Collaboration Stories

This is the fourth in a series of collaboration stories featuring JEI community members who have worked together to shift the flow of capital and power. This post features JEI alumni and facilitator Keoni Lee and JEI faculty member Esther Park. Keoni Lee is the CEO of Hawai‘i Investment Ready, a 501(c)(3) supporting the people and organizations addressing Hawaiʻi’s social and environmental opportunities by accelerating social enterprise impact and access to investment. Esther Park is the CEO of Cienega Capital, a family office investing to improve local agriculture and food systems, and a member of the #NoRegrets Initiative, a relationship-centered approach to land and asset management that deploys human, ecological and financial capital toward soil health and its effect on climate change.

Relationships. While an underappreciated part of the conventional finance system, they’re foundational to the work of building a just economy. 

And for Keoni Lee and Esther Park, they’re indispensable. 

Keoni is a Just Economy Institute Fellow (2020 – 2021 cohort) and has recently joined the core team as a facilitator, in addition to being CEO of Hawai‘i Investment Ready (HIR). Esther is a longtime JEI facilitator and faculty member, and CEO of Cienega Capital, a member of the #NoRegrets Initiative. Together, they’re collaborating to put relationships — among entrepreneurs and funders, and within regional economies — at the center of activity for building a just economy. 

 “[Our collaboration started] when I applied to the #NoRegrets Initiative for funding,” Keoni shared in a recent conversation. “And while money is great, what I really wanted was some of Esther’s time.” 

“At Hawai‘i Investment Ready, we reimagine how to move money differently in service of our collective goals for a more resilient, regenerative, equitable, and just economy for Hawai‘i.” Integral to this work is a business accelerator program that supports entrepreneurs with training, access to resources and capital, and opportunities to scale social enterprises. 

Keoni was frustrated. He saw firsthand the challenge of entrepreneurs making themselves fit with what funders wanted, even if it was out of step with their goals. He found a willing co-conspirator in Esther, herself seeking better ways to leverage her relationships with funders in service of deeper alignment of capital with social enterprise. 

“Usually you have entrepreneurs who say, here’s what we need,” says Esther. “And you have funders who say, here’s what we provide. There’s no meeting in the middle. Why can’t the funders revise their approach, so they can actually meet the needs that the entrepreneurs have on the ground?”

“Esther and I are aligned in how we see the problems and also the opportunities of moving money differently,” said Keoni. “And she’s been involved with various projects and initiatives on the funder side and getting them to shift. I needed that expertise.”

Keoni and Esther began an informal partnership to discuss how to shift funders to be more responsive to the needs of entrepreneurs. Esther encouraged Keoni to become a JEI Fellow. And Keoni made an important leap on behalf of the entrepreneurs in his program by beginning to organize the funder community to help them get into right relationship with entrepreneurs.

He was eager to engage with others seeking new pathways and to reduce the isolation he felt being on an island far removed from other bioregional efforts. Hawai‘i faces unique challenges in building a just economy, and also unique opportunities. “We’re so far away from the continent. And we’re also still in the United States. We’re governed with the same principles and economics, but we’re also our own little sandbox. And so we think and do things a little bit differently and that can provide learnings and insights because we’re forced to experiment within the sandbox. The pressure for us to make real change happen is like a pressure cooker in Hawai‘i. We feel the pressure more acutely because we have nowhere else to go.” 

Indeed, Hawai‘i has the highest cost of living in the U.S., one of the highest homelessness rates, and growing disparities for elderly and native populations. For the past three years, and for the first time ever, the state had more out-migration than in-migration because the cost of living is so high. Hawai‘i’s economy is driven by three extractive industries: tourism, real estate development, and the military. The stakes for building a just economy are high. 

“If you want to have a resilient economy in Hawai‘i, we have to be able to feed ourselves, we have to be able to house ourselves,” says Keoni. “And the market dynamics that have been created by the extractive economy are clearly working against that, the status quo has an unrelenting momentum. And if we want to change the status quo, we need to have an equally powerful opposing force.”

The force that Keoni is harnessing? Relationships. “We’re taking a culture-based, relationship-based approach as a strategy to build momentum and to push back.”

Keoni and Esther’s collaboration has worked in part because Esther could speak to funders as a Fellow investor, as well as inspire and motivate the entrepreneurs in HIR’s accelerator cohort.  

“Esther was able to enlighten them that there are funders out there who are trying to be different and there’s a movement outside of Hawai‘i working for a just economy and moving capital differently. There’s a wider set of possibilities than they knew before Esther talked to them.” 

Esther admires Keoni’s boldness. “When we first met, he had this accelerator program, and now he’s made this leap into organizing the funder community. It’s super exciting.” 

Keoni credits Esther and the JEI fellowship with giving him the support he needed. “When you’re out on the edge, there’s not a lot to stand on, we’re in uncharted territory,” he said. “To have allies and partners and collaborators to lean on is really important, or you feel alone. Had I not gone through the fellowship, I don’t think I would’ve had the confidence or even the idea to really push on some of these funder strategies. But I had the support through my relationship with Esther.”

This is the third 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 JEI alumni Kim Hardy and Carolynn Beaty and community organizer Jess H̓áust̓i of the Right Relations Collaborative–a shared space for Indigenous leaders and funder partners who recognize the inequities, harms, and volatile future that is manifesting from our current disconnected and extractive financial system.

