Journey to Impact · 2020-04-29 · Happiness First implemented in Bhutan, Gross National Happiness values collective happiness and wellbeing as the goal of governance, ... prosperity

Impact investing is not an asset class.

It’s a paradigm shift.

Journey to ImpactA Roadmap for the

Next Economy

4 Hello & Welcome 6 New Measures of Success 8 What is Your Vision for

the Next Economy?10 A World of Impact

90 Making Your Portfolio Beautiful

Journey to Impact is for anyone interested in financial capital and its potential to create positive change in the world. It asks questions around the purpose of capital, and invites you to think deeply about the role money can play in tackling the social and ecological crises we are currently faced with.

The work has been a co-creation between Dumbo Feather—a publishing company with a quarterly print magazine, monthly podcast and website that tells stories of people bringing about a more resilient and compassionate world; Impact Investment Group—an Australian impact investment funds manager which uses finance as a force for good; and Small Giants—a family office that invests in and nurtures businesses that are leading their communities to empathy and a new economy.

Food & Agriculture44 The Future of Our Daily Bread Column by Vandana Shiva

46 Building a Business that Supports Biodiversity

Column by Nigel Sharp

48 Mossy Willow Farm Photo essay by Gregory Lorenzutti

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The Built Environment54 Building an Eco-community Column by Amir Rabik

56 Berlin’s Holzmarkt: a Co-created, Co-operative Urban Oasis

Words by Mitra Anderson-Oliver, photography by Nailya Bikmurzina

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Business & Finance14 Sustainable Investing Column by Anna Skarbek

18 Joel Solomon Creates Clean Money

In conversation with Berry Liberman

26 Kate Raworth is a Renegade Economist

In conversation with Kaj Löfgren

34 Don Shaffer Invests in Relationships

In conversation with Danny Almagor

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Social Capital80 Unlocking Multiple Forms of Wealth Column by Nipun Mehta

82 Konda Mason has Love Capital In conversation with Berry Liberman

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Renewable Energy66 Moving Money into Renewables Column by Lane Crockett

68 Chinchilla Solar Farm Photo essay by Pat Wood

72 David Suzuki is a Force of Nature In conversation with Livia Albeck-Ripka

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We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we work—the Yalukit Willam clan of the Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nations—and pay our respect to elders past, present and emerging.

We also acknowledge the context in which we produced this work: a time of climate emergency in which human beings are having an unprecedented impact on the planet.

The publication has been lovingly put together by Berry Liberman, Danny Almagor, Daniel Madhavan, Fergus Pitt, Nathan Scolaro, James Rewell and Dianne Cotter. It was printed by Printgraphics (Printgreen) in Mount Waverley, Victoria. The paper we used is called Grange and has been sourced from responsible forestry practices. Special thanks to everyone who has contributed to the publication and shared their stories and ideas for what a more resilient, life-giving economy could look like.

If you want to engage with more ideas like the ones in this publication, subscribe to Dumbo Feather at dumbofeather.com/subscribe

If you want to get in touch with Impact Investment Group, visit impact-group.com.au

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the permission from the publishers. ©2019 Dumbo Feather Pty Ltd. The views expressed in this publication are those of the respective contributors or interviewees and are not necessarily shared by the publication or its staff. Nothing in this magazine constitutes financial product advice.

Hello friend,

I’m so happy this has found you. We are at a pivotal time in the history of the planet when everything we do, say and think has an impact. In the face of rising sea levels, species extinction, social isolation and mass poverty, it’s become clear that our human-made constructs have been formulated on philosophies that no longer serve us, and perhaps never did.

The stories and ideas in this guidebook will take you far in thinking a way out of the diabolical broken systems we have found ourselves in. The challenge will be to continue finding more conversations within and amongst yourselves to go even further. The best part of waking up from denial is the opportunity for growth and renewal. We have an exquisite window to become our best selves in the face of potent, dark forces which have emerged ultimately from our global condition of disconnection.

Importantly, this isn’t a conversation about philanthropy and how we can weave a tiny bit of our capital into doing good and feeling good while the rest of our money is in business as usual. We cannot solve the problems we face with one percent of global financial resources—we need to be viewing this as whole systems change. Impact investing isn’t an asset class or a sector, it is a provocation to say: “How can we use financial capital in service to a vision of the world we know is possible and want to leave our children and grandchildren?”

This is a clarion call. Instead of always feeling we are running away from the future, let’s orient towards it with full hearts and grounded hope, drawing on the luminous ideas within these pages as signposts.

With love and gratitude, Berry LibermanCo-founder of Small Giants and publisher of Dumbo Feather

Dear reader,

Why did we feel it was important to share the ideas and stories contained in this special collaboration with Dumbo Feather? I’ll get to that.

Firstly, it’s polite to introduce myself. I have the honour of leading Impact Investment Group, an impact funds manager that’s part of a very special family of businesses called Small Giants, which Dumbo Feather is also part of. It’s a serious thing that people trust us with their money and their hopes for what that money can do. But we’re also (joyfully) serious about reimagining and redefining the tools of finance and how finance can be used as a force for good.

As human beings going about our day-to-day work, our thinking can so often be constrained by the way the world is. We struggle to lift our heads to look towards what it could be. We accept so many of the rules that served us before, even when they may not serve us anymore. We look at the beautiful houses we have built and wish to ignore the crumbling foundations they are built upon. That’s why, in this special guidebook for investing and the economy, we have looked far and wide to find people who are challenging the foundations we have built on. They are questioning the assumptions we have accepted as immutable truths of finance to ask, “What if?”

Imagine questioning not only the most basic of ideas we believe to hold true in finance, but also the nature of those truths. Imagine re-examining the way the finance world could work if we re-imagined how we thought about time, risk and return. What if we didn’t think about investment timeframes in terms of a portfolio but in terms of the lifespans of our grandchildren? What if we didn’t think about risk in terms of how our financial capital might be impacted but in terms of how the world might fare if we fail to take action? What if we didn’t limit our thinking about returns to what we receive financially but in terms of what our society and environment gain from what we decide to provide financial capital to?

We trust the people and ideas you meet in this special edition are a valuable input into your own journey of questioning—whether things need to work the way they have just because that’s the way they have worked to date. We believe now is the time to imagine a different way forward and it’s our pleasure to share some ideas on different paths to carry us there.

Dan Madhavan CEO of Impact Investment Group

“ How can we use financial capital in service to a vision of the world we know is possible and want to leave our children and grandchildren?”

54 INTRODUCTION

New Measures of Success

Doughnut EconomicsKate Raworth’s Doughnut Economic Model measures the performance of an economy by the extent to which people’s needs and rights (the social foundation) are met without overshooting the Earth’s ecological ceiling. The work is in building a regenerative and distributive economy so that we can find our way back into the doughnut’s sweet spot—“the safe and just space for humanity.”

Circular EconomyA circular economy is a closed loop system that is restorative and regenerative by design, moving us beyond the extractive “take-make-waste” industrial model we currently have. It represents a systemic shift that builds long-term resilience, generates business and economic opportunities, and enables people and planet to flourish.

Gross National HappinessFirst implemented in Bhutan, Gross National Happiness values collective happiness and wellbeing as the goal of governance, rather than Gross Domestic Product. It is a holistic and sustainable approach to development, with nine key measures, including psychological wellbeing, community vitality, ecological diversity, and resilience and education.

Sustainable Development GoalsThe Sustainable Development Goals are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure all people enjoy peace and prosperity. Set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, they act as a roadmap to 2030 and beyond, outlining 17 key development goals to be addressed by governments, businesses, communities and individuals.

The rulebook for a thriving economy is being re-written. New models of prosperity are taking into account people, planet and profit, showing us how we can manage our shared household within the laws of our ecology.

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What is Your Vision for the Next Economy?

Charles Eisenstein“ I can’t say that I have a full-on vision for the next economy but I do get

little glimpses of it. Enough to know that it will be based on generosity, gratitude and service rather than accumulation and control of resources. That it will encourage us to do the things that serve the health and wellbeing of the planet, of our places and of other people, rather than bribing us to not listen to our heart’s desire to do those things and to have to always make compromises. It’ll be aligned with the things that we find sacred and beautiful in the world. And I also know that this is not just a fantasy or a pipe dream, but that there are economic steps that we can take as a society and as individuals to create that future. Things like debt cancellation to name one. The relief of the debt burden that keeps almost everybody in the matrix whether they want to be or not.”

Helena Norberg-Hodge“ If humanity is to survive we have got to base the next economy

on life. That means diversity, the fundamental principle of life. The economy we have today is a monoculture imposed across the world, a consumer monoculture consisting of mega corporations, mega technological systems. The next economy needs to be economies, plural. Decentralisation, localisation, adapting our businesses to places, to cultures and ecosystems around the world. Restoring and regenerating the rich biodiversity, the rich human individual identities and cultures around this planet. It’s already beginning to happen. From the bottom up there’s a rich and very inspiring localisation movement. Let’s join it now.”

Dan Ariely“ I think we somehow need to get over the ownership obsession we

have. There’s actually a really interesting historical analysis that said before the agriculture revolution we lived in groups. And when we lived in groups we didn’t really care so much about whose property was whose. The group was the important unit. Then when the agriculture revolution came, all of a sudden property became important. And we had lines for my property and your property, and my kids were getting mine and your kids were getting yours and so on. And we started caring a lot about property. I think as long as we stay in this belief system that came from the agriculture revolution where life is a matter of ‘I have my things and your things and it’s not about welfare, it’s not about contribution,’ we’re going to get stuck in a suboptimal world.”

Michelle Long“ For me the question is really more about who are we becoming?

Because our economy will be a reflection of that. Of who we are, of what we believe and of what we value. That’s the big question of this time. Remembering the essence of our humanity, the fact that each of us have soul gifts to bring that aren’t strengths that we might learn in business school but are actually the gifts that are ours innately and must be shared in order for our lives to have meaning. It’s about cultivating our ability to connect with others and to see their soul gifts, to actually have curiosity and remember that natural affection that we have for each other and the joy that we have from community.”

Helena is founder and director of Local Futures. She lives in Byron Bay, Australia.

Michelle is founder of Jubilee, an investment platform for building Beautiful Portfolios that are catalytic in healing the Earth. She lives in Berkeley, USA.

Vandana Shiva“ The economy based on greed and on fossil fuels and toxic

chemicals is an economy that is not an economy. Because economy is supposed to be the management of a household as derived from point cost. The next economy has to be about life, about our planet, about creativity and meaning for all. The last person, the last being. The next economy will put creative work at the centre, not destruction of work as efficiency. It will put caring for the world and rejuvenating the earth at the centre, not the destruction of resources and their privatisation. The next economy will be an earth democracy based on living ecologies where every being, every person participates in the creation of the common good.”

Vandana is a scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate and anti-globalisation author. She lives in Delhi, India.

Charles is a public speaker, gift economy advocate, and the author of several books on ecology and interbeing. He lives in North Carolina, USA.

Dan is a Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Economics at Duke University, and the author of several books on motivation and irrationality. He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Damon Gameau“ My vision of the economy for the future is one that is far more

regenerative in its design. One that is more aware of resource use, how it affects the planet and also how our society functions. How is the health of our population? I think at the moment the metrics that we define our success by and guide us are far too narrow. They’re just based around finance or GDP. I think we need to broaden those metrics considerably to bring more visibility into the things that really matter to us.”

Damon is a climateactivist and documentary filmmaker whose most recent work, 2040, paints a powerful vision of the future. He lives in Byron Bay, Australia.Illu

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A World of Impact

1. The Bullitt CenterOne of the first energy-positive green buildings, located in Seattle, Washington. The building collects and treats rainwater for its showers, sinks and drinking taps with grey water re-used on the green roof and in landscaping. There is also a solar array that completely covers the roof and overhangs the walls. Opened on Earth Day in 2013, it is designed to last for 250 years.

bullittcenter.org

2. Full Cycle BioplasticsA circular economy startup that uses bacteria to break down organic waste and turn it into bio-plastic material for packaging which can then be upcycled after use. Established in California, the Full Cycle solution mitigates greenhouse gas emissions, and reduces plastic pollution and toxicity effects on land and in the ocean.

fullcyclebioplastics.com

3. HCT GroupA social enterprise that provides subsidised public transport to the vulnerable in the UK, helping them stay active in their communities. It safely provides over 30 million passenger trips on its buses every year.

hctgroup.org

4. HireupAn online platform established in Australia for people with disability to find, hire and manage support workers who fit their needs and share their interests. From help around the house to transport to skills sharing, the support available is wide-ranging and entirely up to the individual’s needs.

hireup.com.au

5. Patamar CapitalA venture capital fund with an impact and gender lens for low-income communities in South and South East Asia. Their mission is to scale venture capital investments in high-growth companies that are solving the region’s most pervasive problems.

patamar.com

6. GoodstartAustralia’s largest provider of early learning and care. Goodstart is a social enterprise with social purpose at its heart, and delivers healthy operating margins for continued investment in its centres. Its purpose is to ensure children have the learning, development and wellbeing outcomes they need for school and life.

goodstart.org.au

8. Newpin A program and social benefit bond established in Australia to restore children in out-of-home care to their families and break the cycle of destructive family behaviour. The bond behind Newpin provides investors an opportunity to generate a competitive financial return while creating social change. Newpin has restored 328 children to date, and delivered an annual financial return to investors of 11.6 percent.

socialventures.com.au/work/ newpin-social-benefit-bond

7. Dual-Use FarmsA technique that uses the shaded space underneath solar panels to grow food. In Japan, a solar farm that produces 4000 kilowatts of clean electricity each year will also yield 40 tonnes of cloud-ear mushrooms, a crop that was previously imported from China. In Massachusetts, another farm is growing kale, broccoli and chard under electricity-producing solar panels.

s.nikkei.com/2mrI86b

Across the globe, business and capital are being used for all kinds of restorative and regenerative change-making. Here is just a handful of projects making a big impact in their communities.

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Business & Finance

“ I think in the United States we got sold a ‘bill of goods’ instead of a Bill of Rights, and everyone decided that the ultimate goal of the economy is to be efficient, optimised. I like optimisation in some contexts, but optimising in a business firm usually means treating many, many stakeholder groups really bad. If you think about it, efficiency in human relationships is called rudeness.”Kat Taylor, CEO of Beneficial State Bank

“Human beings are not born with dollar signs in front of their eyes. The real

human is both selfish and selfless at the same time. If we include the selfless part

of the human being into economic theory, then it changes completely. And it’s

possible to undo wealth consolidation.”Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank

“ Purpose-driven business is starting to scale because it provides increasingly visible business value. That value has been created by several other players in the business ecosystem. I’m also seeing fund managers and bankers using purpose and sustainability as screens in their investments, and that’s scaling quickly.”Rick Ridgeway, Vice President of Environmental Affairs at Patagonia

“ I want to say to every CEO, ‘Why on Earth would you support an economic path that is the biggest threat to your job? In the game of mega mergers, your job as CEO is threatened.’ There are no winners in this system. I really feel that the path of mega-mergers, mega-everything is so dehumanising that nobody would want it if they understood it.”Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of Local Futures

“We need to shift from extractive systems to more regenerative

systems. Some of that will have to do with a redesign of money, and

some will do with the way in which we relate to money. I don’t think it’s just an external systems issue. Any

sustainable solution has to bring external impact along with inner

transformation in a very real way.”Nipun Mehta, founder of Service Space

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boardroom. They’ve recognised the shift is on and there’s global capital pressure. They also see the growing consumer and stakeholder pressure.

