A Money + Meaning Podcast with Esperanza Pallan of Food & Farm Communications Fund, Reem Goussous of Village Capital, and Leslie Lindo and Morgan Simon of Candide Group
New models of participatory investment are helping to build a more inclusive and effective impact investing community. By giving entrepreneurs and grassroots communities a voice and vote in investment decisions, practitioners are centering community voices in their investment decision processes.
Recorded at SOCAP23, a new episode of Money and Meaning explores the advantages of centering community voices in the investment decision process through examples from three models. This podcast episode features:
- Esperanza Pallana, Executive Director of the Food & Farm Communications Fund
- Leslie Lindo, Managing Director of the Olamina Fund at Candide Group
- Reem Goussous, Chief Growth Officer at Village Capital
- Morgan Simon, Founding Partner at Candide Group, Moderator
Simon said Candide Group continues to seek ways to shift the typical investor structure so that community members have a greater say in how capital is deployed. “How do we ensure that those with the greatest proximity to issues get to make funding decisions?” she said, noting that more investors are looking to streamline their capital decisions and deepen their impact work by turning over decision-making power.
At Candide Group, that includes the Olamina Fund, a loan vehicle that focuses on racial and economic justice by through investments primarily in the Deep South, Indigenous communities, and rural America. Lindo said the Olamina Fund aims to create access to capital and resources in communities that have faced historic disinvestment and extraction.
A community advisory board advises on the fund’s strategic direction and participates in credit decisions — a model designed to “flip the traditional power dynamics that we see in finance.”
“It’s going beyond representation to having the decision-making authority,” Lindo said. “Where they are involved in really influencing the types of loans that we make, as well as making the credit decisions on which loans we’re approving.”
Food & Farm Communications Fund adopted a movement-led grant structure about five years ago that involves a spectrum of strategies to support frontline communications, Pallana said. The shift was driven by funders who saw a need to invest in frontline communications. “We provide grants, technical assistance, and coaching through third-party providers, and we provide a lot of connectivity.”
By supporting the communications work of frontline leaders, Food & Farm reinforces its vision of agricultural systems change. “We’re national, and having the kind of reach … to lift up frontline narratives is tough,” Pallana said. “Having a participatory process enables more connectivity immediately within the community to make that happen.”
Goussous said that advancing equity and democratizing investment decision-making have been foundational to Village Capital from its start. The global organization has developed a peer-selected investment model that includes frameworks and tools to address the power imbalance between investors and entrepreneurs.
Through a collaborative due diligence process, entrepreneurs gather to evaluate each other and determine who will receive funding. “We intentionally select a very small cohort of entrepreneurs who have an innovative solution to a problem that we want to address,” Goussous said. “For peer selection to work, commonality is very important.”
Village Capital’s tools include a Smarter Systems framework that helps investors adjust their due diligence process and mitigate gender bias so they identify new investment opportunities. Entrepreneurs can use the Capital Explorer tool to identify the type of funding structure that best suits their needs.
Learn more about these participatory funding models in the full Money + Meaning podcast.
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Money + Meaning is the official podcast of SOCAP. The 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.
