Masawa Minute 39
Masawa Minute 39 | Own part of the Masawa Platform! | Can better relationships fix the climate crisis? | + More!
This is the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets from what we’ve read the last two weeks + where you can get active.
In this week’s newsletter, we take a look into the future — ideas and opportunities that can lead us to a more sustainable, equitable world, starting with the Masawa Platform. We hope you enjoy it and take something away from it!
Masawa Opportunity
The Masawa Platform! You can be part of something bigger.
After struggling with mental ill-health for years, I founded Masawa with two core convictions: people will continue to suffer as long as mental health remains undiscussed and underserved, and we will fail to create the kind of society that meets people’s fundamental psychological needs and elevates their full potential without substantial holistic investment.
From day one, I’ve been determined to nurture the capital we invest into founders catalyzing mental wellness. Masawa’s investment thesis has always been that by focusing on maximizing social impact, founder wellbeing, and organizational health, we will enable a higher combined financial and social return.
By not focusing on founder and organizational health, investors ignore the hugely consequential human capital risk that too often leads to startup failures. I looked back at my experience as both an entrepreneur and a funder while managing a sizable social investment portfolio for the US and Swedish governments: I never once considered or worked to improve my mental wellness, nor that of the individuals in the organizations I funded.
During the lockdown, we all experienced first-hand the mental pressures the crisis has and continues to put on us. (Self-)Care and compassion have once again been brought into the foreground. It is now all the more important that these and other holistic values are also integrated into how capital is used to enable positive change, a powerful nod to our Nurture Capital approach.
We’re now also joined by a clinical psychologist, an integral coach + super-connector, and a former philanthropy and CSR executive + are collaborating with many others on delivering the most impactful Nurture Capital approach possible.
As such, we’re bringing the companies that manage the eventual impact funds and provide nurture capital services to us and other portfolio managers under a new holding company called the Masawa Platform.
We’re offering equity in the Masawa Platform to closely aligned investors who want to pioneer an evolving and holistic approach to financing and innovating mental wellness. Masawa has 20% committed of the €330K equity raise and is in discussions for another 45%. Investors will own a portion of all companies on the Masawa Platform, including the impact investment management, nurture capital, and impact advisory companies + also receive 5% of the General Partner carried interest (fund performance fee) from all Masawa impact investment funds.
If you are interested in the shift in how capital is allocated and nurtured to increase mental wellness along many dimensions, reach out! 🥑
Get Active!
🎧 Listen
The Journey of Realizing Empathy
Masawa’s Founder & Managing Partner Joshua Haynes sat down with the host of the Realizing Empathy Podcast, Seung Chan Lim (Slim), for a conversation. This episode presents us with intense vulnerability, exploration of empathy and reflection on healing from trauma. Make sure to give it a listen and reflect on your own struggles with empathy.
🍿 Attend
Resilient Futures: Hidden Narratives in Global Mental Health
The conference aims to bring together students, researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and have a discussion around global mental health with a focus on marginalized communities. How do we make global mental health truly global, what innovations are needed in the field, how can we move towards equity and decolonization are among the questions to be addressed.
The conference will take place on July 7, 10:00 AM — 5:00 PM CEST. The event is free and open to everyone interested in transforming global mental health, making it more accessible and exploring “hidden narratives” — under-researched areas in the sector. We hope to see you there!
What we’re reading…
🌺 Masawa Special: A long-known secret to tackling climate change
In Masawa’s latest post, Niels Devisscher shares his impressions from a week-long Mind and Life Summer Research Institute program. The event brought together scientists, climate activists, and leading indigenous and Buddhist scholars, all of them contributing their unique perspectives on the realities of climate change. We often talk about the importance of interconnectedness in improving global mental wellness and tackling the challenges like climate change, systematic injustice, and economic inequality that intersect with each other. The experience and wisdom exchanged in the conference confirmed that the interconnectedness approach will guide us towards the transformational change we need to see in our society and help us move closer to a sustainable, equitable future.