The third benefit is that by increasing the capital that is being deployed, we’re helping the underlying economics of the solution. Most clean energy technologies have economics that improve with scale of deployment—so the progress feeds more progress.

Aside from the capital flows, there’s an interplay between the action of moving capital and popular sentiment. It’s a lot easier to demand sustainable finance if you can see it.

Asking the question helps trigger the demand, which helps trigger the internal activity of corporates and financiers to work harder to provide the solutions. Similarly, consumer demand can translate to voter sentiment, which then can translate to government confidence and policy, and that can accelerate the change faster. It can be a virtuous loop.

Playing our Important PartGiven that we are in a race against time, and that there are clear benefits from speeding up, innovative investment-minded people are a crucial part of the picture. The engineering is done for many climate solutions but to translate these into a commercial case that is attractive to investors in today’s financial

markets, it takes a dedicated team with a really sharp sense of what’s required, clever analytics and good old-fashioned hard work.

Individual investors and family investors play an important role as well. Not only providing the capital but in spreading the safer climate message. Firstly, individuals start to move up the awareness curve through receiving the dividends and having an appreciation of the risk profile, the returns, the stakeholders and co-investors, and the quality of financial management. Secondly, individual actions can help broaden the awareness among individual social networks—your friends, family and professional colleagues.

We know that the most trusted messages are those in our own circles. Facebook works because we enjoy and trust messages from friends and family. So investors in new clean energy products have very powerful roles because they now have lived experience of it, which demystifies impact investing for their networks of friends and family.

People come around to sustainable investing in their own time. The main thing is that once you’re here, you get helped up the learning curve as fast as you can go and then you can share your knowledge with others and scale up your commitments.

People can be a little hesitant to ask a stranger about it and fear they lack the knowledge. So the more investors who are

ack in my university days, studying the Kyoto Protocol was an exciting bridge

between my business skills and policy interests. I had always cared for the environment, but what this environmental treaty revealed was a new market mechanism approach to environmental solutions. Simply, it had identified that we had the technical solutions available to reduce global warming, and began creating the incentives and conditions to get the investment in.

For someone like me, who was enjoying business and law but really cared about the environment, it opened up a path to applying my finance and law degrees to the climate change cause, and help make those investments happen.

I worked on environmental sustainability, in both private and public sectors, for more than a decade before I started my own family. Back then my motivation for reversing the effects of climate change was already very strong. I didn’t think I needed much more motivation. But what I have found since having children is that the motivation now runs even deeper. When I think about my own daughters, aged three and seven, I feel the fear much more strongly. If we get this wrong my daughters, and all children, will be inheriting a much more unpleasant planet to live on.

The evidence is clear—the risks of climate change are stark, but the solutions are there.

These solutions are also so beneficial for the planet—better for cleaner air and healthier land as well as avoiding dangerous levels of warming.

There are solutions in clean energy, sustainable investments, green buildings, industry, agriculture and transport. The list continues from there, with more economic opportunities and exciting technologies that make for a very compelling case, the same case that motivated me decades ago.

This next phase I’m hoping to see is a wave of capital and a movement of people with financial resources and skills that will really speed those solutions.

Accelerating ChangeThe first thing to realise is that there’s a lot of inertia in our systems of finance. Everything from websites to product designs have been created by people and processes shaped for decades before climate change solutions became much more readily available. But what the smart folks have seen is that as finance starts to move, the benefits build upon themselves. The opportunities create their own momentum.

The second benefit is that the more capital flows towards sustainable options, the more it is normalised. In turn that supports movement at an institutional level as those actors see sustainable finance as mainstream rather than a variation of the mainstream. Many institutions have shifted towards this thinking in the

Sustainable Investing By Anna Skarbekas told to Freyla Ferguson

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1514 BUSINESS & FINANCEC O LU M N 1514

happy to talk to their friends and family the more safe places exist for new providers of capital to join in. I’ve often heard my sectors described as a ‘new asset class’ yet often there is little financial difference from other products. These products really should be far more mainstream by now, and could be if more people understood this. And then, when you zoom right out, beyond the individual, to a national scale, there are some terrific examples in Europe and America and Asia.

In Europe, new investment providers will soon be asking new customers what their risk preferences are in terms of sustainability. The European Union’s action plan on sustainable finance intends to ensure investment firms and insurance distributors integrate sustainability preferences into suitability tests when giving advice to investors. Those firms would need to then offer products that meet their clients’ sustainability preferences.

But just because an action like this hasn’t been rolled out on a national scale in Australia, doesn’t mean we can’t start doing this now on a grassroots level. This is something all people can do within their own families. It’s important to approach impact investment with two lenses. Saying yes to avoiding harms but also yes to creating solutions to help reduce the existing harms. We should look across the areas of energy, water and nature and ask ourselves: “What are our risk preferences in regards to sustainability? What risks are we comfortable with in terms of negative impact or environmental harm?”

If the risk preferences that the family discussed are that the family is not comfortable with increasing the risk of polluting energy systems, polluted water systems, or damage to nature through investments, then what are the investment options? They’re out there if you look for them.

which means we use less energy and water, and therefore pay less.

The introduction of nature into the built environment has wellbeing benefits. Mental health of employees is better when nature is in their environment—whether that’s indoor plants, natural materials, such as timber, or better views of outdoor nature. It’s quite well documented that improved mental health and well being benefits translates into financial benefits in improved tenancy occupancy rates.

If we start looking at green buildings at a precinct scale the benefits are broader. There’s solutions for mobility and transport infrastructure that allows an urban precinct to function better, for example creating better access to the building precinct with more walking options and options for electric vehicles and infrastructure. By nurturing premium tenancies those financial returns continue over the life of that asset.

And yes, returns can vary. In some cases, you often have to make a number of investments over a number of years before a new venture can start securing that financial return. And some of those returns can be on the outside, they could be introducing a whole new business model to a sector or disrupt or help disrupt some of the inertia that’s part of the system. The urgency is in making sure we do thousands of these investments every year and don’t lose time.

Aiming for a New Global EconomyAlthough it’s true that Australia has lost a lot of the last decade through debate, uncertainty and inertia, what keeps me optimistic is that when I look at what the solutions are for the transitions to a safer climate and a more sustainable planet and economy, and I think about our country, Australia has a brilliant endowment of natural, physical, human, financial, geographic assets and resources.

All these things are what is needed in a global economy that is decarbonised and sustainable. Australia can be a low carbon energy super power. Australia can be a winner in a low emissions world.

The world has changed fast before, sectors have changed fast before. This time it needs a pace of change on a massive scale. To get the initial direction of change accelerated it’ll take a big nudge and that nudge needs to come from all sectors—consumers, investors, government and supply. Climate change is going to need all of us and all the ingredients are there, it’s now time to pay attention and to dial it up.

What excites me the most is that the solutions that are good for emissions turn out to be good for society on a whole other realm as well. That’s what gives me hope for my daughters. If we stabilise emissions for a safe climate, we’ve actually also achieved an economy which our children can grow up in that won’t be increasing the environmental harms as we are now. They will live in a world with cleaner air, hopefully more harmonised communities, and more diverse sources of income geographically and economically. All those things combined will make for a safer world not just climatically, but geopolitically as well. See you there.

Anna Skarbek is Chief Executive of Climateworks, an independent, research-based, not-for-profit organisation committed to catalysing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. She has considerable private and public sector knowledge as an experienced non-executive director, investment banker, policy advisor and lawyer. She is also a Guardian of Impact Investment Group.

Achieving Results in a Challenging EnvironmentClimate change is both a long-term challenge and a short-term urgent challenge. To achieve the long-term goal of stabilising our climate before we reach a temperature increase above 2°C, which is what scientists consider a dangerous tipping point, we need to imbalance the scales in terms of emissions.

Temperatures will keep rising until we no longer add more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than we can absorb in any year through natural sequestration in oceans and trees, or physically absorbed through carbon capture technologies. Reaching that point is a case of helping a thousand flowers bloom. It will take thousands of infrastructure investments to turn over all of the assets that currently use fossil fuel energies and emit greenhouse gases and replace them with non-polluting energy.

Reaching those short and long-term goals can and does happen. For example, in the short term, the financial returns on a solar farm can be available within a year or two of it being constructed. Once it is connected to the grid, it can be earning income from selling the electricity that’s displacing the fossil fuel energy in the grid. In the long term, that solar farm is an infrastructure asset that can operate for decades to come.

When we look at investing in green building—not only will that building exist for decades, more importantly from the day it is built it is performing in the most emission efficient way and not locking in emissions for decades. Behind the beautiful facade there’s clever technologies and smart optimisation that means its environmental performance is much better than the average building. Constructing a new building in an emission neutral or energy efficient way brings immediate financial returns the day the building is tenanted. Smarter buildings are more energy and water efficient,

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Joel Solomon’s book The Clean Money Revolution opens with a surprising premise for an influential investor who’s been in the game for a long time: “We need to start talking about money in ways that dethrone it and make it subject to human ethics and standards of love and decency.” That sounds like a clarion call for our generation.

Joel writes intimately about his many years of experience in politics, business and investing, and the moments where he was able to take stock and think deeply about the best impact he was making with his money. In sharing his story and that of others like him, he draws a picture of a world recreated by using the trillions of dollars we currently have circulating the globe to heal the multiple crises we are facing. The people who have already started, he says, are also taking advantage of the greatest economic opportunity in history.

Joel’s story is a reminder that our world is what we make it, that the economy is a human construct and can be remade from our highest intentions and our best selves.

In conversation with Berry LibermanPhotography by Grant Harder

Joel Solomon Creates Clean Money

18 C O N V E R S AT I O N 19 BUSINESS & FINANCE

Berry Liberman: What made you move from an early career in politics to looking at using business as a force for good? What was influencing you to be like, “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m going to do”?

Joel Solomon: Well, I went through a period of retreat and seeking and searching, and it had to do with a health diagnosis and rejecting the family business and needing some time in my mid-twenties. I got diagnosed with the family genetic kidney disease which basically said, “You could die soon, you could live long, there’s nothing you can do about it.” So that was also a challenge that aggravated me. I said, “What should I eat?” It’s my kidney, like, it’s got to clean out the toxins, and the well-meaning doctors of the time said, “Just be careful about that. Don’t get on weird diets. That’s not important.” That message I just didn’t buy. I went to my first ever health food store and tried to figure out what was in there and how that related to me and the whole idea of eating better led me down a pathway towards a business, which was, “Why is it so obscure to find clean food?”

During the years where I went into retreat I did things, physical things, like living in the wilderness and I care-taked and worked on an orca research laboratory, I did a lot of reading, studying, thinking. From philosophy to politics to metaphysics to history, feminist literature, all kinds of things that might give me better perspectives. The revelation that finally came to me was, “I was born into what I was born into and I’ve been given these opportunities with my family wealth, and I’m going to use what was given to me but use it differently.”

I was asking myself some pretty big questions around that time—what do you do with your career, and should you just live off that money, why work? I got involved with Threshold Foundation who were bringing together people to talk about those personal issues and start to understand philanthropy. Many members were going into family foundations and maybe wanting a career in philanthropy. So I got immersed with a group of about 150 people at the time who were challenging all those assumptions, asking questions, giving each other support, and also doing emotional, psychological and spiritual practices to help them deal with who they were in relation to having more wealth than most people and what do you decide about your life. That gave me strength to determine that I could actually make a choice and I could develop a so-called career that was based on who I really was.

So what then got you to the work that you’ve devoted your last 25 years to?

Out of that Threshold Foundation there were those of us who wanted to talk about investments and business. And the group at the time decided that it wanted to work on being a community, so about 15 of us got together around something called the Social Venture Network. The premise of this was that you could use business and entrepreneurship for doing good in the world. People like Anita Roddick and Body Shop, Yvon Chouinard and Patagonia and Ben and Jerry, they saw the burning bush and they got in [laughs]. And I got to sit at their knee and listen to those stories. And Ram Dass was a member. He was brought there as a spiritual entrepreneur.

A 9-minute read about refocussing your family legacy to contribute to the world in a meaningful way.

Threshold Foundation is a community of individuals transforming wealth into an instrument of social and environmental change.

The Social Venture Network now encompasses more than 500 leaders of for-profit and non-profit sustainable enterprises.

Bernie Glass was, in Yonkers, part of a Zen Buddhist community who felt their calling was to serve those in the most need—they started a bakery. And the bakery employed ex-convicts and people in very challenging circumstances. I watched Ben and Jerry get excited about meeting Bernie Glassman’s group. They made a deal to have the brownies of the ice cream sandwiches that Ben and Jerry were selling made there at the bakery, the Greyston Bakery. It was a beautiful story for me. That the ice cream company that’s making happiness and cleaner ice cream decides to purchase its brownies from a very meaningful operation that was a not-for-profit that’s helping people’s lives recover.

When my father died I said, “Okay, my family legacy is in shopping malls. What can I do with this that I would find meaningful that carries forth the expertise there?” So I went into hyper local real estate. And neighbourhood real estate. The city that I was in, Nashville, Tennessee—that’s where my father was when he died—was going to suburbanise everything and tear apart the downtown and kill all the old neighbourhoods and destroy the buildings, and were going to be heavily dependent on burning fossil fuels, to drive people far out to the suburbs. Which made no sense! We had a well developed downtown and lots of urban neighbourhoods. So let’s bring them back to life. And bring culture and creativity and smart business practices back, and use them as political machinery.

So if you were to encapsulate what you have actually been doing for your whole adult life where you’ve been working as an investor and as a businessperson, it’s that you’ve been using your investing to contribute to the world in a meaningful way?

Yes.

How else would you extend that sentence?

Well it’s bigger than that. I would say, “creating a platform for influencing more things.” If you’ve got the ability to create a platform that has some power and influence to it, use it. It’s like we say, “Impact investing.” Every investment has impact of course. Business is going to have a certain amount of power to it if it succeeds. Well how do you use that power? I’m an entrepreneur at heart, I love getting from point A to point B, I love helping create new things that other people don’t want to do or don’t think are going to make them as much money, but to me they’re doing something important and meaningful like the organic food industry just as a simple example. And now the renewable energy industry and the green building industry and we can go on with a long list. So it has been more about creating the ability to influence the world around me than it is about building a business.

I was raised by refugee entrepreneurs. My family are Jewish on both sides, so the same paradigm of civic responsibility, but also watch your back and make sure that the society you live in and promote is one of justice for all human beings because if that turns, like the times now, well watch out. But I was also raised by hardcore patriarchs who really valued the capitalist system for what it could provide the individual and the tribe. So if you could build big enough walls of money around you,

Greyston Bakery has an Open Hiring model which creates opportunities for people facing barriers to employment. They bake almost 16kg of brownies every day which they ship to Ben and Jerry’s.


you were protected to a large degree. So it was a survivalist mechanism for my family. At the core it was fear-driven, for sure. But everything changed for me in understanding that money was energy. And that we could talk about money and love in the same sentence if we start to ask certain questions. So I’m going to ask you, what is money?

