Day 4 ⏐ Session 2
When money meets meaning:
funding the path to a preferable future
Introducing our new paper “Pathways to a Preferable Future: Investing in System Innovation” with powerful cases shared by those directly mobilising investment to shift systems and create new ones. We dived right into practical and inspiring examples drawn from the pioneering edge of system investment with Jeff Cyr, Raven Indigenous Capital Partners (CA); Willemijn de Iongh, Commonland (NL) and Robin Hacke, the Centre for Community Investment (US)
“So what would it be like if you could transform the world from capital as ‘command and control’ to capital as ‘servant and partner’? What would that look like?”
Quotes from the session
“What if you… set the direction, determine the action and then pull in the investment? What if the investment was there to support and to generate the action in service of the direction. Rather than investment being dominant, it's really direction and community that's dominant.” (Charlie Leadbeater)
“We're interested in people, planet, communities, the driving factor for collective action before pulling the investment to it, or generate the investment from it, than starting with the requirements of capital.” (Charlie Leadbeater)
“The capitalist system is doing its thing and doing its thing means that mainstream investors are looking to maximise profits… and minimise effort. So transactions are meant to be scaled big, repeatable, easy and not give you too much of a headache.” (Robin Hacke)
“We came up with what we call the Capital Absorption Framework, which is designed to help us think about what it takes to build that system and to really start from community priorities” (Robin Hacke)
“What we learned when we tried to take that organised supply loaded with money bags onto an airplane and fly to Detroit, is that nobody had been thinking about organising the demand for the capital because capital was not coming. So why would you organise demand for it?” (Robin Hake)
“What we encourage the communities that were working with us to do, is to think in terms of pipelines of deals and not just one” (Robin Hacke)
“We asked people to think about the enabling environment which either accelerates or impedes the execution of those pipeline deals, and that includes the skills and capacities of the players who are in the local system. It includes the resource flows both actual and potential that could be feeding that pipeline and moving it. It includes also the platforms for collaboration where your circles can actually come together” (Robin Hacke)
“I love the idea of a deal as a system event, a sort of system shifting ripple. And I love the idea that you're sort of learning into change in a way that it's an iterative process that it's not sequential.” (Charlie Leadbeater)
“Raven is a response to the inadequacies of a modern economy to address indigenous people and their issues” (Jeff Cyr)
“What we really sought to do is to address what is a systemic lack of indigenous led, own control of patient flexible capital to address the stickiest problems facing our people” (Jeff Cyr)
“And so what we started to look at is outcomes financing methodology to really address sticky, complex multi lever problems. You can take social housing, but in our case, we took both indigenous energy sovereignty, climate change and health. With health we take a very indigenous approach about the holistic nature of how everything is interconnected.” (Jeff Cyr)
“One thing we are doing is building trust with the investor ecosystem. There are people who can work with capital, Indigenous people who can work with capital in a way that we understand it, but modify that to meet the needs of our communities and people on the ground. So that’s what we call decolonizing the investing process. We act as an intermediary to take away that taint of the global financial system” (Jeff Cyr)
“What we did is we centred the community in that process and we didn't invite capital in until after we'd determined what the priorities were, what the outcomes that we saw, all the delivery mechanisms and how we're going to do it.” (Jeff Cyr)
“You need to build support and wrap yourselves with trusted intermediaries who hold relationships on the ground” (Jeff Cyr)
“We talk about four losses; the loss of hope and inspiration, the loss of connection to the land, the loss of social capital, social fabrics, decomposing networks, becoming less strong communities, disintegrating people moving out of the area, rural, rural areas and we have a loss of natural capital that speaks for itself. So that's loss of biodiversity, soil, health, etc. and then lastly, there's a loss of financial capital.” (Willemijn de longh)
“So what if we turn those four losses around? What if we create a sense of hope and inspiration and connection to place and each other? What if we could could increase this social fabric of life and social capital and create stronger networks and communities? What if we could work with Mother Nature and help her thrive again? What if we could create regenerative businesses that do not exploit the soil but actually regenerate soil?” (Willemijn de longh)
“...most important I think is the long term approach. You need a large skill in order for ecosystems to work for you, but you also need a long term approach. Otherwise you're going to be stuck in a project to project way of working. The 20 years timeframe is a minimum. So you need at least one generation to restore an ecosystem.” (Willemijn de longh)
“...to be able to connect the dots in the landscape, to be this sort of cement in between the stones. You need a dedicated group of people that live and work in the area to continuously mobilise people in the area, connect dots between investors, business entrepreneurs, local farmers, community members, so you need this base level of process funding to get the landscape restoration movement off the ground” (Willemijn de longh)
“We're talking about a sustainable economy which is working on a flow of continuous resources of different planets not requiring grant money and so you would want to be sort of a self propelling local economy at some point.” (Charlie Leadbeater)
“The landscape is both a sort of economic unit, and an environmental geographic unit, but also a place of meaning and belonging. So it's about organising the economy around a sense of meaning and belonging” (Clarlie Leadbeater)
“One of the things that we found really helpful in breaking through that limitation on what investors are willing to finance is the use of philanthropic guarantees… If we can get a foundation to wrap that investment in some way that makes people feel safer, that does unlock the capital stack” (Robin Hacke)
“We try to understand from the point of view of the investors what's really going on, because very often what we find is that people have underwriting systems or processes that become unthinking.” (Robin Hacke)
“I think the real thing that we're trying to do though, is treat the investors as humans, strange that may be, and invite them into relationship with a whole bunch of indigenous CEOs… people want that connective tissue as it turns out, even bankers, even investors” (Jeff Cyr)
“We tend to treat money as medicine, not as extraction” (Jeff Cyr)
“...we want to build human relationships and help people say, hey, I want to work with that community.” (Jeff Cyr)
“Resources follow coherence” (Robin Hacke)