A new episode of SOCAP’s podcast series, Money + Meaning is now available!
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Investing and Changing the Rules to Build Racial Equity
“The forces that hold people back are deeply integrated. A racist criminal justice system requires a racist media culture to keep it alive to keep it thriving. Political inequality follows economic inequality. Those things often collude to create a hostile climate. That is in essence why we have to build power–because racism shapeshifts.” – Rashad Robinson
“It is not people with wealth who have the best solutions for how to disrupt poverty. It is the people who are living in poverty who are living under the boot of those who have the wealth to give away that are closest to the solutions for how we need to change what is happening right now.” – Alicia Garza
How can impact investors help build racial equity? Rashad Robinson and Alicia Garza agree that if real, lasting change is to happen the conversation must move beyond income and wealth disparity and begin to address disparities in power. Robinson said, “Changing the rules has to be part of what we do and that has to be the metric of success.” How can allies help people of color have the opportunity and the power to change the rules?
In this episode of Money + Meaning, recorded live at SOCAP19, Javier Torres, Director of the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Cultures program, leads a conversation on what it will take to achieve racial equity in terms of wealth and power with Black Lives Matter co-creator and Principal of the Black Futures Lab Alicia Garza and Rashad Robinson, President of Color of Change. Together they consider the question of how investors can be allies in the building of power for communities of color. Garza and Robinson share their own moving stories of why they do the work they do and how their organizations are working to create change for people of color. They also offer their own perspectives on how we can get people to imagine a different way of organizing and formulating our economy, how they are contextualizing their work within the current political climate, and what they want people to think, feel, and do after they hear this conversation.
Listen to more episodes of Money + Meaning here.
Featured Voices
Rashad Robinson
President
Alicia Garza
Co-creator
Principal
Javier Torres
Thriving Cultures Program Director
About Money + Meaning
Money + Meaning is the official podcast of SOCAP. This series aims to expand the conversation around impact investing and strategies to finance and support social change while stimulating innovative and valuable new partnerships across sectors.
Resources
Watch the SOCAP19 session mentioned in the episode featuring Alicia Garza and Rashad Robinson, as well as Rodney Foxworth, CEO of Common Future, and Felicia Wong, President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute: Closing the Wealth Gap, Essential Conversations for Impact Investors:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Z8b1kqyp0&feature=youtu.be
- Read the results of Black Futures Lab’s Black Census Project, the largest survey of Black people conducted in the United States since Reconstruction.
- Download: More Black than Blue: Politics and Power in the 2019 Black Census
- An Activist for a Young Generation: Using boycotts, walkouts, protests, and media savvy, Rashad Robinson has gone up against the likes of Amazon and Facebook in the name of racial justice — and won. By Michael Anft for The Chronicle of Philanthropy (Requires a subscription to access).
- Review a selection of articles that Rashad Robinson has written for The Guardian
- Learn more about the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Cultures Program