Well, I agree: money is energy. And money is the embodied energy of people—labour, and extraction from the planet. We harvest things and if other people need them we get money for them. If we can pay people a wage that is such that we can sell the product that they make for more money, that’s capitalism. We make some money on the embodied energy that came from planet and people, and I do believe that God is love and that it all was created for the opportunity of enlightenment. That this energy form that is money gives us the ability to exchange energy for tangible items that we want.

You say in the book, “Money is perhaps the most dominant religion in the world today. We need to dethrone it and make it subject to human ethics and standards of love and decency.” How do we do that?

[Laughs]. Well, I wish I really had an easy answer for that. All I can say is that we continue on the path of self-exploration and attempt to add awakening and wisdom and enlightenment. In the big grand struggle between love and fear, we just keep doing everything that we can to express what our deepest beliefs are. I think we have become quite distracted as humans. We have poorly used this great gift that we’ve been given of life. We’ve forgotten that there were generations of people who worked hard to give us what we have. A certain balance is required to maintain it. And a certain wisdom over the use of this power and these resources. If we fully go down the path of the more “me against the world” view, we are likely to blow the Garden of Eden that is the other possibility.

I believe that we have the ingenuity, the power, the intelligence to choose, should we choose, that all of our money can be directed towards things that are regenerative and that help. And if we fall into thinking the whole reason for money is to win and to accumulate a bigger and bigger wall around ourselves, then we cost ourselves a lot of beauty, we cost ourselves love, we cost ourselves the true wonder of the experience of being alive.

I think we all know that some of the people with the least money on the planet have more satisfaction in life and more ability to feel joy and to feel love. And many of the people with the most money are the most miserable. And they’re deeply unhappy and fearing people. So yes it’s idealistic to think that we might all figure that out together. But there’s not really a lot of proof that more and more money brings more happiness, joy, satisfaction. And there is a lot of proof that more love and more caring and more awakened behaviour can bring us more joy and love and satisfaction.

Why would anyone be critical or suspicious of an economic paradigm that values equally people, planet and profit?

I think because they have missed having the right kind of nourishment in their lives. The right amount of love in their lives. The ability to have self-respect.

In 2017, research out of the University of Zurich found that giving to others activates an area of the brain linked with contentment and the reward cycle.

“ If we fall into thinking the whole reason for money is to win and to accumulate a bigger and bigger wall around ourselves, then we cost ourselves a lot of beauty, we cost ourselves love, we cost ourselves the true wonder of the experience of being alive.”


That creates fear and unhappiness and those things drive greed and accumulation as a substitute. There are so many examples now of ways we could do business that shows the possibility that more people on the planet could have more happiness, peace and love in their lives as the goal. Instead we’re creating bigger bunkers and walls and guns and attempt to dominate what’s around us, and that does not lead to a good outcome for most of the individuals that succeed at it.

The economic model you write about and practice is one of interdependence. How does that work? And how could people who are cynical or unpracticed in this mindset get to understand something so new? Or maybe it’s something so ancient, I don’t know.

I think it’s ancient and it’s new. I think the answer to that is if they sincerely want to enter that inquiry then they just need to keep asking the questions. And going to places where they might find inspiration and insight about the questions. I’m pretty confident that people have the ability to do inquiry and if you seek, you often find. All I can speak from is my personal experience, from my observations and reflections on the world around me. We are in an interdependent, synergistic, symbiotic system that we can understand by looking at nature and by looking at what we know about earth and how things unfold here that those lessons are all around us in the natural world. It’s not that it’s simple. It’s not that there’s not pain. It’s what we do with those experiences—and I’m a practitioner of the spiritual pathway that chooses to believe that I can find peace, joy and love.

You write about the hundred trillion-dollar question. What is the hundred trillion-dollar question?

Are we going to use our intelligence and invest that money in solving the challenges that we’ve created in our innocence as humans and think about the long-term again, the long-term future, and accept that our job is to make that future better for the people who come after us, and that that’s the highest purpose of life?

Most of the major problems that we face on the planet are solvable. They do take a lot of money and capital. We’ve been fairly philosophical about this in the conversation so far; we can also look at the facts about what it means to destroy the oceans. To destroy species. To destroy the soil. To continue burning fossil fuels recklessly and destroy the climate and therefore, you know, back to my metaphor of destroying the Garden of Eden, destroy this incredible place called Earth and the life that we’re able to have on it. A hundred trillion dollars is enough to solve most of those problems. Now what we’re seeing is you can’t really argue anymore about whether there’s a business opportunity in organic food. Whether there’s a business opportunity in wellness practices. In helping people eat better, think better, treat themselves better.

We know that if we continue going down a path that’s completely fossil fuel dependent when there’s another alternative of investing in infrastructure that then has energy sources forevermore, these are becoming not just irrefutable but people are making fortunes on it. So all across every sector of the economy

we are seeing disrupters emerge that are being smarter about what’s coming and they’re betting on that. That’s changing the face of the economy. Major oil companies are investing in renewables. And they’re investing in how they can be less damaging with the current extraction processes and deployment of those fuels.

Eventually, as we hit big enough crises on poor practices, probably governments will be in a position where they have to regulate more and intervene in that way—as they always intervene in the marketplace. The concept of “free market” stands on as weak of a footing as most major orthodoxies. And the examples across the landscape right now of what’s emerging economically make it clear to me where to place my bets.

What next?

REFLECTIn Joel’s story, there is a distinct move to make new of what he inherited. When his father died, Joel asked himself, “My family legacy is shopping malls. What can I do with this that I would find meaningful and that carriers forth their expertise?” Think about the inheritance you’ve received and how you can carry forth your family’s legacy in a way that honours them and is meaningful for you.

READBe sure to check out Joel’s groundbreaking book, The Clean Money Revolution.

Another favourite that explores the themes in Joel’s story is Adam Kahane’s Power and Love.

ACTDiscover the role you can play in helping move the $50 trillion currently in circulation toward true prosperity. Sign up to Joel’s newsletter at joelsolomon.org and learn about the banks, businesses and super funds that are doing good for the world.

VISITLearn more about Joel’s mission-driven venture capital firm Renewal Funds at renewalfunds.com. Also, if you’re fortunate to hold financial wealth, and you’re on a journey to making sense of that, take a look at Threshold Foundation.

LISTENIf you want more of Joel’s story and wisdom, tune into his chat on the Dumbo Feather podcast, available where all good podcasts are found.

Get your ears on the Fireside Chat podcast series from Making Money More, a lifestyle business that explores new ways to meaningfully engage money, social impact, sensory awareness and inner transformation.

The full version of this conversation can be found in Dumbo Feather issue 53.

We highly recommend Sharon Salzberg and Ram Dass for spiritual practices that lean into peace, joy and love.


Kate Raworth is a Renegade EconomistKate Raworth is an economist—a renegade, maverick, rockstar economist. She’s got serious mainstream pedigree—from the UN to Oxford—along with passion, imagination and insight to move us out of the trenches of business-as-usual economics.

In 2017, Kate published her seminal work, Doughnut Economics, Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, in which she highlights how old economic models created tools, norms and mythologies that keep failing us. Thrillingly, the book also shows us how we can rethink, reclaim and redraw economics.

Kate’s model is a strikingly simple analogy for a flourishing society where the outside of the doughnut represents the ecological ceiling that we cannot go beyond, and the inside represents the social foundation that we should not let people fall below. It provides more than a glimmer of hope; it is a framework for recovery and a gateway to a true economic transition.

In conversation with Kaj LöfgrenPhotography by Siddharth Khajuria


Kaj Löfgren: You’ve said before that you felt almost embarrassed describing yourself as an economist when you left university. How did you find your way back to reclaiming the label?

Kate Raworth: Well I still introduce myself as a renegade economist [laughs]. I did development economics as a Masters degree, which made more sense to me than anything I’ve been taught before. But still I felt it was very much a space of markets and prices. And I just didn’t ever identify as an economist. When I worked at Oxfam I had a colleague who in our meetings would always say, “Well, thinking as an economist…” and I would think, Why wouldn’t you think as a whole human being? So I never wanted to identify myself with this authority of economics. But when I discovered the name “renegade economist” it just felt totally appropriate to what I was doing and the spirit I was coming from. Being playful but seriously challenging. And it opens conversations.

So I do want to reclaim the word “economics.” Because you go back to the root of that word, it’s made up of two Ancient Greek words, ecos and nomos. So ecos the household and nomos the norms or the rules. And so “economics” literally means “the art of household management.” And it couldn’t be more urgent today. We urgently need a new generation of household managers at the planetary scale, managing this shared household in the interests of all its inhabitants. When I frame economics back to its Ancient Greek meaning, well then I passionately want to be an economist in that broader sense.

You start your book with the phrase, “The most powerful tool in economics is not money, not even algebra, it is a pencil. Because with a pencil you can redraw the world.” And you’ve taken your pencil and drawn a doughnut. What is the essence of Doughnut Economics?

So all throughout my career I’ve tried to draw images of the theory that I was expounding. And the doughnut is this compass for 21st Century prosperity. How do we meet the needs of all within the needs of the planet? And then a fascinating question comes: if that’s our goal, to get into the doughnut, then what kind of economic mindset would give us the best chance of getting there? What are the deepest models and concepts that we could equip ourselves with? Because my goodness what is being taught is in no way equipping us to take on the challenges that we all know lie ahead.

I’m interested in going back a bit to the origins of this story. Where did it stop being useful to us in terms of where we were as a humanity?

That’s a big question! So I wasn’t taught economic history at university and I think we should all learn the history of the ideas that we’re taught. Because ideas come from a certain time and a place, they’re created by someone with a particular worldview. The economists who came up with them were brilliant people. I say “people,” they were all rich white northern men. But they in themselves were brilliant. They often saw the caveat or the blind spots or the historical limitations to their own ideas. They offered them with more caveats than they have now. So we’ve simplified them and taken them almost to be like laws.

A 10-minute read that will shed some light on the history of economics and more.

The Wealth of the Nations proposed that within a given stable system of commerce, individuals would respond to the incentive of earning more by specialising their production.

In the Western World, economics was not a separate discipline, but part of philosophy until the 18th–19th Century Industrial Revolution, which accelerated economic growth.

The founding fathers of capitalism date back to the mid-18th Century. They included Adam Smith, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman among others.

I think the economists themselves would be mortified to see how their ideas had been used. But let’s go back, we could start with Adam Smith in 1776 famously writing, The Wealth of Nations. He wrote this very famous sentence which has come to underpin the power of self-interest in market economies. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer and the baker that we expect our dinner, but it is from their regard to their own interest.” Meaning people don’t do things out of generosity but their own interest, and the market allows us to do this without ever meeting and talking. Well the wonderful irony was that Adam was aged 43 when he wrote this and he’d never married. So he didn’t have a partner or children to raise. He actually moved back in to live with his mum while he was writing this book. So imagine if at that moment he was writing, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, the baker that we expect our dinner,” if she had said, “Adam! Dinner’s ready!”And he could at that moment have realised, “My goodness, my mum is the one who delivers my dinner!” He could have invented feminist economics right there and recognised the importance of the unpaid care economy. But he didn’t.

Oh goodness. How much pain we could have saved [laughs].

Yeah. He only focused our attention on the market. And his message got simplified and turned into this drive for market-first economics. Another story from the 1870s, almost a century on, a small group of economists were desperate to show that economics was a science. And the science of the day was physics, that of Sir Isaac Newton. So they looked at Newton’s diagrams, he drew a diagram of gravity pulling a ball to rest, using calculus to show the rate at which it would fall. And they drew their diagrams exactly in the style of Newton’s to show, by analogy, it looks like physics. They even used metaphors saying, “Just as gravity pulls a moving ball to rest, so prices pull markets into equilibrium.” They were desperate to show it was science so they made it like the equilibrium science of Newtonian mechanics. Well physics has moved on. But economics is still based on this very strong analogy.

Let’s come forward another couple of hundred years, 80 years ago Paul Samuelson wrote the foundational textbook of economics called Economics. And in it he drew a diagram of the whole economy, which was a big picture of macroeconomic flow. It’s called the “circular flow diagram” and it shows money going round and round between households and businesses and some of it going through governments or through banks or through trade but it’s all money going round and round. It’s closed, it’s circular, it’s self-contained. But it’s absolutely gaping with holes that are massively relevant to today. It serves nothing of the living world. Says nothing of the unpaid care because it falls out of monetisation.

So we’re still working with a mindset developed hundreds of years ago that focuses exclusively on what’s monetised. It assumes that we act because we have an interest and we put our personal interest first. And it is silent on the living world on which we deeply depend. We’re trapped in a deeply outdated mindset.

One of the things you talk about is that we need a new portrait of humanity at the heart of economics. That there’s something around

Macroeconomics is purely concerned with phenomena such as inflation, price levels, rate of economic growth, national income, gross domestic product and changes in unemployment.


“ If you go back to the root of the word economics, it’s made up of two Ancient Greek words: ecos, meaning the household, and nomos, meaning norms or rules. So economics literally means the art of household management.”

human nature and self-awareness and maybe even psychology for how we design our societies and economics.

I think we need to start with a much richer concept of humanity. So yes of course we can be motivated by self-interest, but we’re also socially reciprocal. Actually let’s look at how we do behave, we reciprocate with others. We assist strangers. We collaborate with other people until they defect and then if I’m cooperating with you and then you cheat me, I’ll punish you. I might even go out of my way and impose a cost on myself to punish you. So we’re reciprocal cooperators.

The old theory imagines us having fixed preferences, that I just know what I like and then I come to the market and I assess all the different options in the market and I maximise what I like. And we’re either seen as consumer or worker, and we’re told, we hate work and we’ll actually do as little work as we can for as much return. That’s just not true. People actually, rather than being work-hating, I would say, are purpose-seeking. And people will work for nothing for extended time if they believe they’re part of a purpose they believe in. So we’re worker or consumer. Then again we’re seen to want to get the most we can for the least amount of money. And again that’s just not true in terms of people’s values, in terms of what they actually want to be part of. We’d rather create than merely consume. But also we’re so many other things in between. We’re a neighbour, a parent, a volunteer, an investor, an entrepreneur, a student, a professor. And each one of us in all of these different aspects of our lives can play a role in shaping and reshaping the economy.

You know, this almost vicious idea that’s become a truth for our current economics is the quest for growth. And economic growth as the be all and end all, the only indicator of success. We’ve gone through a number of election cycles in Australia now where that is literally the slogan of the election campaign: “jobs and growth.” I’m interested in how we overcome that absolute addiction to the idea of growth? At a nation-state, global level. But also at an individual level.

So I agree with you. This is a profound addiction. And I believe that our addiction to the notion of endless growth is written into the structure of our economies so that the very structure of the institutions have been designed to depend upon unending growth. I’d say after a century of consumerist propaganda we’ve been convinced that we will transform ourselves by buying something more. Again history, understanding history and where ideas came from, always helps us as a first step in releasing ourselves from them.

