot of time thinking about that too.

“To me, a financial activist is someone who believes that we deserve more than what’s currently happening in our economy. We deserve more pathways to not just stability but flourishing, at the individual and family level, and also at the community and economy level.” Being a part of JEI offers a structured way to focus on activation of capital in all spheres — the personal, the interpersonal, the systemic. “A financial activist is someone who wants to live in a more sensible financial system, who wants to make sure their actions, even in small ways, are aligning with building a system that is more equitable and sustainable.”

The Financial Activist Playbook isn’t designed just for people passionate about economic justice or those who already have significant financial wealth to redistribute. “The audience I’m targeting wouldn’t necessarily call themselves financial activist[s]; they may be interested in social change and improving conditions, but probably aren’t spending every night in someone’s basement organizing the next campaign. I’m trying to reach people who have the right intentions and the right motivation, giving them an on-ramp to see themselves reflected,” she shares. “In this work, change doesn’t happen because of mystical, singular, expert leaders. Everyday people, working class and middle class folks, who are often left out of conversations about money, wealth, philanthropy, and investing, have way more power than we’ve been told to shape the financial system where we are. The book is meant to help anyone who’s interested access to some of the tools, strategies, and insights that I’ve been given through JEI, as well as the stories that so powerfully nourish and inspire us to keep innovating.”

Rashid’s role in the JEI community is only deepening, as she currently supports the team on facilitation guidance for incoming cohorts.. She is eager to “continue bringing intentionality, openness, and emergence to this joyful, powerful, and generous community.”

The Financial Activist Playbook will be available in September 2024, with pre-orders opening up later this year. In the meantime, Rashid hopes that anyone who’s curious about financial activism is willing to “just start somewhere. I happen to work in the impact investing field, that’s my profession, but you don’t have to actually be a financial intermediary or dedicate your whole life to becoming a financial expert to be a financial activist. Even small actions with deep intentionality add up. As long as we’re connecting to one another, in community.”

Jasmine Rashid discusses her forthcoming book for a JEI video project at Paicines Ranch. (Techboogie)

Jasmine Rashid is a financial activist, writer, and impact investing professional. In her role as Director of Impact for Candide Group, she helps investors flow tens of millions of dollars to predominately women & BIPOC-led social justice-focused companies, funds, and organizations building the economy we deserve. Her forthcoming book, The Financial Activist Playbook: 8 Strategies for Everyday People to Reclaim Wealth and Collective Wellbeing, will be available in Fall 2024 with Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

JEI Journeys: Keoni Lee on Partnering Across Differences

August 14, 2023

This is the third in a series of Q&As with JEI Fellows about the path they’ve taken to financial activism and what they’ve learned along the way. For this post, we interviewed Keoni Lee, CEO of Hawai‘i Investment Ready, about what it takes to partner across differences and how the effort can produce deeper impact.

Hawai’i Investment Ready is a 501(c)3 nonprofit impact investing intermediary working at the nexus of purpose, business, and culture to restore regenerative abundance to Hawai’i’s economy. HIR supports purpose-driven enterprises (for-profit and nonprofit) and funders in Hawai’i to strengthen and scale their impact through a variety of programs and services for capacity building and impact capital deployment.

Keoni Lee of Hawaiʻi Investment Ready (HIR) coaching enterprises in Cohort 4 of HIRʻs Hawaiʻi Impact Accelerator. (Hawai’i Investment Ready)

JEI: Can you share any a-ha moments you’ve had when engaging with someone through JEI, or in another professional context, that changed your perspective on how to do the work?

KL: Just going through the fellowship program creates conditions for conversations that I don’t think ever would have existed otherwise. The cohorts are so diverse. You have people who hold the wealth, who steward and manage the wealth, and who receive the wealth all thinking about a more just and equitable community.

