Current timeline: May 2020
“It’s time to step into the liminality of it all,” says Melinda Weekes Laidlow to the group gathered on Zoom.
Liminality seems to be the order of this pandemic moment — with the normal receding and the new still unclear. The focus of today’s roundtable is the future of investing. The group includes experts on many facets of how money flows: philanthropy, impact investing, wealth management, and more. Led by investor and future architect Sharon Chang, Yoxi has brought us all together to imagine how this moment of profound disjuncture might open up new possibilities for making our social and financial systems “more beautiful.”
The group opens up by sharing images that demonstrate what “value” means to them. Value is “what grounds us,” potentiality, freedom of thought. It ties us back to our ancestors — both free and enslaved — to our presently imperiled elders, and forward to a future rooted in justice. Value means walking through the freezing waterfall hand-in-hand, drawing strength from our connections when we’re out the other side. Sometimes value conjures magic that can’t be put into words, revealing that we are small parts of a much vaster whole.
Chang explains that Yoxi is her impact investment practice, and that it has undergone eight previous iterations since 2010. Based in a spirit of inquiry, Yoxi has a small but mighty portfolio, with a focus on the relationship between creativity,capital and impact. In particular, Chang is interested in interrogating the structures and assumptions around ownership, instead working towards models of stewardship and connectedness. What would it look like to treat philanthropy as an art form, to build a “Bell Labs” for investing? The pandemic “is an extraordinary opportunity to look at investments in a radically different way,” she says.
What would it look like to treat philanthropy as an art form, to build a “Bell Labs” for investing?
Now in its ninth incarnation, Yoxi has shifted to support the curation and cultivation of a community of practice focused on deploying capital through collective radical imagination. In collaboration with the Guild of Future Architects (GoFA), Yoxi is directing resources to further articulate a new structure for social innovation: the shared future.
Chang has developed the concept of “future architecture” to encompass a series of linked approaches for supporting these new entities, which focus on collaboration over ownership, and benefits for the commons over a more traditional return on investment. Just as a “startup” now reflects a certain set of legal, cultural, and financial assumptions, she envisions that a “shared future” could serve as a counterweight, allowing for hybrid business models that frame equity and justice as key outcomes. Rather than standard key performance indicators (KPIs), the success of shared futures might be judged by KXIs, where x is the variable most salient to the social issue being addressed.
Launched in the summer of 2019, GoFA now is a nonprofit membership organization led by Kamal Sinclair, which brings farsighted social innovators together to build and pursue shared futures. She speaks to the group about how members have been curated to work together on systemic interventions that “unlock human potential.”
Sinclair explains that a key GoFA program is the Futurist Writers’ Room — an experience that this group will now undertake together. The process involves taking an analysis of the current reality, and both relating it to an envisioned future state, and rethinking how the past might have changed to generate a better present. The goals are to understand the “why” of previous decisions, and to shed light on how our current actions might create ripple effects. Co-creating speculative futures and histories, says Sinclair, can help to democratize imagination and unlock unexpected epiphanies.
To feed the conversation, Hearken CEO Jennifer Brandel gives a rundown of current efforts to rethink philanthropic and investment structures. As the co-founder of Zebras Unite, a global network of entrepreneurs and investors building a “more ethical, inclusive, and collaborative ecosystem for mission-based startups,” Brandel has been in the trenches of reinventing capital structures.
Brandel notes that while investment in women and people of color was already miniscule — these founders receive less than 4% of venture capital combined — the pandemic has accelerated this gap. Those who have first-hand knowledge of key social problems are the ones most likely to have solutions, she says, but also are those locked out of capital markets. B Corps, co-ops, steward-ownership, and entrepreneurs setting their own terms with investors all represent efforts to fix broken systems. The status quo is not acceptable, she says. It’s “time to start building something in the midst of this collapse.”
Jump forward: Aspirational future #1, 2071
The group is transmitted into a dialogue set in November 2071 between philanthropist Ranier Tate of Helios Capital and OLA, an AAI (artificial ancestral intelligence) built to inform the decisions of TenGen, “a council of investors, grantees and fellows who collaborate to mitigate blind spots and incorporate deep knowledge in systems and people interconnected for regenerative Gross National Wellness.”
Ranier strives to make the case that Helios has invested ethically, and is seeking to invest further in TenGen’s projects. In response, OLA patiently explains the principles of TenGen: investing in ecosystems rather than single projects, calculating the “ancestral index” of investors to see if they are committed to regenerative practices for the long haul, and giving resources to those most vested in solving the problems under consideration.