So let’s go back to the 20th Century. The nephew of Sigmund Freud’s, a man called Edward Bernays, he invented what he called propaganda and the public relations industry. He realised that his uncle’s psychotherapy could be used for very powerful retail therapy. And he recognised that his uncle, who realised that we had deep seated desires to belong, to be regarded, to be seen as attractive or important, that these could be connected to consumer purchases that we should desire to buy. So instead of advertising a car saying it’s faster, it’s shinier, it’s fancier, he would show an advertisement that would subconsciously connect the car to male power and status. So we’ve

One of the more recent philosophers to have highlighted the altruistic and purpose-seeking nature of human beings is Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning.


lived through a century of Edward Bernays brilliantly using his uncle’s psychotherapy to lure us into endless retail therapy. I wish he were alive now and we could say, “Okay Edward, well done. Now please join the other side of the team. How do we undo this?” Because it’s been so written into expectations of what a good life is. So how do we undo this?

One of my favourite quotes is from the psychoanalyst Adam Philips who says—this isn’t word for word—“Our excesses are actually the greatest sign of our poverty. And the place where we have the greatest excesses mirror where we’re most impoverished.” Because actually when you talk to many people about what the good life is, when they’re brought into that conversation maybe as community member, as citizen rather than triggered as consumer, they’ll talk about having a strong sense of community. Feeling secure and safe. Feeling that it’s a thriving place, that it’s a friendly place to live. It’s not about growth.

Finally, just to go back to the metaphor itself, we think that growth is a wonderful thing. Of course we want growth, right? It’s spring! The flowers are growing! My children are growing! Yes. But that’s an incomplete understanding of the deep metaphor of growth. If I tell you that my friend went to the doctor and was told she had a growth, that feels very different. Because we know also that when something begins to grow uncontrollably within a healthy living system, we deeply understand that it is a threat to the integrity and thriving of that living system and it has to be stopped. So actually we have a bigger metaphor of growth to tap into in our lives, but we don’t take that to the economic sphere. What we need are economies that make us thrive whether or not they grow. And it might be a small flipping word, but it’s a profound flipping mind-shift. We need a new language, a new concept, new metaphors and new evidence that this can work. So to me that’s the journey to go on.

I’m really interested in where the doughnut model is being manifested in the world? Like what examples are you seeing of people using Doughnut Economics as a theory of doing real work in the world?

So I teach at the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford. And one of my students was from China and had gone back to China. And he emailed me and said, “I’m sitting in a conference in Beijing. The deputy director of China’s renewable energy centre is launching the report that sets out what the government plans to do in terms of transitioning from today’s fossil fuel-based economy to a renewable energy system. And the second slide that he’s showing is your doughnut.” And he’s put it up on a screen next to a quote from President Xi Jinping saying, “Man must learn to live in harmony with nature.”

Wow. How extraordinary.

Yeah. That meant a lot to me actually. And then there are many teachers, definitely at schools, who say we’re desperate to teach these new ideas to students. So I want to work with them, give great material that they can bring into the classroom and help have dialogues. I’ve been contacted already by teachers from Sweden who said, “I’ve just spent a whole week teaching the doughnut. And allowing students to bring all sorts of thinking, whether it’s biology or chemistry or physics, to how we meet the needs of all within

the needs of the planet?” So teachers are seeing this opportunity. And there are professors in universities who want to bring this in and question the growth paradigm.

You know, I drew the doughnut which is a vision of the world that is safe and prosperous for all. Doesn’t mean I think it’s easy to achieve it. I’ve set out the mindset I think will be the best way of equipping today’s students with even having half a chance of bringing this about. But sometimes people say to me, “Oh I love your optimism!” And I say, “Hang on, I didn’t say I’m optimistic.” In fact I’ve come to say, “Don’t be an optimist if it makes you relax.” It’ll be fine! Technology will sort things out! We always figure things out! Don’t be an optimist if it makes you think like that because it’s very dangerous to sit back on your heels right now. There’s absolutely no evidence that this thing is going to sort itself out. But also don’t be a pessimist if it makes you give up. If it means you feel overwhelmed and you turn your back and you just don’t want to be part of this because it’s too overwhelming. I say be an activist. Right? Don’t be an optimist or a pessimist. Be an activist. And ask, what can I do? From who I am, from where I sit, as a parent or a neighbour or a voter or a member of the local council or an entrepreneur or an employee. I’m a student, I can put up my hand and ask different questions. Or I’m a professor, I can bring different materials to class. I’m a financier, I can transform the kind of finance I offer. We actually all have many different avenues of influence and networks that we’re embedded in.

What next?

ACTThe doughnut is a great overarching model for balancing sustainability with a good level of abundance. How might you apply some of the concepts of the doughnut in your company?

WATCHKate features in Damon Gameau’s extraordinary documentary, 2040, which shares a vision of what the world would look like in 20 years’ time if we act on all of the environmental solutions that are currently available to us.

Get your eyes on Kate’s TED Talk: “A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow.”

REFLECTQuestion some of the assumptions about the golden rules of economics, and take a look at where they came from. Are they serving us and our shared household like they originally intended? What particular rules need rewriting?

Think about our addiction to growth. How do we become more conscious of our addiction rather than just accepting it as an underlying assumption of everything we do? How can we overcome the addiction and introduce a healthier behaviour?


Head over to page 6 of this book to see and learn more about Kate’s doughnut model.

32 C O N V E R S AT I O N32 33 BUSINESS & FINANCE33

Don Shaffer Invests in RelationshipsDon Shaffer is at the deep end of the pool when it comes to thinking about financial capital and investing.

For 10 years, he led an investment firm based on the economic principles of Rudolf Steiner.It serves borrowers who are committed to sustainable practices and investors who value community impact as well as profit.

He grew the organisation in every conventional measure, but also deepened its commitment to its values. He moved the bank from a fairly traditional set of services to focus on a new type of relationship with clients—one that was direct, transparent, personal and based on long-term relationships, flipping the typical exchange we’ve grown accustomed to with banks.

We love Don’s wisdom, kindness, incredibly calm nature and his strong resolve.

In conversation with Danny AlmagorPhotography by Angela DeCenzo


Danny Almagor: So I’ve been asked what does love mean in the world of finance? And how can we connect those two words? And maybe we can start there. So we just start on the shallow end and then go deeper, right?

Don Shaffer: [Laughs]. Well, at RSF we are a financial intermediary. We do lots of investing and direct lending into organisations that would not be in business but for the social-environmental mission that they have. Our purpose is to transform the way the world works with money. What we mean by that simplistically is to move from transactions to relationships. And that’s a deceptively simple phrase but if you really live it and try to get closer to what it is you’re investing in and also for the entrepreneurs, for them to truly understand where their money is coming from, as opposed to it being a black box or totally anonymous source, this is actually a fairly radical act. To take that seriously, either with your investing dollars or as an entrepreneur seeking capital, is radical.

And so what we believe is that we’re at a turning point right now in the world. There are many, many, many people who are intrigued by this idea of how you can express your core values through your money and through your investments and not have to compromise and wonder, Am I complicit in things like climate change? Am I contributing to things that are not good for the earth or for human beings through my investing? And coming to terms with that and facing that head on and realising that there are choices, there are more conscious choices that you can make now, is a very big deal. There’s so much money that is out there being invested and it’s critically important for us at this stage, with the challenges we’re facing, to believe it’s possible that we can have a loving relationship in the way that we’re investing or the way that we’re seeking capital as entrepreneurs.

Tell us a bit about Rudolf Steiner and in particular the profound wisdom he had around economics. And then how that manifested into RSF Social Finance.

Sure. I didn’t know much about Rudolf Steiner when I started at RSF ten years ago. And he’s a philosopher, scientist, spiritual seeker from the early 20th Century in Europe and made contributions like Waldorf Education, bio-dynamic agriculture; he made contributions to architecture, medicine and healing, a whole range of other things. He gave a series of lectures in 1922 foreseeing that the world was going to become a more and more globalised economy and that there was going to be more international trade and as a result of these more complex financial systems we were likely to become progressively disconnected from each other as economic actors in the world. We weren’t going to be able to see as easily where our money was going. We weren’t going to be able to be as visible to each other as participants in financial transactions of various kinds. And he saw this as potentially troubling.

I remember in 2007, 2008, just as I was coming on at RSF as the financial crisis was kicking in, US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who had been chair of the board of Goldman Sachs previously, was quoted on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. When asked what we should do, he said “God help us.” That was his precise advice. It struck me at that moment that

A 9-minute read that shows us just how much value can be gained from relationships.

Rudolf Steiner had been quite prescient in what he was seeing. That we had to really go deeply into this question of how we can be more visible to each other in financial transactions and try to understand each other’s needs and intentions. Things like CSAs or farmers markets, in the field of agriculture and food, are very concrete examples of where we can have more of a sense of shared risk that’s based on a connection between what’s happening in a transaction. So we are trying to apply those principles and model them in a fairly radical way so that we can bring money in financial transactions back down to earth.

This is at a time where there’s rampant algorithmic intra-day trading in the stock market and those folks are being rewarded with hundreds of millions of dollars that they’re essentially skimming off of each transaction. So I feel like I’m a financial activist in a way to stand up and say, not just me but thankfully lots of other people standing up, “Why are we allowing this to happen? Can we do better? Is it possible for us to reimagine our financial system and still have it be as vigorous, still have there be all the healthy benefits of trade that all of us believe in and the benefits of private enterprise? And do so in a way where we stay connected to each other as opposed to things being so opaque and anonymous?”

And one of the things you guys do is instead of setting interest rates; what you do is you bring your lenders and your borrowers together in a room and get them to decide on the rate that should be going between them. That’s very cool. I mean the bank I’m with has never asked me what rate I would like. How do you create this model where you get people to see each other?

I often describe it that way actually: “Imagine if your bank called you and said, ‘As a depositor at the bank we’d like you to come down next Wednesday to meet the people who are borrowing your money.’ And then they’d call the entrepreneurs and say, ‘Why don’t you come on down to the branch next Wednesday and meet the people whose money it is that you’re using to grow your business?’” It’s those two groups—the investors or the depositors and the entrepreneurs or the business owners leaders—that actually determine what interest rate the borrowers will pay and what rate of return the investors will get. They actually hammer it out together in the same room. One thing that’s really important is that this is an embodied experience—that people are meeting each other face to face. It really makes a huge difference to sit across a table from someone and look them in the eyes and learn more about their stories.

Some of the entrepreneurs that RSF has helped fund include Farmer Foodshare, Pachamama Alliance, Sun Power and Synergy Clothing.

RSF Social Finance is a non-profit financial services organisation offering investing, lending and philanthropic services to individuals and enterprises.

“ It’s critically important for us to believe it’s possible that we can have a loving relationship in the way that we’re investing or the way that we’re seeking capital as entrepreneurs.”


We ask questions like, “Can we go around to all the investors or depositors in the world and share why are you investing with RSF? And why are you seeking to have positive impact in the world through your investments?” Then we say, “What did this loan make possible for you as entrepreneurs?” Invariably what happens is something that you might think is counterintuitive. You’d think that the investors would clamour for the highest return they could get and you’d think that the borrowers would want to get the lowest interest rate possible. We’ve been doing these meetings every quarter for the last nine years, and every time what happens is one or the other of them, unscripted, unprompted, sometimes it’s the investor who stands up and says, “If I took a little bit less return I can see how that would help you Joe or Jane entrepreneur have a lot more impact in the world with all the good things that you’re doing.” Or one of the entrepreneurs stands up and says, “If I paid a little more so there could be more of you investors and more dollars going to organisations like ours, we could really change the world.”

So this is the core principle around interconnectedness that we all have to get with at this stage of where we are in the world. I think that so many more people are connecting the dots and realising that we’re interdependent.

I’m just trying to imagine the room of people. Who are the investors that come into your organisation? What type of people are they that are coming to you?

So we have 1600 investors. And then we have a couple of hundred organisations at any given time that are borrowing money from us. So we have a couple of hundred million dollars on our balance sheet at any given time, a couple of hundred million dollars in assets. And we’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars of loans since 1984 when we started. The minimum investment in our core loan fund is a thousand dollars. So one thing that we feel is important is to democratise the impact investing movement and allow for more people to participate.

The other thing about the demographics of our investors is that about 70 percent of the assets we hold at RSF are held by women with inherited wealth, a spiritual disposition and a driving passion to change the world. It’s my belief that, for whatever reason, women have a deeper intuitive sense about the problems going on in the world. Whether it’s climate change, community health, poverty. Then they turn out to be a lot less afraid than men to experiment with things like what I just described about our pricing model for our loans. They believe that it’s possible to reimagine something different. Whereas with the big banks and mainstream financial institutions there’s a tremendous amount of inertia and status quo and all the incentives are geared of course to just continue doing the same thing.

I’d like to examine these concepts of short-term and long-term outcomes, because it feels like a lot of these issues that we’re trying to deal with through impact investing—climate change, poverty, et cetera—are right at the edge. And I’d like to know how should I think about those two concepts? Where we’re looking for the long-term but there are some really short-term urgencies in front of us?

“ It’s those two groups—the investors or the depositors and the entrepreneurs or the business owners leaders—that actually determine what interest rate the borrowers will pay and what rate of return the investors will get.”

RSF takes a holistic approach to funding—what they call “Integrated Capital”—combining financial capital and other resources to help the enterprise grow.

Don and his partner Michelle Long are the co-founders of Jubilee, an investment platform for building beautiful portfolios.


Well there are different ways to think about that. Our entire financial system is geared towards short-term outcomes. The CEOs of companies, of listed companies on stock markets, they despise having to have quarterly earnings reports where their entire business is being judged. Every business, every decision is being judged on a cycle of 90 days. If you think about it it’s kind of absurd to expect that long-term value creation with your capital would be judged literally every 90 days and if you hadn’t achieved a very significant number of milestones related to growth outcomes on a quarterly basis, then your stock would get dinged or you’d be replaced and your management team would be replaced or what have you. So everything is geared towards short-term outcomes as opposed to long-term relationships. That’s again where the love factor comes in. I mean it may seem sentimental to talk about love in the context of finance and economics. But this is really at the heart of it. Of course you would not go into any relationship judging it on a 90-day cycle, right? And so why should you look at your investments differently?

The point is that I think there’s a correlation between the fact that things are so opaque and anonymous and based on short-term outcomes that if we can’t get soon to a world where financial transactions are more direct and transparent and personal based on long-term relationships then we’re pretty much screwed. Let’s take climate change. If you’re paying attention this is not a theoretically “perhaps in 20 years” thing. And so if we’re seeing tangible signs now that means we need to start unwinding all the bad things that we’re doing to contribute to it much more quickly and we need to build towards all the more regenerative things that we possibly can think of all the more quickly and all those regenerative things—whether they’re in agriculture or energy, whatever other sectors that you think of when you think of investing related to climate change—you have to be thinking about the long-term ramifications of every part of what it is that’s being affected in the system through your investment. So that’s what I’d say about the urgency. There’s urgency but long-term investing and how you think about investing is critical to it.

I have to say you remind me of Muhammad Yunus in a sense—Muhammad Yunus the banker to the poor who started Grameen Bank, which is a micro-finance bank. And I remember when he started the bank he said, “I looked at what all the traditional banks were doing and I just did the opposite. They were lending to men so I decided to lend to women. They look for security, we’re going to lend to people with no security.”