To hear the wealth holders’ perspectives on money and how it can negatively impact them, especially those with inherited wealth, was enlightening to me. I came from asking for money, and my assumption was that if you have all this wealth, life’s easy for you—no problems. I realized through this experience that in order to have productive conversations, I have to first have empathy for the other person’s truth. Understanding the nuances that I didn’t understand before allows me to have better conversations with wealth holders and get to the core of “Can we be in right relationship down the road?”

It’s made my fundraising a lot easier. If I demonstrate aloha for their person, they’re more willing to listen to my perspective, especially if what I’m offering challenges their current position. They’re more willing to lean in instead of closing the door or pushing back.

JEI: Can you give an example of a cross-class, cross-race collaboration you’ve been involved in? How did it come together?

KL: We are in the early stages of building out a food systems funder cohort involving 24 active investors across philanthropy, government, and the private sector. It’s cross class, cross race, cross culture. They’re coming forward to learn from each other about better ways to move money and solve for some of the market challenges we have in scaling healthy food systems.

When we brought participants in for the first in-person event, they thought they were coming to learn about impact investing, and there was this energy of uncertainty—“Why am I here?” But we started with a group visioning exercise that allowed people to get to know each other on a personal level. After we did that work, the energy rose, and you could tell folks were seeing “There’s something special going on here; this is different.” There was a sense of abundance and possibility rather than scarcity and skepticism.

I learned all that through JEI. I don’t think I would have been able to imagine this funder cohort had I not gone through the fellowship. I saw the power of the JEI approach and wanted to recreate that experience for my cohort. As we move into more difficult conversations and there is conflict, because we now have the foundation of a relationship and know why we’re together, we can pause those conversations and ask ourselves, “How can we have this conversation differently?” It opens up possibility.

Keoni Lee (top, left) with JEI Cohort 4 at Paicines Ranch. (Alicia Arcidiacono, Chasing Chickadees Photography)

HIR alum Kākoʻo ʻŌiwi is restoring agricultural and ecological productivity to 400+ within the wetlands of Heʻeia. (Hawai’i Investment Ready)

JEI: What does it take to effectively partner across differences?

KL: You have to understand that the system has programmed us all in particular ways, and we are all subject to the way the system is currently designed. Some obviously have it better than others, but we’re not going to fix the system just by being righteous, by saying “my community has been wronged” or “you gained this wealth through bad business practices and extraction,” or by taking on a hero or victim mentality. We don’t get anywhere by playing those roles; we get somewhere positive by saying “How can we be different?”

For those who have power, there is a trend toward acknowledging the need to cede power. The more important part is that hearts and minds are shifting. I think of Grace Lee Boggs, who said “movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.” We build these critical connections by first changing our internal conditions. Change at the individual level then transmutes into the collective level.

Whatever perspective we’re coming from, we are all going to have to change in this evolution of finance. Challenging the conditioning we’ve been subject to and trying to be different in a system that’s programmed us not to be is hard work. As we unwind the ways to think, act, and be, we have to approach the collaborative work ahead with the understanding that it is going to be messy and imperfect along the way. To be successful in achieving our shared, long-term goals we need to have aloha for each other on this journey and stay in grounded in relationship with each other — especially when things get hard.

As part of their work to re-establish community food systems, HIR Alum Hui Mālama i ke Ala ʻŪlili serves 85% of their community and 16 surrounding zip codes. Their team is joined at one of their ‘ulu agroforestry sites by Hawaiʻi Land Trust and students from Wai’anae High School’s Marine Science Learning Center to seed cover crops, feed communities, and hear stories of Koholālele. (huiMAU)

Keoni Lee is the Chief Executive Officer of Hawai’i Investment Ready, a 501(c)3 nonprofit impact investing intermediary working at the nexus of purpose, business, and culture to restore regenerative abundance to Hawai’i’s economy. HIR supports purpose-driven enterprises (for-profit and nonprofit) and funders in Hawai’i to strengthen and scale their impact through a variety of programs and services for capacity building and impact capital deployment. Before joining HIR in 2019, Keoni co-founded ʻŌiwi TV – Hawaiʻi’s first and only Native Hawaiian language and cultural television station and media production company – where he spent over a decade learning from and producing stories in and about native communities throughout Hawaiʻi and around the world. These stories and relationships grounded in indigenous knowledge and values have shaped his perspective and drive his work to shift contemporary structures of power.

