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.
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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 :)
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/597319/,
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-unprecedented-report/
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/