I’m going to resist the Muhammad Yunus comparison but the thing that is similar (and of course we have studied Muhammad Yunus’ work), is that we’ve lent out as I said hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, and we have a less than two percent default rate over that time which, by any

In 1983, Professor Yunus successfully melded capitalism with social responsibility to create the Grameen Bank, a microcredit institution committed to providing small amounts of working capital to the poor for self-employment.

In banking, commercial loans are considered nonperforming if the debtor has made zero payments of interest or principle within 90 days, or is 90 days past due.


objective standard, is very, very low. And the reason is because we work very hard to build relationships with our borrowers and then we connect them with each other and with the investors. That’s the key to micro-finance, it’s this associative principle of investors and borrowers connecting with each other and having accountability to each other. What we found is that when you build real relationships, it actually lowers the risk and it increases the fulfilment for everyone involved. So it’s got that dual benefit.

What next?

REFLECTThe first question in this interview would be jarring for most people: “What does love mean in the world of finance?” Why do you think it feels so out of context to talk about love in this way? How can you start to put money and love together in your life?

Don has more recently been working on a platform to help people create beautiful investment portfolios. What might a beautiful investment portfolio look like for you?

Another of Don’s ideas: what if borrowers and lenders agreed on a rate between themselves once they understood each other? How could you help foster more meaningful relationships when it comes to money, and how might that improve the outcome for all?

LISTENFor more on this topic, check out Danny Almagor’s Fireside Chat podcast with Gino Borges at makingmoneymore.com

WATCHCheck out “Wealth in the Age of We” by Charles Eisenstein, and all of the awesome content on the Charles Eisenstein website about redefining our money system.

“ I’d really like to see people believe that it’s possible to design what I call a ‘beautiful portfolio’.”


Food & Agriculture

“ Small farms make economic sense. They also produce more happiness, more beauty, more health—those things that aren’t so quantifiable.”Wendell Berry, poet and farmer

“We have the evidence that we are totally dependent on the natural systems that govern the generation of oxygen, that hold the planet

steady within the temperature range that is safe for us. If we disrupt the natural systems by clear cutting forests to the point where it

impacts the chemistry of the planet, and the temperature of the planet, then it’s not just the

trees and birds that suffer. We suffer.”Sylvia Earle, marine biologist

“ Women produce 60 to 80 percent of food in lower-income countries. Most of them are operating on fewer than five acres. We also know that women smallholder farmers consistently have less access to land rights and to a whole host of critical resources from water and seeds to capital. When you close that gap, farm yields rise by 20 to 30 percent.”Katharine Wilkinson, climate communicator

“ What industrial agriculture has done is replace the natural function of our ecosystems with an artificial function just so big corporations can make a profit. That’s led to mass destruction and erosion of soil. Regenerative farming practices can restore soil health and start to rebuild our ecosystems.”Charles Massy, farmer

“The single biggest obstacle facing a food and farm paradigm shift is not money,

not know-how, not desire. It is the freedom to sell and the freedom to buy

food from healthy landscapes. Offer this in the marketplace and the explosion of

innovative nutrient-dense, ecological-enhancing products would completely

change the face of food and farming.”Joel Salatin, farmer

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here are two distinct futures of food and farming. One leads to the regeneration of

our planet, our soils, our biodiversity, our water, our rural economies and farmers’ livelihoods, our health, our democracy.

The second leads to collapse of the planet’s ecosystems and of socioeconomic systems that sustain rural communities and society, with the speculative, unstable financial system controlling the future of food and farming. The future of diverse species, our common human future and our daily bread depends on which road we take.

The regeneration path reverses the degradation of the earth, our food and our freedom. It paves the way for a habitable future, building on the multiple diverse, ecological paths through which food and agriculture systems have evolved over the past 10,000 years. This is farming in nature’s way as co-creators and co-producers, with diversity, respecting nature’s ecological cycles and people’s rights. It is based on recognising that the web of life is a food web, and maintaining that is the first objective of agriculture.

Care for the earth and community is the most important investment in the regeneration of our degraded land, food and democracy. Food is the most basic need, and a fundamental right. Food sovereignty is our birthright.

Food produced ecologically and distributed democratically ensures that good food

The Future of Our Daily BreadBy Vandana Shiva

mind that sees itself at war with the earth, with biodiversity and farmers. It defines human progress as removing care and responsibility from the economic system and food system. It defines efficiency and productivity in terms of replacing farmers who grow real food with care, by chemicals and machines, without assessing their impact on nature and society, and without taking any responsibility for the impact.

The dead end road is industrial and was paved by the Poison Cartel, which was born during the war to create chemicals that can kill people. After the wars they redeployed war chemicals as agrichemicals—pesticides and fertilisers. We were told we can’t have food without poisons. Explosives that were made by burning fossil fuels at high temperature to fix atmospheric nitrogen were later used to make chemical fertilisers. The slogan was that there would never again be scarcity of food because we can now make bread from air.

There was the exaggerated claim that artificial fertilisers would increase food production and remove all ecological limits that land puts on agriculture. Today the evidence is growing that artificial fertilisers have reduced soil fertility and food production—and contributed to desertification, water scarcity and climate change.

Contrary to the myth that small farmers should be wiped out because they are unproductive, small farmers are providing

50 percent of global food using just 30 percent of the resources that go into agriculture. Industrial agriculture is using 70 percent of the resources to create 50 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions while providing only 20 percent of our food.

We do not need to go faster and further down the road that has destroyed the planet, our biodiversity, our farmers and rural economies. There are other paths, which farmers of India and across the world have walked for 10,000 years that have been rejuvenated through diverse agro-ecological systems, and show the direction to the future.

For the earth, for farmers, for all humans, a transition from an industrial, corporate-driven food and agriculture system to an ecologically sustainable, socially and economically just, politically participative, healthy food and agriculture system has become an imperative.

Such a transition is being shaped by thousands of food communities across the world, in the north and the south. They are taking the road to the future, and abandoning the dead end road.

Dr Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist and food sovereignty advocate. This is an extract from her 2018 report, “The Future of Our Daily Bread: Regeneration or Collapse.”

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T contributes to the health of the planet and people. It also ensures that no one goes hungry, and no one is condemned to eating poisoned bread. It is based on diversity of knowledge systems, including the knowledge within living systems and local economies. It is based on diversity of food economies, from the local to the regional to the planetary. It is based on democracy.

Diversity and democracy create resilience. In food systems, the resilience created through diversity is multidimensional. Bio-diverse organic farming slows the impacts of climate change and instead contributes to climate resilience. Biodiversity creates health resilience—from healthy soils to healthy plants and healthy people. Small diverse farms create ecological resilience. When combined with local circular and cyclical economies, small ecological farms create socially and economically resilient communities.

The second road is a dead end road of industrial agriculture and industrial food systems based on a war against the earth. It leads to ecological collapse of ecosystems and ecological processes that sustain life, economic collapse of rural economies and destruction of livelihoods of farmers who care for the earth and provide food.

The paradigm that has led us down this road is the violent and obsolete paradigm of the mechanistic, militarised, monoculture

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hen I purchased Mt Rothwell, a conservation and research reserve

50km from Melbourne, I started paying attention to ecosystems and understanding how they could be recovered.

The deeper we got into the work, the more we realised the broader impact we were having beyond rebuilding these threatened species populations. Now we work with a range of farms, and have created seven Cs which we seek to address with each project.

CreaturesWe really want to breed up the numbers of endangered animals on our farms so that they get to sustainable populations. For each farm, we choose a threatened species to be the focus. It doesn’t mean it’s the only species we focus on, but it means we build the ecosystem around it. The first animal we worked with at Mt Rothwell was the eastern barred bandicoot, which was thought to be extinct in Victoria. About 10km from where I grew up, a small population was found in a tip and put into a captive breeding program with Zoos Victoria. The role we played was to breed them in a fox-free space on the land rather than in captive pens. Since then we’ve put back eastern barred bandicoots, southern brown bandicoots, rufous bettongs, eastern quolls. We’re re-building the hierarchy of mammals.

ClimateOne of the greatest things we can do is sequester a lot of carbon into the soil. To a degree we make sure we’re not an emitter of carbon either. In our work we measure our soil carbon so that we can demonstrate to people how much the soil can take, and now we’re selling carbon credits on one of the farms for the first time. It’s important that we’re reducing waste. We are connected to an orchard where there’s a big deal of waste, and that’s bad for methane. So we’ve created a system where we can reuse as much of the offshoots as we can. We also take green waste from Melbourne to our farms and turn it into compost, which brings life back to the soil and means we again sequester carbon.

CorridorsCorridors is about connecting two or more larger areas of similar wildlife habitat. I’ve got two approaches. One is a landscape corridor, so it might be a forest like the Brisbane Ranges and Werribee State Gorge where there’s a beautiful forest, then farm land, then another beautiful forest. And you plant trees and other native vegetation to enable migration and colonisation of plants and land animals. The other is where you create a series of wetlands which birds and bats can move between. So we would look at a piece of land and say, “What other linkages are there?”

Building a Business that Supports Biodiversity By Nigel Sharp

Then we go micro and look at how corridors work on a farm. “Are they following drainage lines or a creek? Are we rejoining a couple of bits of remnant vegetation with a planting linkage?” We have a farm that fronts the Lodden River and by doing the planting correctly along the drainage lines, we can improve the river health. We get terrestrial carbon back into the river, which is good for the fish, and that flows into the whole river system corridor.

CommunityCommunity is really fascinating because it happened organically; it’s not something we set out to achieve at the beginning. It started up at Mount Rothwell when I found people keen to come and volunteer with us and work. Now we have students come to do studies on our farms. We’ve done programs with Corrections Victoria where they bring offenders who are incarcerated to work on the land. Then there are people who are just fascinated by nature and want to do a night walk and learn more about the animals. Each time we get involved with a threatened species there’s a recovery team, and that’s usually made up of people who are just passionate about that species.

CultureCulture is about how we work together as an organisation. It’s how we share information and practices across all the projects we work on, and

how we stay on mission. Then in a bigger sense, it’s how we work with our First Australians because they know so much about the land and land management.

Cashflow and CapitalIt’s critical that we have financial returns on our farms—that as well as having this incredible social and environmental impact, we are also making money. We want to demonstrate, particularly to our investors, that impact investing can support biodiversity solutions. Tiverton is one of our assets where there is an operating sheep farm along with many other regenerative practices happening. We had a really interesting situation with our wool there. We’d been raising the sheep on these native grasses, and the quality of the wool was fantastic. We started getting fantastic prices for it. Recently we had our wool sales and it was the first time an apparel buyer wanted to buy our wool because of the quality as well as the conservation story.

Nigel Sharp is the founder of Mt Rothwell Conservation and Research Centre.

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Mossy Willow FarmMossy Willow Farm is a thriving market garden that uses regenerative, no-till practices and feeds more than 500 people a week.

Based in Main Ridge on the southern coast of Victoria, it is run by farmers Keren Tsaushu and Mikey Densham, and owned by Berry Liberman and Danny Almagor of Small Giants.

Photography by Gregory Lorenzutti

Customers attend weekly farmers markets across Melbourne, have boxes of seasonal goods delivered to their door, and travel to the farm gate to shop, meet the farmers and see where their food is grown.

In the two years that Keren and Mikey have run Mossy Willow, a community of passionate farmers, growers and eaters have come together around the work.

Building nutrient-rich soil is central to Mossy Willow’s methodology, which in turn creates an abundance of nutrient-rich produce year-round.

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Mossy Willow is part of a new era of agriculture: one where high-quality production doesn’t come at a cost to nature.

A diversity of crops are planted to build a resilient, self-sustaining ecosystem.

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The Built Environment

“ That common sense which understands that nature is fundamentally important to us as natural creatures on this finite planet—which can do without us but we can’t do without it—is being overridden.”Bob Brown, environmentalist

“When you choose to live in a certain place, a little bit of that neighbourhood becomes a part of you and a little bit of

you becomes part of the neighbourhood. There’s a sense of responsibility in how

you contribute to your area.”Claudia Bowman, good neighbour

“ People are realising that we don’t need a 50-square mansion. We can live in a 10- to 20-square home that has minimal impact and footprint on the environment, still have as much beautiful outdoor space, and still have the same amount of rooms inside.”Dave Martin, Director of The Sociable Weaver Group

“ We can transform cities into carbon sinks such that they are not just generating emissions but sequestering them. This is about designing cities to have the same or greater levels of ecosystem services than the natural systems they displace.”Paul Hawken, founder of Drawdown

“If you have a city and you believe that you can make it

safe, and you believe that the buildings can be beautiful, if

everybody believes it, then they will make it so.”

Tim Smit, co-founder of The Eden Project

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e know now that the prosperity created by the free market has not delivered good

health and happiness for humans or any life on this planet. Our younger generations are looking for alternatives. They see nothing to be gained from the conventional way of dealing with life, where we’re orienting too heavily towards profit and growth. They are at a crossroads with no pathway forward and suffering mental illness as a consequence.

The solution is to create revolutionary lighthouse communities that set an example for others to follow. Communities that encourage a lifestyle that is deeply intertwined with the natural world and in fact works within the laws of the ecology. We cannot surrender to the present singularity paradigm, which will end up with us becoming perfect slaves to technology and artificial intelligence, and which devalue the dignity of the human being. We need direction and leadership for a new way of being.

I have a vision for this new paradigm community. It brings 100,000 people together on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia. Sumbawa is a beautiful island, about three times bigger than Bali, with incredible beaches, forests and natural flora, and at the moment there are only one million people living there. It has a small harbour and runway. So we need clever city planners who will utilise the abundance of space and natural materials like hemp and bamboo to build interconnected homes.

It’s incredibly important that this community is 100 percent off the grid and 100 percent relying on natural resources. Everybody would be harvesting their own energy from the environment and sharing it and caring for one another. There would be community farms, which everyone tended to and sourced their food from. There would be natural housing made of local bamboo materials as we have successfully done in Bali for many years, and a natural clean water system from the nearby river or lake.

Essential to this vision is the empowerment of women. This will embed sustainability and kindness into the lifestyle and a more open approach to schooling. There would be a natural order to the community where misunderstandings could be solved. This is not a utopian dream, but a paradigm shift that can absolutely happen, and must happen before the generational illness gets worse.

With climate emergencies ahead, we are only going to have more and more refugees from across the world. We already know that governments don’t want to wholeheartedly embrace them. In this alternative industrial development, if you embrace them it is of benefit to the community and to the economy. We want diversity, like nature—it thrives from diversity.

If we look at our cities now, we can give them all makeovers. Wall gardens, street curbs, eatable garden everywhere! The biggest

Building an Eco-communityBy Amir Rabik

contribution to global warming is the concrete. I prefer to go out to the country where there is a lot of space than feeling locked up in the cities, but we can do both. It means we need more people moving and building regions outside of the cities. If you look at the map of Australia, there’s a lot of empty space. Let’s build communities there where we take advantage of all the housing and community innovation we have now. Let’s build resilient regions that work harmoniously with the nature.

