In our Livable Future Investing workshops, we like to start with a question that gets people talking about the heartbreak. We feel it’s important to connect with this grief, pain, as a way of opening up our empathy muscle to begin to strengthen the bonds of community and kind of culture we’re trying to create.
We also connect that heartbreak to a list.
The kind of list of crises and things that are happening in the world that are frightening to us.
We hesitate to make a list of the things we don’t want to look at because the list itself can feel overwhelming, even devastating.
But if we don’t look at it, are we actually safer? Are we actually better off?
In this post, I am going to try to name some of my heartbreak and also some of the things that have crept on to my list recently.
Heartbreak
Since I was 22, I have been trying to reconcile my personal investing (and the retirement plans of the organizations I work for), with relationships to communities I’ve grown close to.
El Salvador
When I was 13, I spent the summer in Guarjila, El Salvador. My host father Roberto took me on the hour-long hike through the mountains to his small milpa (about the size of my current yard) where we’d spend a few hours picking cucumbers and weeding the beans and the corn. then we’d carry the 50 lb+ / 25 kilo bags on our back through the small windy mountain path back to our village. A couple days later, we’d take the cucumbers on the bus to the larger market about 45 minutes away. In the evenings my host brother would take me to the town’s soccer field – mostly mud and weeds – but a couple goals – and we’d play with the town’s youth. I loved it. On the weekends, we’d take an hour-long hike to a near-by waterfall to swim.
I’ve been graced by so many experiences like this – unconditional generosity and hospitality.
Chiapas
More recently, I’ve connected with Yomol A’tel – a cooperative of 600 rural, farming families – similar to Roberto – but in Chiapas. This cooperative grew out of the Jesuits mission there – “Mision de Bachajon” 60 years ago and has since become a $1.5+ million enterprise where they not only process the coffee together, but they sell it to upscale gourmet coffee shops – Capeltic – that they’ve set up on the Jesuit University campuses in and around Mexico City.
This summer, I got to spend time in Chiapas visiting Alejandro’s house (he’s part of the co-ops volunteer accountability / certified organic committee), and eating the bowl of beans his family prepared for me and my children. It reminded me of being 13 eating the beans in Roberto and Maria’s kitchen in El Salvador.
The Ache that Breaks
But my heart ache doesn’t come while I’m visiting and spending time in these places. The people are joyful and optimistic. Generous and hospitable.
My heartbreak comes when the quarterly reports from the mutual funds I own arrive in the mail.
I know the companies in these funds are responsible for creating the conditions that make it harder and harder for Roberto and Alejandro to be confident their kids will stay in El Salvador and Chiapas. The pressure to migrate north is so strong – to risk everything. Or to stay and get caught up in the structures of violence, that my friend so vividly depicts here (Behind the Scenes in El Salvador’s Gang Crackdown 1).
The List
And so, I wanted to write today, to make myself a list.
I wanted to build off the first section of this week’s workshop prompt:
My List
We hesitate to make a list of the things we don’t want to look at because the list itself can feel overwhelming, even devastating.
But if we don’t look at it, are we actually safer? Are we actually better off?
From Seth Godin & the AltMBA
1. Asset Manager Capitalism
Explainer: What’s the Deal with Asset Management | Explainer | Common Wealth 1
when it comes to the question of who actually bears risk in the economy, shareholders are protected by the powers of the state time and again through no-strings-attached bailouts and central bank interventions that keep prices high, as we’ve witnessed throughout the pandemic. When companies do fail or create egregious harms, for instance through mass layoffs or soaring carbon emissions, it’s the public – not shareholders or asset management firms – who end up picking up the tab.
The rise of asset manager capitalism as a new regime of investment, ownership, and corporate governance represents a fundamental shift in power in the global economy, and a new challenge to economic democracy. At the same time, the systemic importance of just a few actors opens up the possibility for truly transformative policy interventions with systemic impact.
2. Acktivism 1 & the Concentration of Power
An apex predator known as an activist investor has escaped its cage and is now attacking social issues.
What happens to Harvard [with their president resigning] is a sideshow.
Ackman’s billionaire tantrum represents a far more dangerous virus that has plagued humans throughout history: the concentration of power.
3. Water.
For some reason, I feel water is the looming crisis that feels like it’s closer than any other. I was at a rooftop bar this summer with one of the foremost Catholic institutional investors. Somebody who I deeply respect and admire. One who has been leading for many years and has built thoughtful strategies across many parts of their organization & portfolios. His biggest concern: he can’t find enough for his “water” theme. He wants to be investing in the solutions. Most of the water funds he sees are privatizing public infrastructure or something else that doesn’t actually help our situation.
Climate & biodiversity are HUGE crises, no doubt. But Water… I think it might drive more than anything else. New York Times has done a few nice pieces on this magnitude of the crisis and that’s what brought it to my friend’s attention last summer.
4. An ethical Alternative to 401ks
I’ve recently become convinced that our dominant Retirement Investing options are a huge part of why individuals & families (~$40 trillion) are just perpetuating the problem. And despite their best efforts (i.e. even those who build Self-Directed IRAs and do wonderful catalytic impact investing) they’re so constrained. This is what I’ve experienced first hand – and part of the problem is ERISA… as I’ve recently learned from Janelle Orsi (Cartoonist & Lawyer at Sustainable Economies Law Center.
Janelle Orsi put together this fabulous slide deck about the Sustainable Economies Law Center, their work with The Next Egg community & their findings about the shortcomings, structural entanglements of 401k – and the icky feelings that have started coming up for me.
5. Can we save the Amazon Rainforest?
Finally, I want to keep my eye on the Amazon rainforest. I spent time in Porto Velho, Brasil with Sr. Laura and Sr. Terezinha – two amazing Franciscan Catechist nuns who have been accompanying the Karipuna and many other indigenous communities and the struggle is so painful and real. (My quick reflections here 2.)
If we can’t figure out how to save this most precious of ecosystems… especially when there are indigenous caretakers there on the land trying to protect it – but we just keep rolling forward (in Brazil and internationally) with economic incentives to keep pushing the logging, beef / cattle raising, mining, damns…
Brazil has the largest Catholic population – 123 million – in the world. (say What!?) This was a new fact I hadn’t really appreciated until being in Brazil talking with the Bishop and the Franciscans who hosted us and getting a feel for the hundreds of lay ministers living out the Gospel in remarkably faithful and prophetic ways.
My Hope
A big part of my hope is your presence here. The tensions you’ve begun exploring with me as you read. I’m really grateful for you, your partnership, your curiosity, your support.
In our Francesco community I hear and am so moved by the more than 150 workshop participants that have poured themselves into naming the tensions we need to hold together as a community.
I’m excited to keep figuring this out with you … and then what we collectively decide we want to take on together.
I’m so glad we are here.