The narrative we’re used to in Western societies is that we exist as separate from nature, and our minds are separate from our bodies. Over time it left us disconnected from ourselves, nature and each other, replacing the bonds we had with relationships built on exploitation and extraction. This also applies to our systems that perpetuate injustice, inequality and prioritize infinite growth over people’s livelihood and the environment. Indigenous communities share a different perspective, kinship being the foundation of their connection to nature. It’s rooted in trust, consent and reciprocity, and is often exercised through coordinated social or political activities, such as rituals and ceremonies. They experience time and climate change through kinship, making society feel responsible for climate change and encouraging them to take action.
To address climate change and other challenges we face, we, too, need to start acting with the connection between us and nature in mind. We must find ourselves on a different level of consciousness — as Albert Einstein famously said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” When we start viewing the world surrounding us through the lens of kinship and moral bonds, we experience moral suffering when we see those bonds being breached and see how the actions we take compromise our integrity. We need to extend our capacity for compassion and nurture self-awareness, pro-social values, and human-nature connectedness, both as individuals and in our work. Only then we’ll be able to move past the challenges we face and create a better world for each and every one of us.
The climate crisis is a crisis of relationships
⛏ Progressing beyond extractive thinking in impact investment
Increasingly more investors are deploying capital in ways that are mindful of environmental and social impact, which is a positive shift within the current economic system. Yet impact investors often take the conventional investment approach, prioritizing capital preservation and profit over making real, measurable positive impact. This leaves us with an important question to be answered: is it possible to move towards a system where mission-driven businesses would be financed in a way that regenerative environmental and social benefits would be a fundamental priority?
Impact investing holds great power to facilitate positive change, but investors need to remain aware of how their investments affect communities and their wellbeing, as well as consider whether they are able to add more value to the communities than they remove. Many impact investors today face the challenge of whether elements of investing such as collateral requirements, risk-based pricing model, and requirement for personal guarantees might go against the intention to promote long-term positive social and environmental change.
There are many solutions that can assist in overcoming these challenges and help the process of investing become more regenerative. One example is taking a shared-risk fund approach, where foundations and family offices contribute to a pooled fund that is then distributed to social enterprises through a mix of financial instruments, which helps advance the foundation’s charitable mission and allows the fund to take more financial risk. Another method is designing financing, in this case, a revenue participation agreement, in a way that allows a startup to retain control of its mission and applications of its technology by providing it with payment flexibility.
Moving money in new non-extractive and regenerative ways is crucial, but it may not always go far enough. Financing transformative impact may not always be profitable. In order to see a meaningful change in the oppressive systems, we must give up power and privilege — that’s why we need to regularly ask ourselves whether our work is contributing to capital serving people and not the other way around. We’re faced with an opportunity to build different narratives about money and investment — and a possibility of a world where impact investing offers solutions without replicating the structures that created them looms on the horizon. It’s up to us to take the next step.
The Next Step in Impact Investing: Breaking the Shackles of Extractive Thinking
📖 Impact investors should learn from organizations they work with
Studies show that investors expect to double the money flow into sustainable and impact investing over the next five years. The demand for such investment opportunities is rising — one in five people stated that the pandemic has increased their interest in sustainable investing. Yet, for the sector to scale up, doubling the money flow is not enough. Instead, investors have to place themselves in the room with people and organizations working for the causes they invest in as the investors cannot be expected to have the necessary expertise on the topics, but they can be expected to engage with government agencies, NGOs, businesses, and activists. That’s the best way to build a market understanding of the issues, shape the upcoming generation of investment products, create economically viable businesses and see them succeed.
To begin with, it’s necessary to understand the importance of ESG. As investors now face unfamiliar drivers of value and risk, ranging from biodiversity to racial justice, they need to be able to measure how these factors impact the value of their investments. Investors and companies are increasingly more open to engaging in dialogue to understand the best ways to manage risk and create value. Partnering with people that have accumulated valuable expertise in specific areas and using their data and insights to make investment-related decisions can be the solution. In areas where investors and companies lack relevant ESG-related on-the-ground experience, NGOs and activists can bring valuable contributions to the table.