Bamboo is the perfect material to help build these lighthouse sustainable cities in Indonesia. I have been working with bamboo and coconut wood for the last 40 years in my architecture. The advantage of using bamboo is that it grows fast, it provides a versatile and strong raw material for timber, and it is a very good crop to integrate with others in a typical agroforestry setting. It is also very good at storing carbon and water in the soil so it helps the ecosystem. We can build strong, resilient structures within the ecology using the materials of the environment.

We need a complete paradigm change. Nobody believes that money can come from the trees. When we talk about business as usual, that’s where it’s coming from—the tree. Because you can reimburse the carbon you take from the tree with money and spend it on carbon from somewhere else. This paradigm has to change. And we have to start small.

As soon as we start this process of building intentional communities that work with the ecology, everything comes alive. The nature is alive. The butterfly is alive. The economy is alive. The relationships are alive. The love is alive. Because we start from nature. We need people brave enough to start it.

Amir Rabik is one of the world’s leading sustainable architects and designers. He has worked for over 40 years from Ubud, Bali to create change towards a better ecology. He invites readers to get in touch, visit him in Bali, share knowledge and collaborate.

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Berlin’s Holzmarkt: a Co-created, Co-operative Urban Oasis

alking into the elaborate urban experiment that is Holzmarkt, a sign over the

entrance declares, “Big dreams need space and courageous investors.” In the fast-changing social and economic landscape of Berlin, it has miraculously achieved both.

Holzmarkt grew out of the famous Bar 25, a squat-turned-club on the banks of the River Spree, less than two kilometres down the river from Alexander Platz and the centre of Berlin. Cooperatively run, it’s a place where people from all ages and walks of life can come and find an activity to enjoy, from a relaxed lunch by the river through to dancing into the early hours of the morning.

It is now home to more than 20 independent projects, including a reincarnation of the original club Bar 25 called Katerblau, the upmarket Katerschmaus Restaurant, a café, a sourdough bakery, several bars and a wine shop, a kindergarten, co-working spaces, a yoga studio, cultural facilities, and two stages for theatre and events. There’s a playground with sandpit and slide nudging up against the Pampa Beach Bar, a fire pit for chilly evenings and, tucked in along the riverbank, publicly accessible places to sit by the river and watch the world go by.

It is a secret garden, with new delights around each corner. A meander down to the riverbank reveals the entrance to a swish

waterfront restaurant. There are green-planted archways and public boardwalks hugging the river’s edge. Peek around the back of the bar and before you is a full-sized trampoline. Ania Pilipenko, collective member and co-founder of Holzmarkt 25 Cooperative and Cooperative for Urban Creativity calls it, “An alternative wonderland where people could create.”

Holzmarkt has achieved that rare event in informal urbanism of securing institutional investment, from Swiss pension fund Abendrot. This enabled the Holzmarkt collective—Holzmarkt 25 Cooperative and Genossenschaft für Urbane Kreativitet (Cooperative for Urban Creativity)—to acquire the land from the State in an open sale in 2012, signing a 75-year lease and contract with Abendrot. Holzmarket as we see it now was officially opened on 1 May 2017.

The manifesto underpinning the cooperative includes principles around open access, diversity, revenue sharing and a commitment to maintaining affordable business and living spaces: “At the wood market, we think of nature, economy and culture together.”

Their vision is for a place with no walls dividing communities or locking people out. It is a clear reaction to the city’s past—Holzmarkt is metres away from where the Berlin Wall once divided the city into East and West. But it’s also a reaction to the city’s present pattern of commercially-driven urban development and

By Mitra Anderson-OliverPhotography by Nailya Bikmurzina

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rapidly escalating land prices. As stated by I Heart Berlin co-founder Frank R. Schröder, “Contrary to the recent developments in Berlin that have corporate greed, expansion and profits at its core, the Holzmarkt wants to be a place for the people, for creatives and for alternative lifestyles. It’s like the counter concept of the soulless hellhole that is currently being constructed near-by between East Side Gallery, Warschauer Straße and the train tracks.”

It is conceived of as a unifying force, bringing people together from all across the world, from all walks of life, all ages and stages. The Holzmarkt manifesto continues: “No wall, no fence blocks the view to the Spree. The wood market will attract, delight, inspire and bring together people from Berlin and the world... The wood market leaves room for new things, does not remain static.”

While there are things you can spend money on here, it’s been consciously planned as a place where people can escape from the commercialisation of the city. The site itself is treated as public open space—there’s no restrictions on bringing in food and drink, and the open space is managed by the citizen’s association Mörchenpark eV. So you can get yourself a delicious €5 micro-brew on tap at the bar, or else grab a €1.50 Berliner beer from the convenience shop down the road and enjoy it by the riverside.

The Holzmarkt model of sustainable revenue-making and commitment to diversity runs deep and could be understood as one of the founding principles of the whole organisation and precinct. It is built by many, run by many and caters to many. Many hands, heads and hearts have been involved in dreaming Holzmarkt and seeing it come to fruition. It’s the kind of development that simply could not be planned “from above.”

You can see evidence of the human scale, of individual attention to detail and interest in every corner of the precinct. That said, it is also slap-dash—rough-hewn wooden boards are nailed together here and there to make a seat, a boardwalk, a ramp. There are wild rambling plantings—this is not the work of a coherent landscape plan, but rather many hands making light work of re-wilding the riverbank, but for humans too.

From the River Spree, looking back at Holzmarkt.

A long daylight-savings’ evening in Berlin’s late summer.

Holzmarkt started with one illegally parked VQ combi van and a few shacks in the mid-2000s.


Originally there were plans to develop student accommodation and a hotel, as well as to improve access to the public pathways and the Spree. However, disagreement between the cooperative and the city government has led to a stalemate, and even renewed threats to shut the precinct down, with new proposed noise controls demanding silence after 9pm. A protest was held in June this year, against “blackout hours at 21 o’clock, karaoke ban and street parades that can be monitored.” The pension fund has rescinded the lease over one part of the site, and it remains unclear where the development can go next, and whether the current mix of projects and businesses will be sufficient to financially sustain it.

A Bit More on the History of HolzmarktHolzmarkt started with one illegally parked VQ combi van and a few shacks in the mid-2000s. A “tiny improvised bar made of recycled wood at the end of an overgrown footpath in the wastelands of the Spree riverbanks in Friedrichshain” is how Schröder describes it. “The bar grew bigger ever year, adding a small circus arena, a pizza parlour, a restaurant, a spa, a pool, a hostel and more cute little things to its world making it a little paradise that you never wanted or needed to leave. They started the whole cult of going to a place and not leaving it for five days straight.”

The whole rambling village was eventually bulldozed in 2010: “No-one believed (or wanted to believe) that the five-day mega event was the actual end until a few days later the bulldozers came and waltzed the whole wooded village to the ground. It was probably the biggest heart-break of a whole generation of Berlin party kids,” wrote Schröder.

Shortly after the same operators secured a temporary lease over a site directly across the river, opening KaterHolzig. It was always known to be a temporary arrangement, successful nonetheless, and eventually shut down to make way for a high-end apartment development.

With the support of several investors, banks and Swiss pension fund Abendrot, the founders managed to require the original grounds of Bar 25, and Holzmarket—as we see it now—was officially opened on 1 May 2017.

Bulldozers demolished it entirely in 2010, but individuals, banks and a pension fund invested and Holzmarkt re-opened in 2017.

The banner translates to, “If nobody can live in Berlin, it is finally quiet.”

Behind this window is Holzmarkt’s childcare centre.


About the Investment ModelIn an interview with journalist Kristine Wong, Holzmarkt co-founder Ania Pilipenko shared how their collective carefully structured the business, and developed an alternative investment model. For a start, they cleverly split accountabilities for the business into two distinct cooperative structures. The Holzmarkt 25 Cooperative decides upon the built form and physical structure of the site. The other half, Cooperative for Urban Creativity, handles the money side of things, entering into lease agreements and contracts and managing the investment model, including allocation and management of shares and shareholders.

Together, these cooperatives have 100 members. Pilipenko explains, “Each member of Holzmarkt has at least one share, and shares cost €25,000 each. We have sold about 200 shares. But no matter how many shares each member has, the person only gets one vote when we make decisions. With the €5 million we raised, we applied for credit from a bank in Germany that focuses on sustainable projects. We also got €2 million of funding from an investment bank in Berlin.” While investors expect to get a return on their investment, Pilimenko is clear that profit maximisation is not the ultimate objective, and that investors are on board with the ambition to fold profits back into the social and creative projects that give meaning and life to the project “because culture and arts is what makes this place so interesting and attractive to people.”

This investment model has enabled the collective to build serious financial capital, without sacrificing creative independence and autonomy, remaining true to their roots of self-organisation and anti-commercialisation. Through this, the founders of Holzmarkt and their courageous investors have created a physical expression of these ideals, and a place where people can go to celebrate them in. Holzmart encourages its visitors to dare to dream that there is a different way to develop our cities, where the people are more than customers or consumers, but rather creators of their city.

Mitra Anderson-Oliver is Head of Urban Design and Strategy at Impact Investment Group.

Holtmarkt’s central courtyard, under the windows of the co-working spaces and the childcare offices.

“ No matter how many shares each member has, the person only gets one vote when we make decisions.”

Co-founder Ania Pilipenko


Renewable Energy

“ Renewable energy, in some places, is the least expensive electrical energy in the world. Fossil fuel and coal are dying, it’s just a question of how long they persist. The cost of new fossil fuel wells or mines is going up on a year-to-year basis, with the exception of fracked gas, which will persist for 10 to 12 years—then that too will climb.”Paul Hawken, founder of Drawdown

“Climate change in many ways presents us with an opportunity to build our own

solutions, build our own alternative sources of energy, and create lifestyles and

communities that we want to live in. And in Australia, we’re one of the sunniest and

windiest countries in the world. We have such huge opportunities to move towards

100 percent renewable energy.”Amelia Telford, Co-director of SEED

Indigenous Youth Climate Network

“ Through our shared efforts we will make the complete transition to a world powered by renewable energy in enough time to save a lot of what is magnificent and precious. Yet there will be further dreadful loss as we go. So we must simultaneously hold in our hearts and minds the awful truth of what is happening and the sunlit possibilities of the beautiful world that is still ours to create.”David Ritter, CEO of Greenpeace Australia Pacific

“ We don’t have the luxury of a planet with infinite natural resources. We’ll finish. And a life that’s based on continued economic development on a planet with finite natural resources is stupid, it doesn’t make sense. We have to change that attitude. Listen to Gandhi who said, ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed’.”Jane Goodall, primatologist

“You often hear politicians say we built the economic strength of this country on the back of coal-fired power stations and

mining. But those days are gone. We know renewables are now cheaper. And we all

know that coal-fired power is not only producing emissions that are powering climate change, but it’s also imposing a

health impact on the community.”Lane Crockett, Head of Renewable

Energy Infrastructure at IIG

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enewables is an obvious choice for investment for a number of reasons. On

the economic front, they’re often regionally or rurally based so there’s lots of economic activity created with new skills and jobs. On the social side, it’s obviously providing clean energy, so it’s benefiting the health and wellbeing of people who live around current fossil fuel infrastructure. The more renewable energy we create, the less coal we have to burn.

While we try to dwell on the positives, there are real risks if we don’t invest in renewables. On the macro level, Australia has signed up to the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit climate change to 1.5-2°C of warming. So we need to set some post-2020 policies that actually meet the requirements of what we agreed to. The risk is that we end up with a very carbon-intensive economy while everybody else has moved to a far more efficient economy. Australia is one of the highest carbon emitters per person in the world, but what doesn’t often get talked about is that we are also one of the highest carbon emitters per unit of energy used. So, if there’s an impost on carbon internationally we’re going to be very inefficient and have to transition very quickly. That puts us in economic peril.

Here at the Impact Investment Group, we are trying to invest in new clean energy infrastructure. Unfortunately there is a lot of market uncertainty, because we don’t have

emission reduction policies post-2020, making it very difficult for investors. Policy uncertainty is also inefficient, resulting in higher costs to transition to clean energy, which is ultimately borne by the consumer. This is happening already with prices climbing across the country, impacting everyone—whether you’re an industrial user, small businesses or household.

The demise of coal is obvious and certain. So it’s just perplexing why we’re still debating it. Where does it stem from? Incumbent businesses have a power that is often unexpected. You could see, for example, when the Hazelwood Power Station was closed how much fuss there was about those jobs. I understand the pain and the nervousness and all that. But at the same time, if you look at when Tony Abbott came into power there was something between four and five thousand jobs lost in the renewable energy sector over 12 months. And there was not a word said about that. The unbalanced reporting by some media outlets that have a bias towards fossil fuel energy is terrifying. Fairness is a very strong value for me, so when I see unfair reporting, it just makes me work harder.

You often hear the politicians say we built the economic power of this country on the back of coal-fired power stations and mining. But those days are gone because renewables are now cheaper. And I struggle with the fact that we all know coal-fired power is not only producing emissions that are powering climate

Moving Money into RenewablesBy Lane Crockett

change, it’s also imposing a health impact on the community. If you do the numbers based on US data, somewhere between three and five thousand people die early because of coal-fired generation. But you’d never hear that. More people die from vehicle pollution than they do from road accidents. But you never hear that as well.

I think that in 20 years time our children and our grandchildren are going to look at us and say, “What did you think you were doing? You knew what was happening and you didn’t transition quickly enough.” Either they’ll be saying, “Our environment is terrible, our weather is terrible, we’re struggling through this” or, “You caused a massive economic impost on us as a generation”—or both. I don’t want my children looking at me and saying, “You didn’t do anything.” My wife Fiona and I have talked a lot about how we see the future evolving if we don’t do something about reducing emissions and climate change. We spend a great deal of our time working towards a future, both in our work and the way we live, that will be better for our children.

The good news is that renewables are getting so cheap. They’re becoming so cost-effective that it almost doesn’t matter now that governments aren’t leading on this. It’s going to happen anyway, it’s just not going to happen as quickly as it could or should. But it’s absolutely inevitable. Investors are getting behind it,

businesses are getting behind it. Look at the Business Council of Australia today. They’re now advocating for some form of price on carbon or a clean energy target. That council is kind of the last bastion of resistance.

So it’s an exciting time. We have so many opportunities to create a future for ourselves which is cleaner, safer and healthier. And it’s great to be part of this change. Working in an industry which creates jobs and regional investment while reducing our impact on the world feels really rewarding.

Lane Crockett is Head of Renewable Energy Infrastructure at Impact Investment Group.

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Chinchilla Solar FarmThis is a glorious new solar farm in the Western Downs of Queensland. About 300km northwest of Brisbane, it quietly and humbly turns the sun’s energy into electricity, which will power homes, businesses and electric cars.

Photography by Pat Wood and FEAT

We expect this solar farm will run for 25 years, and because it doesn’t emit any toxins (unlike coal and gas-fired generators) it will save about 11,700 people from pollution-related diseases.

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If you look very closely at the road between the solar panels you’ll see a long afternoon shadow coming from a person. That’s Heidi Leffner, the lead singer of Cloud Control and the founder of Future Energy Artists (or FEAT)—an artist-led movement to reshape the environmental legacy of the music industry. Via a managed investment fund set up by FEAT in partnership with Future Super, artists can own a stake in this solar farm, and others like it around Australia.

