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Two years after participating in the second cohort of the Just Economy Institute (JEI), I’ve settled into a role that I had never imagined for myself. Since September 2019, I have been the Co-CEO of a family office in Toronto, Dragonfly Ventures, dedicated to a vision of humanity living synergistically with each other, the earth, her creatures, and spirit. We use a range of financial tools including grants and investments, together with relationship-based activities, like gatherings, to achieve this vision.  

For the first time, I am deeply embedded in the inner workings of the investment sector, a place that I didn’t believe I belonged in until my JEI experience. I’ve found myself quickly learning about its inner workings while at the same time deliberately trying to work outside of the conventions that were designed to make me and so many others feel uninvited.  

One of the ways that Dragonfly is trying to break free of this mold is by cultivating feminine approaches to our work, which are often absent in the world of finance. I use the word “feminine” rather than “female” intentionally: feminine qualities aren’t always associated with gender. As a cisgender straight woman, I have often led with masculine qualities including prioritizing logic and independence. I’m now in a company where our founder, my fellow Co-CEO, celebrates and encourages leading with feminine qualities. This gift has contributed to a journey of rediscovering attributes I realized I had disassociated from, perhaps to prioritize and emphasize masculine qualities I viewed as being more valued.  

What does this feminine approach look like in practice?  

One of Dragonfly’s core values is intuition, which we define as the recognition that we can go beyond conscious, evidence-based reasoning to access and be guided by the skills and experiences within us. We’re fortunate that our founder has strong and honed intuition skills, which she shares through monthly team workshops, that help us to develop our own practice. This allows our team to value and make space for intuition within our operations and encourage the same in the organizations and companies we work with. We called upon our intuition to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to maintaining our support to existing grantees, we quickly decided to do an additional $1 million in philanthropic funding in both 2020 and 2021 to provide core operating support to organizations serving communities made especially vulnerable during the pandemic.  

Another way we center feminine values is by making space to nurture. We created our own asset classes to intentionally consider how closely each of our investments, including grants, contribute to achieving our mission. The investments that most closely align with our mission are called “nurture.” These contributions, first and foremost, prioritize mission and the care of people and the planet rather than the preservation of capital and/or a financial return.  

Another feminine quality we cultivate is collaboration. At Dragonfly we have a Co-CEO model that shares leadership between myself and our founder. This is a direct recognition of our different and complementary skill sets and of knowing the limits of our capacities. That awareness extends to our organization and the communities we serve, which is why we prioritize collaboration and shared learning. An example of that is our dedicated stream of funding to support collaborations amongst charities and funders to tackle long-term ambitious goals including the Coalition for Action on Toxics, Farmers for Climate Solutions, and Our Living Waters. 

The quality that I believe is most often associated with the feminine is emotion. I’ve seen emotion used as an excuse for why women shouldn’t be in leadership roles or make financial decisions. At Dragonfly Ventures, showing emotion and centring emotion is a strength. We recognize that emotions are an integral part of who we are and how we interact with the world; that if we internalize them, we continue to disconnect not only from ourselves and each other but also the earth; and this is in direct contrast to our mission and vision. This valuing our emotions informed our decision to offer all grantees the option of requesting a top-up grant to support the emotional health and well-being of their employees and volunteers. It is also reflected in the structure of our meetings. At the start of each meeting, we prioritize space to personally check in with one other so we can understand and attend to each of our emotional climates, knowing that directly informs how we show up in our work. 

The incorporation of these “feminine” values is not meant to replace or diminish “masculine” values; balance is essential. However, from our vantage point at Dragonfly Ventures, to reach our vision of humanity living synergistically with each other, the earth, her creatures, and spirit, we are long overdue in rebalancing the investment and philanthropic space. It’s time to lead with and celebrate feminine qualities. 

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Wendy Cooper serves as Co-CEO of Dragonfly Ventures working in partnership with the founder and the rest of the team to advance solutions for a clean, healthy planet and equitable society by creatively using a suite of financial tools grounded in relationship. Prior to joining Dragonfly Ventures, Wendy worked in the charitable and philanthropic sector for nearly two decades at a community, regional, and national level supporting a range of areas including land conservation, Indigenous youth leadership, freshwater health, and toxic elimination.