As we step into the future, we need to define and create new markets that can be turned into profitable investment products. This kind of innovation rarely is driven by investors alone. Certain ideas come with many initial hurdles, such as the concern of the scale of the problem or a limited pipeline of projects to invest in. It’s yet another example of a situation when partnering with a non-profit or a business dedicating their efforts to this cause can be extremely beneficial — they can help develop investment candidates as well as propose different avenues for tackling the issue. As sustainable investments become part of many investors’ portfolios, the continued collaboration between investors and problem solvers will keep the momentum going and accelerate the money flow while maintaining profits and helping the planet.
What Impact Investors Can Learn from the Organizations They Work with
🍀 A win for the European cannabis market
Cannabis and digital health startup Sanity Group has just closed a $44.2 million Series A round led by Swiss VC Redalpine along with U.S.-based Navy Capital and SOJE Capital. This round is the largest known round of cannabis funding in Europe to this day. Sanity’s success suggests that cannabis is making its way to the mainstream and catching investors’ attention. It’s also a part of a larger trend of substances like psilocybin, MDMA, and ketamine proving their value in mental health disorder treatment and being considered by many the next big thing in psychiatry.
The Berlin-based company offers a platform that customers can use for mental health and chronic pain management. It allows to digitally track cannabis-based therapy with a medical device, offering information on how much of the active ingredient (THC, CBD, etc.) is being administered. The information is then logged into a therapy diary. Next to product development, the Sanity Group also invests in research of the cannabis plant and its active ingredients as well as potential ways of application. The capital from the funding round will be used to expand the company’s medical division in Europe and an EU-GMP-compliant research and production facility located in Germany.
Currently, Sanity Group operates in Germany, but they hope to enter the Czech Republic and Poland markets very soon. The UK, being the second-largest cannabis market in Europe after Germany, is also an attractive prospect, but the other countries are prioritized due to the markets there opening up from a regulatory perspective. Either way, this is only the beginning — according to Sean Stiefel, CEO at Navy Capital, the European cannabis market is on the brink of exciting developments that are to come over the next months. While the European market still struggles to catch up to the North American one, this milestone achieved by Sanity Group might be a sign that it’s about to gain momentum. We wish them good luck and can’t wait to see the next step in their journey!
Cannabis and digital health startup Sanity Group closes $44.2M Series A led by Redalpine
🏔 What can we learn from alternative economies around the world?
As we already noticed, the pandemic has uncovered the fragility of the globalized economy that should benefit everyone but instead contributes to deepening inequality and injustice. In India alone, 75 million people fell below the poverty line, millions of people globally lost their sources of income, their homes, their families. In crises like this, communities do better when they have local markets and services, their own food, energy, and water to rely on. Yet, the value of a certain way of living goes far beyond its resilience during relatively short-term emergencies. So what connects the alternative economies worldwide that provide the people with a sustainable, equitable, prosperous way of living?
While the alternative economies we can find around the world are very diverse, they share a set of core principles. The most important one is sustaining or reviving the local governing of the commons — land, ecosystems, seeds, water and knowledge. It has been proven that the commonly held resources are far more sustainably governed by the communities from which they are seized than the governments and corporations that extract them. The right to govern the commons is at the roots of food sovereignty movements, creating self-reliant communities, protecting the spaces from the exploitative interests of corporations and waste dumping, making cities greener and more welcoming, as well as a range of other initiatives.
Another important takeaway is the need for a fundamental transformation of our globalized economy in five interconnected spheres: economic, political, social justice, culture and knowledge, and ecological. We need to move towards systems that respect ecological limits, prioritize wellbeing on every level and enable self-reliance. Nevertheless, we have to understand that seeking to scale up the existing initiatives would defeat the purpose. The essence of this approach is diversity, and every situation is different, therefore it’s more useful for us to internalize these values and apply them to our own communities. And at all times we must remember that the principle underlying it all is simple: we all are holders of power. Notably, this means not only exercising our own autonomy and power but also being responsible for ensuring the autonomy of others. With this in our hearts, we can hope to find new pathways out of global ecological and social crises and make peace with and among ourselves.
These Alternative Economies Are Inspirations for a Sustainable World
In Closing
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Gabija works as a Marketing & Communications Coordinator at Masawa. She lets her vision of a more just, sustainable, equitable world guide Masawa’s story and inform the work towards transforming global mental wellness to make it accessible and accepted.