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David Suzuki is a Force of NatureDavid Suzuki became the face of the environmental movement when he left the lab for the screen in the 1960s, recognising that popularising science was the best way to shift the ecological agenda. After earning his PhD in zoology he launched the Canadian series, The Nature of Things, which has become one of the most popular nature shows of all time. He has written more than 50 books (19 of them for children), produced for the Discovery Channel, and in 1990, founded the David Suzuki Foundation to promote sustainability.

One of David’s most famous thought experiments compares humans to exponentially growing bacteria in a test tube (the earth): “Let’s suppose at 55 minutes one of the bacteria says, ‘Hey guys, I’ve been thinking, we’ve got a population problem!’ The other bacteria would say, ‘Jack! What the hell have you been smoking? The other 97 per cent of the test tube is empty and we’ve been around for 55 minutes… At 59 minutes, they realise Jack is right.’ Our home, the biosphere, is finite and fixed,” says David, and our attempt to grow infinitely within it is impossible.

In conversation with Livia Albeck-RipkaPhotography by Grant Harder

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Livia Albeck-Ripka: Thirty years ago you asked, “Can we find a way to shift our perceptions to find a view that will encompass both our technical achievement and our ties with our planetary home?” What do you think, have we found a way?

David Suzuki: No, we haven’t yet. The problem is that we keep asking nature to fit our agenda. If we look at our Paris meetings we have 195 countries trying to negotiate the future of the atmosphere (that doesn’t belong to anybody) through the political lenses of 195 national boundaries and 195 economic agendas. Everybody saying, “Oh I don’t know if we can afford this, are we going to pay the money? I don’t want to pay this money!” Wait a minute folks—don’t we all agree that the air is something that is absolutely critical for our survival? If we don’t have air for three minutes we’re dead. If we have to breathe polluted air we’re sick.

We still haven’t understood that the most important thing everybody needs is clean air, clean water, clean soil and clean energy. That has to be at the foundation of however we live—protecting the air, water, soil and sunlight we capture in photosynthesis. Then we can ask, “How can we make a living? How can our countries survive while protecting those things?”

But unfortunately we do live in a world where the dominant myth is that the economy and marketplace rule.

Yes. This is absolute suicide, to act as if the economy must be served above all else. The very word “economics” comes from the same word as “ecology.” Eco is a Greek word for “household” or “domain.” Our domain is the biosphere. Ecology is the study of the biosphere, which is the science that attempts to find out how can species live sustainably, indefinitely. Economics is the management of the household. Economics should be subordinate to ecology.

Whatever the economy does shouldn’t violate the principles of sustainability. But that’s not how we do it. We’re altering the chemistry of the atmosphere; it’s having a tremendous impact on weather and climate. But it’s crazy to think that we have to keep going this way to keep the economy going. The economy is a human construct, we invented it. We can change the rules of the economy. We can’t change the rules of ecology. Those are nature’s laws.

As somebody who’s tried all these methods of communication, what’s the best? What’s going to wake us up from our stupor?

The people who have taught me everything about a different way of seeing the world are the Indigenous people that I’ve encountered from Australia to Canada, to Africa and South America. Everywhere that my wife and I have met Indigenous people, they tell us the same thing: the earth is our mother. When they say that, they’re not speaking metaphorically or poetically. They mean it literally. We have done terrible things to the original people of Canada. Yet they have survived with a strong sense of their attachment to land. And after all we’ve done, they’re still willing to share that perspective with us. Twenty years ago, the attitude towards First Nations people was really horrific. Totally racist. If I did a program 20 years ago about alcohol, I wouldn’t have hesitated

A 7-minute read about working within nature’s laws and learning to ask the real questions.

to put a picture of a drunken Indian on skid row in the show. Today that is unthinkable. The position of First Nations has completely changed. We have 10 Indigenous members of parliament, and two of them are now ministers, including the minister of justice. Now almost every environmental issue that’s going on in the country is being led by Indigenous people.

I was actually just in remote central Australia, where the Indigenous people have a worldview and vocabulary around it that is totally at odds with the dominant Western myth of human control over land. I was thinking that perhaps language itself—not just what we say but the words we use to talk about the environment—needs to change. It reminded me of your story of a mother being furious with you for calling her child an “animal.”

That was many years ago in Texas at a green building conference. There were a lot of children in the audience. At one point, I said, “the most important thing for you to remember from my talk here is that we are animals.” Their parents were furious! “Don’t call my daughter an animal! We’re human beings!” My response to that is, “if you’re not an animal, are you a plant?” Because we are biological creatures.

The obvious wish that I have is that we could “indigenise” our worldview. But I think there’s still a lot of barriers from the colonisers to take over that kind of language. So the way I do it is as follows: I have the CEO of a major company in the tar sands of Alberta—I don’t know if you’ve heard, but this is a very controversial area. It’s a deposit of oil second only in size to Saudi Arabia, but the oil is like tar, and in order to extract that tar, we have to pump a huge amount of heat down and literally melt it so it can flow

The David Suzuki Foundation draws on evidence-based research to conserve and protect the natural environment, and help create a sustainable Canada.

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What is keeping you motivated now after decades and decades of doing this work?

I realise now that being an elder is the most important time in my life. It should be for everyone. I urge every elder to stop spending so much time on the golf course, or sitting around on the couch watching television— we’ve got something no other group in society has: we’ve lived an entire lifetime. In that lifetime we’ve made mistakes, we’ve suffered failures, we’ve had a few successes. Those are hard-won life lessons and they are priceless. We’ve got an enormous responsibility. This is our job now.

We are no longer running after money, fame, power or sex. We don’t have to worry about getting a promotion or a raise. We don’t have to kiss anybody’s ass. I think we’ve got to talk about what our fundamental needs are, in the way that I talked to that CEO of the oil company: what are the most important things that keep us alive and healthy?

What next?

READFor a complete list of widely-researched solutions to reduce greenhouses gases, check out Project Drawdown by Paul Hawken, the most comprehensive guide ever proposed to reverse global warming.

David has so many books to choose from—all brilliant. His latest is a clarion call to our generation. It’s titled The Legacy: And Elder’s Vision for our Sustainable Future.

REFLECTContemplate David’s statement: “We can change the rules of the economy. We can’t change the rules of ecology. Those are nature’s laws.” What would nature’s laws look like? What rules and conventions do we need to change for the health and longevity of our environment?

Think about what legacy you want to leave the next generation. What contribution can you make for the longevity of our planet?

ACTMake your voice heard when it comes to climate justice and demand action for our future and our children’s future. Check out Extinction Rebellion and the work of Greta Thunberg to learn how to protest in constructive ways.

VISITGo to davidsuzuki.org for science, stories and ideas on climate solutions, biodiversity, cleaner oceans, environmental rights and healthier cities.

through pipes. It’s a very energy intensive source of petroleum that we think should be left in the ground. So the CEO of this company calls me and says, “Can I come down and talk to you?” I said, “Sure. I don’t want to fight.” I’m done with fighting. When there’s a fight, there’s a winner and a loser. And we all have to be winners. So he came down to Vancouver the next day.

When he came to the door I said, “Thank you for coming. I’m honoured. But before you come through my door please leave your identity as a CEO of an oil company outside. I want to meet you as a human being.” Well, he wasn’t very happy about that. But anyway, he came in. I said to him, “Look, I know this is unusual. But I think before we begin to negotiate, we have to agree on what the bottom line is. We have to have an agreement, all of us, on what our fundamental needs are that we have to have fulfilled to be able to live and to be healthy. Let me start by suggesting that if you don’t have air for three minutes,” as I told you earlier, “you’re dead. If you breathe polluted air, you’re sick. So for every human being on the planet, our highest priority should be the protection of clean air. We are absolutely dependent on it for our survival and our health.”

Then I said to him, “Every one of us is 60 to 70 percent water by weight. We’re basically a big blob of water. And the body leaks the water through our skin and our eyes and our mouth so we have to keep drinking water. If you don’t have water for four to six days, you’re dead. If you have to drink polluted water, you’re sick. So surely clean water should be like clean air—a high priority. “And if you don’t have food for four to six weeks, you’re dead. Contaminated food, you’re sick. Most of the food that we eat is grown in the soil. So clean food and soil should be there with clean water and clean air.” Then I said, “Every bit of the energy in your body that you need to move and grow and reproduce, everything of that is sunlight captured by plants in photosynthesis. We get that by eating the plants or eating the animals that eat the plants. And then we store that energy in our bodies. When we need to move or jump or do anything, we burn those molecules and liberate the energy of the sun back into our bodies.” I said, “Could you not agree with me these are the most precious, the most important things that we need to survive and be healthy? So we need everyone to agree that’s the foundation of the way we live. And then we ask, ‘How do we make a living?’”

And what did he say?

Well, he couldn’t agree with me. If he were to go back to his shareholders and say, “I had a discussion with Suzuki, I agree. Clean air, clean water, clean soil. We’ve got to protect that whatever we do,” he’d be fired. I thought that by coming down to talk to me, he was interested in discussion. But he was there really to negotiate. We have to get beyond that.

The way we’re doing it here is by starting a grassroots movement to get a constitutional amendment that says if you are Canadian, you’re guaranteed to a healthy environment. Now, when a company comes in and begins to pollute the air, water, soil, the victims have to go to court and prove that they’re affecting our health. But if we put this in the constitution, then any company will have to prove, before they start, that they’re not going to harm the environment. The full version of this conversation can be found in Dumbo Feather issue 46.

Inadequate management of urban, industrial, and agricultural wastewater means the drinking water of hundreds of millions of people is dangerously contaminated or chemically polluted.

According to the World Health Organisation, by 2025, half of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed areas.

Check out the David Suzuki Foundation’s Declaration of Interdependence, written for the 1992 UN Earth Summit.

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Social Capital

“ Almost every day I come face-to-face with acts of generosity, and see how people are moved and touched by the fact that when they start being generous with their time, with their spirit, with their money, with their gifts, they are infinitely rewarded.”Ronni Kahn, CEO and founder of OzHarvest

“We are expanding our world and our reach in an environment where

there’s no ‘we,’ there’s no bond, there’s no connectedness already presumed.

We have to create relationships with at least a few people who we trust, and

then within those relationships we don’t feel like we have to protect ourselves.”

Terry Patten, writer and educator

“ Ironically, we’ve created an endless source of poverty amid objective material wealth. To be loved, to be in intimate relationships with other beings, is to feel at home. It’s to feel belonging. It’s to feel secure. That’s the deepest kind of security: that you’re loved by many. Money is a kind of false substitute for that.”Charles Eisenstein, gift economy advocate

“ We do live in an interdependent world. This is not being sentimental, it’s not wishful thinking. It’s not always nice. But our lives really are intertwined. That’s the way it is.”Sharon Salzberg, meditation teacher

“I think we are simply custodians of the planet at every level, including

custodians of wealth that comes our way. A lot of people suspect that I

must be secretly very rich, which I find incredibly funny because I am secretly

very rich, but I’m not rich in material wealth—I’m rich in every other thing

that matters to me in my life.”Audette Exel, founder of Adara Group

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ecades ago, one of my friends was volunteering with Mother Teresa in

Calcutta, and one of these major donors walks into the place, checks everything out, and at the end asks her, “Can I take a photo with you?” Mother Teresa says, “Sure.” Except that the photo wasn’t quite perfect. He says, “Can you move over just a little.” Took another photo, and another. At one point, they moved her face to the right and to the back.

Watching, my friend was understandably furious. This is a global icon of service. How can anyone treat her like an object? When they left, she asked Mother Teresa why she didn’t say anything. Mother Teresa responded in one sentence that would change her life: “My dear, there are many forms of poverty.” What Mother Teresa saw in this financially affluent person was a poverty of spirit. And she responded to that with many forms of wealth—the wealth of acceptance, of tolerance, of kindness, of compassion.

In our society today we’re too biased towards the direction of financial wealth. Wealth is equated to money, even when there are so many different forms of wealth.

That singular money orientation hasn’t worked out too well for us. Money is issued in the world as debt, and to pay off that debt we need constant growth. Over time, that forces us to commoditise goods and services that otherwise would just be shared for the love of it—give

somebody a ride, cook a meal for a neighbour, have a friend crash on your couch. Moreover, money orientation breeds a sense of scarcity that isn’t good for our minds, hearts or brains.

So how can we build a bigger pie? In other words, what other forms of capital can we tap into? In 1999, some colleagues and I started an organisation called ServiceSpace. We just wanted to give. We started by building websites for nonprofits, purely as a labour of love. But over time people told us, “Look, if you want to scale this up and continue this over a long period of time, you’re going to have to monetise.” Nineteen years later, our work is touching millions of lives and we still haven’t monetised, we still don’t host any ads, and we’re still not fundraising. It is working because we are tapping into a gold mine of alternative forms of wealth.

The first one is time capital. We all understand this intuitively. Typically, we think, “I offer my time at my work.” But turns out we’re actually really bad at honouring this kind of capital. Recent polls show 71 percent of people feel disengaged at work. It’s costing us $350 billion. Not only that, we have a ton more time to share. For instance, we watch 200 billion hours of TV every year. On Wikipedia alone, people have contributed 100 million volunteer hours and that’s just one percent of what’s possible. How can we channel this underutilised resource towards constructive social change?

Unlocking Multiple Forms of WealthBy Nipun Mehta

Another type of capital is community. We usually frame contributors as individuals, but actually one plus one ends up being greater than two because that plus sign in between has value. How we relate, how we connect to each other can end up changing the entire outcome. If you look at a piece of graphite and a piece of diamond, they’re both made up of the same carbon atoms. The only difference is in how they’re connected to each other. In a world where we’re increasingly isolated, we are longing for community. Leading with relationships, instead of transactions, is not only good for us but creates entirely new possibilities.

A subtler form of capital is attention capital. We all know this intuitively because the entire advertising industry is geared towards monetising our attention. The way we’re using it, however, is shrinking our capacities. Goldfish used to be at the bottom of the rung, with an attention span of nine seconds; now it’s humans, who are now at eight seconds. Our minds are full. Today’s New York Times has more content than one would encounter in an entire lifespan in 17th Century England. What all that content does is over-stimulates our nervous system, leaving us feeling exhausted and dissatisfied. Instead, if we designed for mindfulness, it can really help us unlock this capital.

Time, community and attention each has its own currency. Time is measured in hours and shows up as engagement in society; community has the currency of relationships, leads to social networks and creates trust in our world; attention leads to mindfulness and ultimately positive social acts. And there are many other forms of capital, too. Knowledge capital, with the currency of ideas leading to innovation in society. Compassion capital, with the currency of kind acts. If we start to deeply consider this lens and broaden beyond the scope of money, we can really tilt the seesaw in a different direction—perhaps towards greater love.

The question we’re left with is this—what forms of capital do we want to amplify?

If we use our hearts to assume value everywhere, if we use our heads to wisely invest in the greatest of our capitals, if we use our hands to courageously design for the full spectrum of this wealth, we will create an entirely new solution set for a thriving humanity.

Nipun Mehta is the founder of Service Space, an incubator of gift economy projects that inspires people to be the change they wish to see.