One of the many connective threads that unites the Just Economy Institute community is the desire to untangle and reweave the power dynamics at the heart of so many relationships between funders and communities. Traditional philanthropy requires organizations to force complex work into prescriptive funder strategies, rather than working in deeper partnership to ensure that resources are invested directly in what a community most needs. JEI Fellows are committed to developing models that build trust and support reciprocity, and the Right Relations Collaborative offers a powerful, promising framework.

“In the past I had tried to invite Indigenous community partners to be the advisors on funds, and it was always met with hesitation — asking indigenous leaders to hold that labor wasn’t right, we needed to flip the power dynamic and invite reciprocity, responsibility, and relationship from funder partners” shared JEI Fellow and Right Relations Collaborative (RRC) co-lead, Kim Hardy. RRC funder Carolynn Beaty, executive director of the Sitka Foundation, participated in the JEI fellowship alongside Hardy. They were both eager to build on some of the positive learnings that emerged from emergency response funding during the pandemic and integrate an indigenous-led governance structure. Hardy went on, “Being part of the Just Economy Institute, and coming out of the early days of COVID — where funding began to flow more quickly, through trusted relationships and with more community control — was a potent combination. I was able to build on what I had learned in spaces for money holders who wanted to make sure their wealth wasn’t doing harm, while doing the deeper work of uncovering where the money came from, in order to repair the harm caused along the way.” 

The Collaborative is governed by a Council of Indigenous Aunties — including Hardy’s RRC co-lead, Jess H̓áust̓i and three other Indigenous women — and serves communities whose homelands are now colonially known as British Columbia. The Aunties not only determine where dollars flow, they invite funders to apply to be considered as contributors to the fund. During this application process, funders are required to share their money story (how they earned their wealth), name the harms that were created through the amassing of their wealth, and how they’re addressing those harms.

“During the JEI fellowship, Kim and I were able to build a relationship,” Beaty shared. “We were able to ask hard questions and analyze some of the sticky elements of philanthropy.” Thanks to H̓áust̓i’s co-leadership and the governing Council of Aunties, they had access to the wisdom and vision required to answer those sticky questions. 

H̓áust̓i experienced some trepidation when Hardy approached her about co-creating the design of the Collaborative. “I had some fear that funders wouldn’t want to engage with the hard work that we were asking them to do. Funders ostensibly benefit from being in the position of power; why would they want to challenge that or cede power? I worried that people weren’t going to embrace the opportunity to do things differently. And it has been beautiful to see the whole hearts that our funders show up with, both when they’re filling out the engagement frameworks, and also on an ongoing basis with the Aunties Council and with the Collaborative.” 

The kind of introspection and evolution required for funders to participate in right relationship is challenging and critical to the future of community-centered, trust-based philanthropy. “It is an honor to have been invited to fund the RRC,” Beaty shared. “I have no doubt that I’ve made mistakes and caused harm with how I show up as a funder in other spaces, and I am continuously learning.”

After years of fundraising in the conventional philanthropic system of scarcity and competition, it can be challenging for community leaders to adopt a perspective of abundance. “It was hard for me to realize how deeply embedded a scarcity mentality had become in my brain,” shared H̓áust̓i. “I spent 20 years raising money for community programs, and it is so ingrained in me that I am in competition with my relatives from other communities for limited funds to offer basic services that my community desperately needs. At the RRC, we are really intentional about embracing an abundance mentality, and I still find it really hard to undo that sense of scarcity that has driven so much of the work that we do.”  

The RRC released its first Reciprocity Report in 2023, sharing details about its unique approach to philanthropy that features indigenous leaders and funders in right relationship to one another, and the resources they seek to flow into communities. The fund grew quickly to $1.2 million CAD in unrestricted grants and continues to consider new funders to support its growth.

Hardy shared, “Because we’ve decolonized the way the funding arrives in communities, the work itself is decolonized. When you change how funding arrives, it frees up the work. We hear from our funder partners the relief that they feel in our approach. Many of our funder partners don’t otherwise have a space to grapple with important questions. That alone has created shifts in institutions; we’ve seen funders actually use the practice of the money story in their own presentations and reporting, sharing more openly about the way their resources came to be, and how they are addressing harm in their work.”

Hardy and H̓áust̓i had been focused on bringing a more balanced and thoughtful approach to philanthropy for decades; the fellowship helped to bring together different threads and intentions into this powerful new model for decolonized, trust-based funding. 

“When I reflect on what JEI has done for me, and what I’ve seen it provide for others — the word that comes to mind is magic,” Hardy said. “They somehow take this otherwise terrifying and often boring subject of financial service systems and bring magic to it, so that we can see our responsibility and role in the system and support each other through the transition towards a just economy.” 

Beaty shared, “At my family’s foundation, my work is to identify where power is concentrated and redistribute it accordingly. I also think my job is to listen and reflect–as simple as those words may sound, they’re hard to do. JEI helped me listen, reflect, and act more generatively and effectively.” 

“We still feel like an integral part of this beloved community — such a unique, powerful thing.”

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.”

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.” 

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.

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.”

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.”

“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.” 

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.”

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.”