Hey team,
Thank you all for showing up with such enthusiasm, curiosity, and
thoughtfulness last week! And a big thank you to Stacey for hosting and
convening us all.
In follow-up to our conversation, I wanted to share a few resources. First,
the Grassroots Giving Guide we referenced
<https://www.blueheartaction.org/giving-guide-2019> (2019 edition!), which
is a starting point for finding grassroots, movement-building organizations
advancing the kinds of ambitious visions we so desperately need. Also check
out Blue Heart’s manifesto
<https://medium.com/blue-heart/blue-heart-manifesto-682640a5baef> for the
‘why’ behind these kinds of groups and solutions, and this is a great piece
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/opinion/philanthropy-black-women.html>
in the NYtimes last week about social justice giving.
If you are interested in becoming a member of Blue Heart to support
grassroots social justice nonprofits monthly, and receive political
education and opportunities to engage further, check it out here
<https://www.blueheartaction.org/>. Part of your monthly recurring donation
supports the Creator’s Fund <https://www.blueheartaction.org/creators-fund>,
providing small grants to organizations to create art to support their
work. We would love to have you join our growing community!
Social impact investing came up at the end of our discussion. I’m copy
pasting a blurb about this to a community some of us share below. Please
reach out if you want to talk more about any of this! It’s one of my
favorite things :)
Finally, I recommend Movement Voter Project <https://movement.vote/> as a
way to direct your electoral giving. One-off campaign donations are similar
to giving to large, top-down nonprofits – they are doing good, and are
often not creating structural change. Grassroots political power-building
in 2020 is critical for 1) winning and 2) ensuring we are channeling
resources into long-term systemic change from the bottom-up. Sounds like
this could be the topic of a future dinner discussion given the energy
around it! :)
Thanks again for such a rockin’ night. I’m grateful for y’all.
--
Lindley Mease
206-482-6104
she/her
Walls turned sideways are bridges.
- Angela Davis
We live in a society where our economies are extractive. Our economies are
extractive of the Earth (water, air, soil, etc. I think you all are
probably pretty aware of this) and of people (the majority of profit goes
towards very few individuals, and the working class barely makes enough to
survive, let alone thrive). As I understand it, racial monopoly capitalism*
has extracted a lot of the profit it can by devastating worker rights,
externalizing costs to the environment, etc., so it has turned to
extracting profit through investment (aka making money off of money, which
again, has consequences for the Earth and people).
When we talk about 'social impact investing' it's important to note that
most of the time this means *negative screens *on your investments. In
other words, 'social impact' might mean corporations that do *not*
manufacture guns, fossil fuels, etc. However, most of the time these
investment screens are not very rigorous. E.g., they don't screen out
prisons or even a lot of oil & gas (because some of them have 'good' labor
practices). Some firms use positive screens, but these are very rarely
grounded in the materially and culturally necessary investments we so
desperately need. For example, I was an a social impact investing conference
last year where the 'gender justice' screen for a firm meant including
companies that had at least one woman on the board of the corporation. This
is not gender justice; that is, a lot of the time, pretty horrific gender
discrimination. My experience in this world has led me to believe that
social impact investing is the next phase of capitalism reproducing itself,
and this time its cunningly allowing liberals/progressives to continue
throwing down for our extractive economy, and feel good about themselves in
the process.
Let me be clear: it's not that doing slightly less harm (impact investing)
is bad, it just becomes dangerous if we are socialized to mistake it as
actually doing good. And the degree to which it distracts us from putting
energy into economic/financial reforms that we need to actually build the
world we want.
Okay, so what to do?!
1. There are some negative investment screens that are better than others.
If you are set on making money in our economies (alternative: save money in
your local credit union), I'd recommend checking out places like Rise
<https://robasciotti.com/social-justice-investing/the-rise-social-screen/>.
They are based in SF, are experimenting with more participatory/democratic
processes for investors, and have a great intersectional feminist lens,
specifically regarding measuring systemic racism. I'm currently
collaborating with them to create a screen for industrial ag**. Also, if
you want to look beyond RISE, I'd recommend these folks
<https://www.chordatacapital.com/> who have really great theory and
practice around re-orienting investment for repair & redistribution.
2. Invest in *what is creating a world that is non-extractive, based in
cooperative & collective prosperity*. I'm talking about cooperatives that
are democratizing capital, food systems that can feed people while
regenerating our soil, and energy grids that are community owned and
affordable. Check out the Southern Reparations Loan Fund
<https://southernreparations.org/> as an example. If you've got bigger
bucks, we've started the Buen Vivir Fund
<https://thousandcurrents.org/buen-vivir-fund/> at my work, which has been
co-created with grassroots groups in the Global South so that risk is moved
to the investor and terms are controlled by those actually doing the work
to create liveable economies that are just for all.
3. Okay, I gotta mention giving money away, because..ya know..it's an email
from me 😬 But seriously, with the Amazon burning
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/follow-money-amazon/59731…>,
the youth leaving schools to sit on the street until we do something, and
pretty much every report sharing dire news
<https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unpre…>
about
the planet, *what are we saving our money for?* of course we should have
safety and security, and every bit we throw down now is taking an action to
make your future more liveable. I give to grassroots movements because
those are the only spaces where I see consistent & real demands for
policies and solutions that will get us towards a 1.5 degree future (aka
habitable Earth for most of humanity).
*Whoa! Super wonky word! If you want to unpack this, I'd love to talk about
how we've defined it at LeftRoots <http://www.leftroots.net/>
Hey all!
As I mentioned last night, the Battery has a community giving program
called Battery Powered that is interesting. BP is not flawless — there are
critiques to be made, and I've heard many of them over the course of my
residency at the Battery :) but, at heart, BP is a serious attempt to bring
new people into the world of philanthropy. In a way, it's a larger-scale
collective giving circle similar to what Stacey has begun here.
BP looks at three issues per year, and for each theme, they give away a
bunch of pooled money from their members. With each theme, they start by
hosting "expert nights" that offer Battery members & guests the chance to
learn about the theme.
The next theme is Mental Health, and their Expert Night is on January
22nd. I can guest in +3 people (besides myself), so if you want to come,
let me know!
I'll save one spot for Stacey in case she can make it (let me know
Stacey!), but aside from that, anyone is welcome to join :)
Event details:
*Mental Health Expert Night for Battery Powered*
*@ The Battery, 717 Battery St*
*Wednesday January 22nd*
*6:30pm to 8pm*
Experts:
• Thomas Insel, Special Advisor to Governor Newsom on Mental Health &
Former Director of NIMH
• Keris Myrick, Chief of Peer Services for the LA County Department of
Mental Health, Peer Advocate
• Alex Briscoe, Principal at California Children's Trust
• "Additional speakers to be announced soon."
More info about the Mental Health theme:
https://www.thebatterysf.com/batterypowered/future-theme
<3 Lydia
--
Lydia Laurenson
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Currently working on a brand-new publication:
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<https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lydialaurenson/the-new-modality/>! *