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Konda Mason has Love CapitalKonda Mason is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, Grammy Award-winning music producer and the co-founder and former CEO of Impact Hub Oakland. When it comes to finance and the economy, however, it is the fact that Konda has one of the most expansive, soulful and brilliant minds that makes her a true leader.

Her bio is cause enough to drop the mic. She directs a micro-lending fund for African American entrepreneurs, started The Wellbeing In Business Lab, and co-founded the Community Capital Conference in Oakland, which focuses on building the “we” economy.

Konda’s work is fuelled by a passion to witness in her lifetime a world that is environmentally regenerative, spiritually fulfilling, socially just and economically equitable.

In conversation with Berry LibermanPhotography by Angela DeCenzo

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Berry Liberman: So I’ve heard rumours that you’ve been nominated for Grammys and an Oscar.

Konda Mason: Oh yeah.

How did you get from the music and film world to the social justice entrepreneurial and impact investing world?

Oh it’s all the same. Honestly. The films that I have been involved in have everything to do with change and are just another way of delivering it through the media. And media is very powerful. It’s really important that media is filled with activists, right? Filled with change-makers. So a lot of the media that I did was that. The film that me and my friend, Dianne Houston, got nominated for an Academy Award for was a short film called Tuesday Morning Ride. It’s a really interesting movie that pissed a lot of people off. Other people cry at the end of it.

So you came from the storytelling world, storytelling being both music and film.

Yes. And theatre. I did a lot of theatre in New York. Love theatre.

And then you became one of the founders and CEO of Impact Hub Oakland. Can you explain what Impact Hub Oakland is and why it’s so important in the landscape of social justice?

My life unfolds in a way that I get these deep taps on the shoulder from this internal voice. And I got tapped by a group of people who own the Hub in San Francisco. Impact Hubs are a network of co-working spaces, there’s over a hundred around the world, but at the time there was only 30-something. They tapped me because I spoke at SOCAP on a panel with three black women colleagues, and we were was dissing a lot of these impact investors who are doing great work in Africa and Asia and South America and I was like, “What about in your own backyard?” And so we did this panel and all of a sudden I realised nobody was investing in my own town, Oakland. And yet millions of dollars going out there in the world. So at the end of it the people who own Hub San Francisco said to me and my colleagues, “You should open up a hub in Oakland.” I was like, “I’m not interested in that.” The only hub I knew was the one in San Francisco. And it was filled with a bunch of white middle-class millennial tech guys doing their techie thing.

I thought, It’s great that this happens. But that’s not what I’m interested in. And then in the middle of the night, which is where a lot of my intuition comes, I realised, It doesn’t have to be that. It can be something totally different. It can be what you want it to be. What I wanted it to be was a space where this movement—what my dear friend Paul Hawken may call “this blessed unrest movement”—was centre. So the real remaking of a world with a spiritual underpinning focused on economic equity and social justice.

So at Impact Hub Oakland our front is that we are a co-working space. What we really are is a place of deeper transformation. Yes, people come and co-work,

A 9-minute read that might reframe an unconcious bias when it comes to money and power.

SOCAP is an annual event that convenes impact investors, social entrepreneurs and organisations dedicated to catalysing world change through market-based solutions.

Impact Hub Oakland is a co-working and events space for a global community of professionals taking action to drive positive social and environmental change.

but there’s a deeper conversation happening there all the time. We have amazing events. One of the things that I created with another partner is called COCAP, which is a conference around building the “we” economy. One of my biggest paths on this planet right now has been to address the wealth gap. I grew up as somebody who didn’t have much. I’m from the most devastated communities that weren’t invested in, that aren’t invested in. And I know the beauty of the people who need more resources. But the resources we have are also priceless.

So let’s talk about that. We were together just recently talking about the different kinds of capital.

Well I would say there is an unlimited, absolutely abundant unlimited amount of spiritual and social capital available to us. And financial capital, I don’t know how unlimited that is. I go back to the neighbourhood that I grew up in, or any neighbourhoods that are quote unquote “under resourced.” What you will find, typically, is huge social capital. It’s about family. It’s about community. It’s about what people are now calling the sharing economy. The sharing economy is just a way that people have lived forever who have depended upon each other and shared our resources together to take the next step in life.

Are we going to get lost calling it the share economy and love capital and social capital? Financial capital needs to come off its pedestal.

We have given our power to money. And money is what we think makes us powerful. And what’s powerful is our time with each other. What’s powerful is the time that I spend with you. What’s powerful is the time that I spend going to the hospital with my sister, taking care of my neighbour’s cat. We look at the meaningful things and they seem so small. Because we’re all trying to do such big things. I just want to get a grip that as we’re doing all these big and wonderful things, saving the world, also ask, do you know your neighbour? Do you know the person who is cleaning your building? Are we part of each other’s world? We have to see each other. Not be afraid to fill each other’s hearts. And there’s so much fear. We’re driven by fear, lack, all of that.

How do we get beyond it?

Hmm. It’s interesting how crises bring us together. If a crisis was to happen right now in your neighbourhood and you don’t know your neighbours, people suddenly are out in the streets getting to know each other. But after the crisis is over, we go our way. And that shows me that we are built to care for each other. It is our natural DNA to care and support each other and collaborate. That is really who we are. So we have to walk towards each other.

“ We have given our power to money. And money is what we think makes us powerful. What’s powerful is our time with each other.”

The sharing economy is a peer-to-peer way of exchanging goods and services. It is typically facilitated within local communities or online platforms.

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Can we talk about your very special life? Because the thing that moves me about your life, I tell a lot of people about it. Half your life is devoted to your spiritual practice. And half your life is devoted to your work in the world. Can you talk about that and also the remarkable opportunity you have to be one of the last students of Jack Kornfield, one of the great spiritual teachers on the planet.

Yeah. It’s a blessing. I met Jack in 1995. He just out of the blue reached out to me. I got a phone call from Jack Kornfield! And I was like Jack Kornfield? It was crazy. And it was really Jack, I thought it was a hoax. And he’d gotten my number from someone and he wanted me to teach with him. I was a yoga teacher at the time. And I said, “Absolutely I’ll teach with you. Are you fucking kidding me?” And so I get on a plane and I meet Jack Kornfield. And he’s been in my world ever since. And then I started coming to Spirit Rock and working and being a yoga teacher at his retreats.

Could you explain just quickly what Spirit Rock is?

Spirit Rock is an Insight Meditation centre set in the woodlands of West Marin County in California. You can come for short meditation classes or longer retreats and practitioner programs. So I now, having moved out of the CEO position of Impact Hub Oakland, I am now in this four-year course, which is requiring a lot of me. There’s a lot of study. Like I’m back in school, and I love it. I’m really learning the dharma. And I am teaching and I am sitting. The other part of my life is in the world of business and finance. And how the two must come together. Because what I believe is that we, as I said earlier, we are all deeply interconnected—to each other, to the planet, to that species over there, to that tree, to the air, to all of it. We live our lives in our business life and in finance as if we are not connected. ’Cause if we were deeply connected, if we worked from that place, if we invested from that place, we could not do the kind of harm that we are doing.

What has happened is that we have separated ourselves from our own interior and from each other and from all life. We as human beings use life as a resource. We use this planet as a resource. That tree is a resource that I have dominion over. That relationship is devastating. All life is sacred. And the planet is a living planet. That’s the story that we need to be telling. Instead, we are financing the destruction of our own living planet. Who destroys their own home? And we can put on our blinders and put up our walls and our fences and not look at it and continue to look at the bank account and make sure that we are continuing to make that money. Investments are going good. As investments go up, resources go down. It has an inverse relationship. As this GDP goes up, the planet goes down. What about your children? What about your children’s children? We are completely delusional if we think we’re going to get away with this. We’re all suffering. We’re suffering from our separation, we are trying to buy our way out of our suffering.

So I would love you to articulate that incredible quadrant that you talk about as a way for everybody to sort of place themselves in this in a pragmatic way. Some people might read this conversation and just be overcome by despair. But you know, between despair and denial is action.

“ All life is sacred. And the planet is a living planet. That’s the story that we need to be telling. Instead, we are financing the destruction of our own living planet. Who destroys their own home? ”

Jack Kornfield is a trained Buddhist monk and one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practices to the West in the 1970s.

Issue 60 of Dumbo Feather magazine speaks to the theme of belonging and how we can reimagine our relationships with one another and the earth.

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But that has a nuance to it. And you’ve got a great way of articulating that nuance.

In any movement for change there are these four quadrants. And people are typically drawn more to one than the other. Doesn’t mean that you’re only one. But you have a proclivity towards one more than the other. And they all start with the word “R.” So there’s the quadrant of “resist.” There are people who are resisters. They resist the current system that is happening right now, and okay, I’m in America, you know who’s the President of the United States, you know who’s running our government. He who goes unnamed. There is a lot of resistance to this regime and it’s really important. The Women’s March is an example of resistance.

The next quadrant is “reform.” The reform quadrant is people who are on the inside of the system. They’re reforming it from the inside. They say, “The only way to do this is to be in government or to be in whatever it might be, the system,” and you may be working in Silicon Valley and you’re really trying to get more diversity, say, you are reforming the place that you work. And that is really important.

Then there are the “re-creators.” And the re-creators are like, “You know what? I am over here outside of the system and I’m going to create a new world. I am re-creating.” And my place at Impact Hub Oakland is filled with a lot of re-creators, right? Re-creating a new system that has no waste, for example.

The fourth quadrant is “re-imagine.” The re-imaginers are actually out front, way out front, saying, “Come this direction. I have a vision of what

the world can look like.” And the re-imaginers can’t do any of it if you don’t have what you’re working towards instead of what you’re working against. And the re-imaginers are those folks who are mainly creatives. ’Cause there’s never a movement without art leading and being a major part of it. Art is vital. The artist, the magicians, the seers. And so those are the four quadrants: resist, reform, re-create and re-imagine. And everybody’s doing their part. And with all of it, change happens. But often what happens is that we set ourselves in one quadrant and say, “That’s not going to work. Why are you resisting? Why are you inside the system? Get out of the system!” No, no, no, no, no, all of it is necessary. And that is what is going to bring about the kind of transformation that we want to happen with the planet.

What next?

REFLECTWe can so often feel guilt that we are not doing enough, which is really guilt that we are not doing everything! How do we acknowledge the things we are called to do and walk towards them without being distracted by the guilt of walking past what’s not ours?

LEARNThere are a range of resources available to learn more about the Sharing Economy, including a TED Talk by Rachel Botsmon titled “The Economy of Trust,” and her book, What’s Mine is Yours.

WRITEConsider the four R quadrant and write about the R that resonates most with you. What are you doing in the quadrant now? What would you like to be doing? How can you get there?

READGet your eyes on Jack Kornfield’s latest book, No Time Like the Present.

ATTENDThe annual SOCAP (Social Capital Markets) conference in San Fransisco convenes thousands of impact investors, world-class entrepreneurs and innovative cross-sector practitioners dedicated to increasing the flow of capital toward social good. Visit their website for more.


Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

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Next Steps for Making Your Portfolio BeautifulIt feels a little presumptuous to be offering advice (we’ve only just met) so instead we’ll just point out some paving stones. Some for solo travellers, some for travellers in groups. Feel free to step on them, or jump over them, or beat a new track through uncharted wilderness.

Individuals & Families Foundations & NGOs Mainstream Finance & Business Know yourself and decide what you care about.Is it creativity, leaving a better planet for your kids, protecting wildlife and lands, climate activism, sharing abundance, or building vibrant communities? Whatever really fills you with joy, pick out your north star before you start moving.

Consider where your capital is.What have you got, and where is it? Your superannuation, your mortgage, your savings, your investments. Who’s managing it, what do they value and what use are they putting your finances to?

Find a guide, an advisor, a mentor or just someone to chat to.There are lots of people who’ve gone before you (and many more will come after you). If you’ve picked up this edition, you’re probably just one step from someone who’ll be able to help you.

Read, converse, join.Aside from the books and websites we’ve already mentioned, check out: – responsibleinvestment.org – socialcapitalmarkets.net – toniic.comGetting to know these folks mean you don’t have to figure out everything yourself.

Just start!You don’t need to get to perfect and 100 percent done in a single step. If changing your bank is a pain, maybe your retirement savings are easier. Maybe find a green investment fund to put $5 into once a week. Take a bow, ramp it up.

Know yourself, your colleagues and your company’s values.Look, this step might throw up some contradictions, but hopefully not. Your own values and your company’s business model might overlap a lot, or a little. Also consider your appetite for being an outsider. Some folks have the stomach for being a continual internal agitator, whereas some people like to work with a like-minded group and speed up its work.

Find your tribe.You’re probably not alone. Honestly, most people hold similar underlying values (that’s backed up by good social science), and they’re probably seeing the same world you are. Having a tribe to work with is much more fun and sustainable than going it alone.

Find out what’s been happening and respect your company’s journey.Seeing that most people have similar values, if your company’s current situation doesn’t line up with your hopes there’s probably a complex set of valid reasons. That doesn’t mean progress should stop, but it’s probably going to help if you assume good faith and really understand the reasons your company works like it does.

Consider where you, your team and your company hold a powerful lever.You’re part of a movement, so you don’t need to do everything yourself. Spend your effort wisely. If you work in a team assigning foreign aid infrastructure projects, maybe there are improvements to be made by requiring that assignees promote human rights?

Just start!If you’re at this step, you’re probably somewhere specific that we couldn’t understand as well as you. But start, just start; we really do believe that action, taken with humility and care, is a better bet than inaction. There’s work to be done.

“ Realising the ambition for change set out in the UN Sustainable Development Goals requires us to think differently about how to direct investment to where it connects with people and how they experience impacts—positive and negative. When we combine aspirational vision and leadership for the future with actions that connect with people where they live and deliver positive impacts that matter, the results can be truly transformative.”

Rosemary Addis, founder of Impact Investing Australia

Know yourself, your colleagues and your company’s values.As well as the questions in the first step, consider what your collective values and mission are. It’s probably important to separate them, because your values might suggest what not to invest in, while your mission could prompt proactive capital allocation.

Find out whether your organisation’s investments line up with your values.This is where the paths start to diverge. Organisations are complex and diverse! But generally speaking, answers will come from your investment policy and investment committee (this might be you!). Your advisors will have more. Be prepared for ambiguous answers and conversations that start but don’t conclude quickly.

Get clean investing on the agenda.This will be a discussion, because it’s probably not your unilateral decision. But you may need to simply get agreement that there’s a conversation to be had.

Just start! Divestment is probably the lowest hanging fruit.It’s easier to start by getting rid of the worst investments—the ones that clearly contradict your organisation’s values. Maybe you’re invested in land mines! Or tobacco companies, or coal-fired power plants. There are plenty of neutral or generally positive assets to replace those investments.

Going to the good.Now that your company has started improving its portfolio, keep turning the dial. Reinvest the next-worst funds into better still.

Get mission aligned.The nirvana is finding investments that actually contribute positively to your mission. If you can get here quickly, so much the better. But don’t be surprised if it takes some time to tick this final box.

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“ You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”Buckminster Fuller

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Journey to Impact · 2020-04-29 · Happiness First implemented in Bhutan, Gross National Happiness values collective happiness and wellbeing as the goal of governance, ... prosperity