Last week I had the opportunity to listen in on Chordata Capital’s webinar “Investing with a Reparations Lens”. Tiffany Brown and Kate Poole founded Chordata Capital with the intention of creating an investment advisory firm committed to engaging in racial and economic justice through investment portfolios of people with inherited wealth. The firm encourages investors to move their money from extractive investing opportunities such as conventional Wall Street stocks and into alternative regenerative assets such as: community loan funds, individual businesses, credit unions, and Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs).
The two founders led the webinar for an audience of around twelve women (most with inherited wealth backgrounds). One participant commented that she “doesn’t feel entitled to returns [on her investments].” This statement seems shocking and counterintuitive to the conventional and current pro-Wall Street investment mindset, which is to maximize your individual short term monetary rate of return. But, to quote Kate Poole, if we consider that “anyone that’s managed to have accumulated wealth in this country has benefited from racist systems”, then we can reframe our relationship to wealth from a possessive ownership mindset (“My money is mine. I earned it alone. I must protect, hoard, and grow it to secure my financial future”) to a collaborative, shared ownership mindset (“My money was accumulated over time through interactions with others - including people and the environment”).
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