Keoni is active in community work and initiatives around decolonizing education, food systems, and the economy, including the Omidyar Fellows program, the First Nations Futures Program, and the Just Economy Institute Fellowship. He is a member of Toniic, the global action community for impact investing, was awarded the 2021 Investor of the Year by the Hawaii Venture Capital Association and named to the 20 for the Next 20 class of 2022. He is a co-leader of the ‘Āina Aloha Economic Futures initiative – an indigenous-led mainstream movement calling out and addressing the inequities, injustices, and unsustainability of Hawai’i’s economy.

Beyond Financial Independence

July 19, 2023

By Donovan Ervin

Donovan Ervin at Paicines Ranch, October 2022 (Alicia Arcidiacono, Chasing Chickadees Photography)

I want financial independence – more precisely, I want to have enough wealth to live comfortably without the need to work or depend on anyone else. Much of this desire, I’m sure, stems from the financial vigilance I learned while growing up in a single-parent household. Although I never went without anything I needed, I internalized the story that money was scarce – a familiar story told in many Black households dealing with the cumulative historical impacts of wage theft, segregation, and exclusion. I’m therefore drawn to the security and stability that financial independence promises, and I urgently want to reach that point within the next 15 years.

Over the past few years of research, I’ve discovered that the most important factor in accomplishing my goal is having an aggressive savings rate (i.e., amount saved as a percentage of income). The more money saved, the better. In fact, thanks to compounding interest, saving more exponentially decreases the time to reach financial independence.

As a lifelong saver, I’ve always treated money with care. I used to regularly iron my cash (with starch!) before neatly stowing it in its special place under my mattress. I also recently found a will I wrote in my Tasmanian Devil journal when I was 8 or 9. It had clear instruction that in the event of my untimely death, all my $71.48 would go to mom. Naturally. As an adult, I still hold a similar respect for my money. My academic background has put me on a career trajectory where my salary far exceeds my day-to-day needs. Yet, I drive a 2006 Honda Accord with 250,000 miles and find it difficult to spend money on frivolous things. As a result, early financial independence is within reach for me.

For most people, however, financial independence is a fantasy. Six in 10 Americans don’t even have enough emergency savings to replace a month of income.^[1] These folks are concerned merely about financial survival. That’s in part because too few of us get meaningful training about how to manage finances. Our culture also tells us that happiness is on the other side of consumption. So, we buy things to fill a void, to the detriment of our pocketbooks (and the planet).

Our economic system and the rules that govern it – not individuals – are the biggest culprits. Despite greater productivity and output over the past few decades, average workers have seen their real wages stagnate, if not decline. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1% has grown exponentially.^[2] Individual and corporate greed has exacerbated inequality and put more people on the brink of financial collapse. I’ve seen it in my own family. And it’s evident when walking down the street in [insert major urban center]. The problem is even starker along lines of race, gender, immigrant status, and disability.

I’ve dedicated my career to improving outcomes within the system – as an educator, nonprofit professional, and now as an impact investor. Given that experience, I often ask myself how I could aspire to reach financial independence by actively participating in a system that extracts wealth and perpetuates suffering for many. Because I’m a descendent of enslaved people, that question rings more noisily.

The dissonance jars my mind and spirit, my identity, and sense of self.

Although I no longer regularly participate in organized religion, I’ve revisited the tenets of my Christian upbringing for some guidance on this existential quandary.

From an early age, I learned about the holy act of tithing. The Hebrew law requires that followers generously and joyfully give a tenth of their earnings back to God, who’s the source of all good things. Every week at church, there was a brass collection plate passed around for people to place their gifts before standing to sing and pray in thanksgiving. Admittedly, as I grew older, this ritual felt unsavory at times, particularly as I saw more than a few church leaders use guilt to squeeze more money from congregants while flaunting their wealth with luxury cars and big houses.

