Blog

At the Swift Foundation, Loic Comolli sought our support to launch their first NESsT Fund to complement their grant-based acceleration work with a loan fund for enterprises. NESsT impressed me as an enterprise program that focused on creating dignified jobs and work...

Ann Whittemore of Highlands SRI introduced me to Chrystel at Swift Foundation’s San Francisco office. Chrystel struck me right away. She was a fast talking woman with numbers. She had an ingenious approach to capitalizing a network of Native Community Development...

In 2017, I heard about Raven Indigenous Capital Partners from the McConnell Foundation. Elaine Rassmussen and I met with Stephen Nairne and Paul LaCerte in 2018 in Vancouver and learned about their emerging fund centered on Indigenous business and their unique...

I met Brendan Martin through the Working World, his longtime initiative to bring non-extractive finance to businesses in Argentina via cooperatives. It wasn’t surprising to me to find that Marnie Thompson and Ed Whitfield, longtime community organizers through the...

Topher Wilkens introduced me to Laina at the Santa Cruz Impact Meetup. I was six weeks into launching Integrated Capital Investing and was intimidated by the circle of young, smart go-getters in the room. Laina listened to me and said, “Some of the most successful...

I first read about East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative in a blog by Nwamaka Agbo. Nwamaka worked to support EBPREC in their early organizing and planning work when she was a Just Economy Fellow (2017-18). Then I discovered Annie McShiras, another Just Economy...

I was first introduced to Oran Hesterman, the founder, and CEO of the national nonprofit Fair Food Network, at a Sustainable Food Systems and Agriculture Funders conference. He was piloting the Fair Food Fund, an integrated capital structure where grants and creative...

I first met David Lynn and Mission Driven Finance via email. Their application to be considered as a Transformative 25 Fund was one of the first I reviewed that was outside of my experience with Swift Foundation and the Just Economy Institute. When I learned about...

In 2017 when I joined the Just Economy Institute, the cohort was dominated by women, with a strong representation of people of color. In fact, it is the one finance space I’ve experienced where being a cis-white male was not the norm. But Bill Stoddart joined in our...

Erik Schultz, a fellow financial activist, Just Economy Institute colleague (formerly the RSF Integrated Capital Institute) and philanthropic colleague at Arthur B. Schultz Foundation introduced me to Blake Jones and Kachuwa Impact Fund. Erik has since refocused his...