If you take some time to reflect, you realize that some of our most trusted relationships are economic. That is not to say you can’t get burned by a bad purchase or a bad investment, but the exchange of goods and services is fundamentally an exercise in trust.  

Historically, this makes sense. In early human history, the core of nearly all communities was (and for many, still are) our family of origin. The secondary community we engaged with was typically a group of friends and other members of our clan or tribe. This was followed by those with whom we exchanged goods and services. If we grew corn and folks near us made fishhooks, we could trade in a mutually beneficial way: a reliable supply of good corn + reliable supply of good fishhooks = trust.  

However, as the mechanisms and processes of these exchanges have become further removed from actual human entanglements, the more our social bonds have eroded. As our mechanisms of exchange (not to mention personal relationships) have become more physically remote, we have also become less connected to, and less trusting of, one another. Online shopping, online relationships, and the virtual world are not as durable, connected, or transparent as real-life experiences. Perhaps that is the question of our time: how do we build and maintain essential trust in an increasingly virtual world?  

Collectively, we have watched (and participated in) the ongoing aggregation and concentration of wealth. This process has occurred over many generations, and the resounding inequity it has wrought continues to breed deep distrust of the system and of each other. To counter this, some might suggest we need to build a competing monolith to combat the strength and power of the incumbent system, while others believe we should just blow it all up and start over. I believe that both scenarios would be seriously harmful in the near term, and what we really need is to shift our focus to building a system that is just at its core.  

By pursuing a distributed approach to opportunity, ownership, and power we can ultimately harness the inherent creative energy in each of us, which can leverage a virtually unlimited source of inspiration and abundance for our collective good. While many of the resources that we depend upon are not limitless, our creative capacity knows no bounds.  

Similarly, when human creativity is combined with meaningful, purposeful relationships, there are no limits to what we can accomplish. We are constantly learning about new discoveries and applications of knowledge that can help us navigate challenges, and new businesses are being formed to address gaps in our lives every day.  

This highlights the importance of the relationship as the centerpiece of an enduring economic future that is generative rather than extractive. In an extractive model, everything, including human capital, serves as a means to an end. In a generative, relationship-based model, the ends are the means – resilient, thriving communities reflect the healthy relationships among people and the resources they depend upon. If the human species is to endure, we must concentrate our efforts on building lasting relationships with one another, as well as with the community assets – land, air, water – that we all share.  

If the human species is to endure, we must concentrate our efforts on building lasting relationships with one another, as well as with the community assets-land, air, water-that we all share.

It is from this perspective that I consider some of the partnerships formed both within and beyond our Just Economy Institute cohort. Not only did my experience as a Fellow help me to refine my own assumptions about the relationship between people and capital, but it also helped affirm that our fellow humans are truly the heart of any worthwhile endeavor.  

Among several deep connections I made, one has resulted in some of the most impactful, thoughtful work in which I have had the honor to participate. When I met Nina Robinson in the JEI Fellowship, she was transitioning her approach to integrated capital, and is now Director of RUNWAY, an organization that envisions a world where Black entrepreneurs thrive in a reimagined economy rooted in equity and justice. And I was diving deeper into our efforts at HomeStake Venture Partners to figure out how best to structure capital to further our commitment to distributed opportunity, ownership, and power while promoting the idea of self-determination both from the community perspective (defined geographically and/or thematically) as well as from the founder/entrepreneur perspective.   

Nina had been working with Chef GW Chew, who had recently won the Bay Area’s Food Funded competition, and whose line of plant-based proteins at Something Better Foods was gaining the attention of significant retailers and investors. She was concerned that some of this interest in Chef Chew’s company and its products might not be aligned with his personal and business goals, and subsequent conversations proved she was right.  

We encouraged and supported Chef Chew to take time to think about how he might be better positioned to accomplish his goals of retaining control of his company while meeting the needs of his community to access reasonably priced, healthy food alternatives. Together, as entrepreneurs, resource providers, and investors, we developed a plan that helped Chef Chew take a more intentional approach to growing and financing his business. We believe that the positive outcome of this important process is directly attributed to the time we took to build a lasting, equitable relationship amongst all stakeholders.  

