Masawa Minute 98
$10 trillion opportunity to transform business ownership | Body mapping | + More! 👀
This is the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets from what we’ve read and created in the last month + where you can get active.
This week’s newsletter is all about centering the HUMAN by exploring innovative approaches to wellbeing, empowerment, and inclusivity, from alternative ownership enterprises that shift economic power to individuals to body mapping that offers therapeutic support. Enjoy!
Masawa Update
This week, Joshua is attending SOCAP23 in San Francisco, where he’s serving as a member of the Content Curation Council and also speaking on the Wellness on Impact Track’s opening panel. He has already shared a few insights and learnings from the first two days (the full extent of which you can find here), highlighting a couple of differences between the US and Europe in impact investing, the rise of Donor Advised Funds, and the crucial role of founder wellbeing in achieving higher returns. Joshua will conclude his trip at Compassion 2.0, discussing how Masawa’s Nurture Capital approach embodies compassionate human experiences for flourishing organizations, so stay tuned!
This Week’s Story
The Future of Business Ownership: Empowering Workers and Communities
In the current economic system, many struggle to thrive or even survive. We’re also on the verge of a major phenomenon known as the “silver tsunami,” where over $10 trillion in assets are expected to change hands as the older generations retire and look for succession plans for their businesses, with the most common options being shutting down the business entirely or selling to another company or a private equity firm. However, there is a way to leverage the latter to address the former: converting these businesses into alternative ownership enterprises (AOEs) that would allow for creating a lasting positive impact for many workers and communities.
The appeal of AOEs, which include cooperatives, employee stock ownership plans, and steward ownership models, is that they shift economic and decision-making power from external investors to non-investor stakeholders such as workers, consumers, and community members. This approach empowers these stakeholders and promotes financial resilience, higher wages, job satisfaction, and reduction in gender and racial inequality — all of which, by the way, we know to be strong determinants of physical and mental wellbeing. AOEs are also often more suited for achieving impact goals than conventional companies, as they are designed to prioritize nonfinancial goals in decision-making, preventing profit from trumping purpose.
Nonetheless, AOEs face challenges in scaling and achieving their potential due to barriers to accessing capital. Luckily, impact investors can play a significant role in helping them overcome this by considering shifting a significant percentage of economic and governance rights to stakeholders, prioritizing models that safeguard the company’s mission, and investing in enterprises that include all relevant stakeholders and adopt a movement-building approach. While AOEs may not be the first choice for many impact investors, they hold tremendous potential for societal transformation, redistributing power towards ordinary people and supporting a more just, equitable, and healthy world.
Investing in Enterprises That Work for Everyone
What else we’re reading…
💼 Despite various legal protections, disclosing mental health status at work remains a complex decision, and many workers still choose to keep it a secret. When making this decision, employees often face a double-edged sword: while being open about their issues can lead to greater support and necessary accommodations, it also risks judgment, discrimination, or dismissal.
🤝 There’s a lot of talk about improving human relationships, but one important concept is often overlooked: that concept is “mattering.” It refers to the fundamental human need to feel valued and add value in relationships, work, and communities, extending beyond belonging, self-esteem or social connection.
🧠 Where is the line between adaptation and conformity? For many neurodiverse people, it’s a delicate balance between personal growth and societal norms, self-fulfillment and external expectations. However, it all revolves around the fundamental question: is the change for oneself or for others?
🤖 Instead of fearing the rise of AI, businesses should seize the opportunity to leverage it to reimagine the way we approach human creativity. Embracing this technology can unlock time for innovation, combine technologies in novel ways to improve workflows, and steer us towards more potent creative solutions.
👁️ Body mapping, a type of expressive arts therapy, allows individuals to capture the narratives of their lived experiences through visual and narrative exploration by creating life-size body portraits. Emphasizing self-agency, resilience, and the restorative power of storytelling, this approach is commonly used to support individuals in processing trauma.