OLA’s projections take into account how an investor’s money was earned, and how their actions will affect the mental, physical, and financial health of that person’s family moving forward — as well as the wellbeing of the world that future generations will inherit. “Economies aren’t just about deep learning and science,” OLA tells Tate. “They’re also about love, alchemy, the art of change. About being human.”
Back to current timeline: May 2020
After a brief somatic meditation designed to attune the group, Futurist Writers’ Room facilitator Madebo Fatunde explains the next steps: choosing an inflection point, identifying a more desirable present or future state, creating artifacts associated with the alternate history or aspirational future, and then writing characters set in those speculative environments. The group takes a quick walk through the Mural board — an online collaboration tool tweaked to support this collaborative time travel — and then splits into two.
Time travel: Alternate histories
For the alternate history, the group debates various inflection points that would allow for a better 2020 to unfurl — one with legally required regenerative systems for businesses, and an expanded sense of “investment” that includes valuing time, heart, and soul. How would businesses run if the x of their KXI was human potential?
They ask:
- What if the U.S. constitution had stayed true to the Iroquois Confederacy constitution that originally influenced the founders, enshrining the values of women’s participation and stewardship of nature?
- What if the Red Scare hadn’t tanked the rise of co-ops as a primary structure for businesses?
- What if freed slaves had actually received “40 acres and a mule,” thus countering the persistent racial wealth gap?
- What if Delaware had not adopted shareholder primacy, which requires directors to maximize the value of corporations for stockholders?
Jump sideways: An alternate 2020
Benjamina knows what it means to invest — and to be invested in. She feels a particular affinity for the land, since her name was passed down through her family, which received its first farm as part of General Sherman’s “40 acres and a mule” order. When she’s not working on her high school classes in regenerative agriculture and financial poetry, she uses her Magic 8 Ball to virtually travel to ancestral seed banks around the world. While she’s a global citizen, she’s also interested in the local — she creates T-shirts based on zip codes for neighborhoods that most people don’t visit, and is just about to start participating in the community budgeting process. She’s excited to have recently filed a creative commons patent, which she and her friends will continue to develop in their co-op R&D lab.
Time travel: Speculative futures
For the speculative future, the group dreams up a world where money is seen not as an asset, but a flow. Companies and investors are no longer able to dismiss negative externalities when calculating the outcomes of their ventures. Everyone has access to the resources they need, so there is time for creativity and inner work. Wealth is reconceptualized as wellbeing, and retirement is remixed so that elders are respected and valued. Our current pandemic was a key inflection point for reaching this future, especially driving a reconceptualization of time and whose labor is truly “essential” during a period now termed “the great alignment.” Space travel has become an everyday occurrence.
Jump forward: Aspirational future #2, 2070
Kadiatou is a citizen of the solar system, travelling with using a system of low-orbit space elevators. She’s on her way to Greenland on a Sankofa quest to learn more about her ancestors. “The past is never really dead,” she reflects. As a descendant of Jeff Bezos, she has an uneasy relationship with her family’s historic relationship with money — but now, since the passing of the Magna Natura, she has no more or less than others, since wealth is now measured in terms of closeness to nature and the depth of inner work. While there are still adherents to the Church of Money, she dismisses them as a lunatic fringe. At 15, she is trying to decide if she’ll move off-planet or continue to deepen her connection with the past and humanity’s home planet.
Back to current timeline: May 2020
In our current reality, the group reconvenes to share lessons learned and next steps. Lafayette Cruise, another member of the Futurist Writers’ Room, leads the reflection.
What design principles can be gleaned from the alternate history? A few: cultivate a spirit of equanimity and curiosity, use policymaking to encourage flourishing rather than control, encourage decision-making that’s not based on fear, and design systems around nature and for diversity.
What action steps might lead to this aspirational future? Taking this moment of pandemic and economic crisis to open up new conversations around value. Fostering mutual aid and radical experimentation with forms of investment that honor returns beyond money. Making “the small investible.” Employers creating compensation programs for inner work. Advocating for a universal declaration of human rights. Creating a reflection tool that allows us to think about who invested in us, and how that tracks back through history.
“We have been places together, friends,” concludes Melinda. The question is: Where will this group go together next?
NOTE: This piece was corrected on 6/24/20 to clarify the use of space elevators