Today, Something Better Foods continues to thrive and attract customers and investment capital AND is aligned with its founder’s vision and values. Nina and I continue to engage in energizing and creative conversations about how we can work together to help drive the creation and embrace of an economic system that puts human connection and generative capital at the center.  

Bill Stoddart is a financial activist who connects people and ideas to create opportunities for transforming the capital markets. Through his independent advisory and consulting firms, 45North Partners and NorthFork Financial, and as a co-founder of HomeStake Venture Partners, an innovative platform to help mid-market businesses access growth capital from locally minded investors, he is deeply committed to distributing opportunity, ownership, and power. Bill was part of the first cohort of the Just Economy Institute. 

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Nwamaka Agbo, CEO of the Kataly Foundation and Managing Director of the Restorative Economies Fund, and Chris Olin, board member of the Kataly Foundation, participated in the Just Economy Institute in 2017-18 and 2019-20, respectively. Below, the two share their reflections on what brought them to the program, the collaborations it led to, and how the program surprised them. 

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What drew you to the Just Economy Institute (JEI)?

Nwamaka Agbo: When I came to JEI (formerly known as the Integrated Capital Institute), I had an understanding of how racism is baked into our financial system, but I wanted to see what was behind the curtain. In the systems of finance and investment, the decisions people make often seem arbitrary from the outside looking in. JEI was an opportunity to understand who was making those choices and why. 

When it comes to building community wealth and doing systems change work, we have to activate capital beyond grants. Through the institute, I learned about investment strategies and really considered what it would require for us to do things fundamentally differently. 

Chris Olin: I applied to the program after a sabbatical from my work in the family business, where I had been accumulating wealth for the benefit of the family. What appealed to me was a space where there would be a discussion about the activation of capital in a service modality rather than a wealth accumulation modality. 

As I was applying, we were beginning the formation of what would become the Kataly Foundation. I wanted to learn with other people investigating the same questions around alignment of capital that benefits communities, the environment, and economic activity—but in a non-extractive way.

How did you feel supported by others in the program? What collaborations came from your participation?

Nwamaka: The relationships were the key thing that came out of participating in the program. Many people I work with now through the Restorative Economies Fund (REF) were people I met through JEI. For example, Lynne Hoey, who is the incoming Chief Investment Officer at the Kataly Foundation, and Jessica Norwood, founder of Runway and a grantee of REF, were both in my cohort. 

At our closing session, I shared that I needed to go on a writing retreat to explore my body of work more fully. Dawn McGee, an advisor with JEI, supported me to do that. I continued with a prompt that began at the program—if we could have access to 100 million dollars, what would we do and design? The audacity to dream so big actually felt really painful at first, given my class and race background and experience, but I wanted to follow through on it. It was at the writing retreat that I envisioned what is now the Restorative Economies Fund. Shortly after I returned I met with Chris and Regan and we established the fund, which was capitalized at $300 million. It was incredible to have the spaciousness to be with people, dream big, and put that idea into the universe. 

What surprised you about JEI?

Chris: There was a focus on presence, groundedness, and the emotional side of finance and investment, which was totally unexpected and brilliantly facilitated by the leaders. There was a powerful exercise where everyone shared their money stories in small groups. I remember thinking, how does this fit into the technical curriculum of integrated capital? But now I’m grateful for being exposed to that side of the story because capital and investment create a tremendous emotional burden for people working in financial industries.

Working in the capitalist mode was a lot easier. My goal was to lose as little money as possible, with the least risk. Now it is a multidimensional equation: who has the power to make decisions with respect to money? 

While it has been tremendously rewarding for me to empower other folks to make decisions related to money through philanthropic projects, it also has an emotional cost for folks who participate in that work that I would never have anticipated. 

Nwamaka: Typically, the ways we think about wealth and finance have been private. JEI invites us to be really honest and clear about the power and privilege that we hold or may not have access to. What does it look like to own that and make decisions from an informed place? That is important if we are to fully repair, transform our economy, and shift our relationship to capital.