But the ritual itself goes beyond a single religion.

Reciprocal giving is a core tenet in many worldviews. In Islam, zakat is the compulsory yearly alms that must be given by all who meet specific financial criteria.^[3] The Yorùbá tradition of West Africa observes Ebó, which requires members to make offerings or sacrifices as a part of the natural order of “give and take.”^[4] In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer similarly speaks of the “Honorable Harvest,” a loose set of common principles that many Indigenous cultures follow to respect the forces that sustain our life and livelihood. One way to do that is to “give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.”^[5]

These practices, which have persisted across geography and time, represent some universal wisdom that I wanted to consider. So, I decided to try tithing. Since I’m not affiliated with a religious institution, I give ten percent of my salary to a mix of mission-aligned nonprofits, family and friends, and people in need.

I’ll be honest: it doesn’t always feel good, natural, or comfortable to give money away. Especially when I look at my monthly cashflows, I can’t help but think about how tithing is immediately shaving off ten percent from my savings rate, prolonging my journey toward financial independence by years.

However, I’ve come to see tithing as additive. I get to show up for loved ones and community members in material ways. I also am supporting organizations serving people who have been marginalized by our political, economic, and social systems.

I, too, have benefited greatly, as tithing has propelled me towards internal growth. Two reflections stand out:

I don’t own my money. When I reflect on my life, it’s clear that I’ve benefitted from immeasurable generosity. So many people and institutions have contributed to my life and my ability to earn an income: family, teachers, and mentors; public schools, financial aid benefactors, and yes, church programs. Not to mention the countless human and nonhuman beings who have literally sacrificed their bodies and energy, providing the building blocks for a healthy body and mind. Giving tithes is a reminder that independence – financial or otherwise – is not a thing. True wealth lies in honoring interdependence and re-membering community.

My money doesn’t own me. Decelerating my journey to financial independence encourages me to cultivate a healthier relationship with money and ambition. The logic of the American Dream says that I, a Black man who has climbed the class ladder, should keep climbing as high and fast as possible. That mindset, though, is unsustainable and has led us to social and ecological imbalance in the first place. Of course, I can have goals, but I don’t have to pursue them to the point of extractive or self-centered hoarding. Instead, I can choose generosity. As silver is for electricity, I can be a conduit for that mysterious current of blessings to keep flowing to others.

Returning to my existential quandary, if anything, my journey with tithing has unearthed more questions than answers. Should I be building wealth within an extractive economy at all? What if I gave more to political efforts that transform the rules, instead of only addressing symptoms? How can I expand my understanding of generosity? While I may not ever have satisfactory answers to these questions, tithing has shown me that the path to a more just economy is not solely professional or intellectual but is also spiritual and personal. Guided by ancient wisdom, I’m learning to subscribe to a new narrative of abundance that says that I have enough – that I am enough.

Donovan Ervin (back row, third from left) with Cohort 6 Fellows at Paicines Ranch, October 2022 (Alicia Arcidiacono, Chasing Chickadees Photography)

^[1] Consumer Financial Protection Bureau 2022

^[2] Economic Policy Institute 2018

^[3] Zakat Foundation of America

^[4] The Ifa Foundation

^[5] Braiding Sweetgrass, Page 183

Donovan Ervin (he/him) is Vice President in the Investment Group at Tiedemann Advisors. In this role, he is helping to direct capital toward a more inclusive, just, and regenerative economy. This work aligns closely with Donovan’s professional mission: developing and supporting new markets that shift patterns of production and consumption, distribute power and ownership more democratically, and expand the definition of wealth to include individual, community, and planetary health and well-being. Previously, Donovan has held positions at various organizations in the social sector, ranging from K-12 education to community development to environmental justice. Based in Dallas, Texas, Donovan is a graduate of Yale University (MBA and Master of Environmental Management) and Stanford University (BA in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity). He is also a proud advisory board member at the Yale Center for Business & Environment. Outside work, Donovan enjoys writing, exercising, and being with his people.