The Reconstruction

As co-convener of the Black Innovation Alliance, Kelly Burton is working to bring together small business owners and startup founders to help Black and Brown entrepreneurs level up – and change the narrative. Launched last year, the coalition of 50 organizations in two dozen U.S. cities include Aniyia Williams of Black & Brown Founders, Daniel Wright of 1863 Ventures, Luis Martinez of We Tha Plug and Jessica Norwood of Runway. The collective's ten-year goal is to recruit at least 500 organizations to support, fund, and sustain one million Black innovators.

Ashindi  Maxton and Sharon Chen of Donors of Color Network and Danielle  Deane-Ryan of Donors of Color Action join the show to discuss their   campaign to redress racial funding disparities within climate giving.

Current systems of credit are not working. Indigenous wisdom points to more promising approaches: deep local engagement and character-based lending. “Just because you're unbanked, or not banked at the moment, doesn't mean you're actually high risk. It just means the system hasn't worked for you,” Vanessa Roanhorse, CEO of Roanhorse Consulting and co-founder of Native Women Lead, says on the latest episode of The Reconstruction podcast.

Nwamaka Agbo of the San Francisco-based Kataly Foundation is re-imagining capital as a tool for justice and regenerative wealth-building to “build the type of community that we want to see.”

Stephen Nicoleau joins The Reconstruction podcast to discuss the intersection of infrastructure and climate justice at a moment where both private and public investment in climate solutions are ramping up.

With hurricane winds still blowing and rain falling, essential workers already are stepping up to bring back services and communities in Louisiana and elsewhere. No, it’s not too early to center equity, justice and worker rights as Hurricane Ida relief efforts get underway. “We have to give the workers a shot at finishing the project of repairing and resilience after disasters, because our lives truly depend on it,” Saket Soni, executive director of Resilience Force, tells host Monique Aiken.

The overhauling of mass incarceration to advance justice in criminal justice requires the leadership of people who have been directly affected by imprisonment and injustice. “We are proximate to the problem," says DeAnna Hoskins, CEO of JustLeadershipUSA, who was a mother of two young children when she was incarcerated during her struggles with addiction in the 1990s. "If our voices are not heard, we're going to continue to recycle this inequity."

Enterprise, the 40-year-old nonprofit affordable housing developer, has set out to change the structure of the real estate industry, starting with themselves. Lori Chatman, president of Enterprise’s  Community Loan Fund, joined the Reconstruction podcast to share how the Enterprise is working to dismantle America's legacy of racism in housing by changing the way the organization lends to real estate developers.

Can venture capital be kind? This simple question is at the heart of the impact investing firm Kind Capital and its founder, John Duong. Duong joins Monique Aiken to share how investors can rethink venture capital by focusing on bold, long-term impact, wrap-around support for talented entrepreneurs – and authentic kindness.

Ipshita Mandal-Johnson was raised in India and says growing up in an unequal society helped her overcome limitations. With a new life sciences fund, Mandal-Johnson is again going beyond what has historically been possible. Mandal-Johnson and co-founder Giorgio Reggiani are investing their Global Bio Fund exclusively in women-led bio startups with solutions in health and wellbeing, food and agriculture and energy and environment. Women-led companies generate more revenue with less capital and return a higher investment rate of return than male-founded firms

The Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative, originally founded to incubate green businesses to address social challenges, was relaunched in 2017 to address a major piece of unfinished business: Atlanta’s racial wealth gaps. Latresa McLawhorn Ryan, the initiative’s managing director, joined The Reconstruction podcast to talk about strategies to build income and wealth for Black Atlantans.

Tommy Johnson and Fennie Wang are developing a certification process to authenticate products of Black culture. Through a blockchain-based cryptographic mark, MWBC certifies products as ethical commercial uses of Black culture, even as they change hands over time.

A just Reconstruction requires an understanding of how the country’s past shapes its present, and how the Tulsa Race Massacre and the systemic injustices surrounding it undermined wealth-creation across generations. Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, founder of the Terence Crutcher Foundation and Greg Robinson of Tulsa’s Met Cares Foundation join host Monique Aiken to reflect on the impact of the massacre on survivors and descendents.

Investing in the success of women and girls is the closest thing to a silver bullet solution that humanity has. Yet a mountain of facts haven’t been enough to motivate much change. Why, and what can we do about it? This question has informed a century of movement-building by women leaders around the world, including Marime-Ball, Founder and CEO of Women of the World Endowment.

The Nathan Cummings Foundation says it has nearly fulfilled the commitment made three years ago to align 100% of its $450 million endowment with its mission goals – and confirmed that aligning foundation assets  with positive impact turns out to be a way to make a decent return as well.

Illumen Capital's Daryn Dodson joins host Monique Aiken to discuss how reducing racial bias in asset management can optimize performance and boost global prosperity.

Foxworth, CEO of Oakland.-based Common Future, gets personal in conversation with host Monique Aiken in the latest episode in The Reconstruction, the new podcast series from ImpactAlpha. In their conversation, Foxworth and Aiken range from the need to confront power, to possibilities for reparative investing to empathy in a time of division.

Host Monique Aiken sits down with sociologist and demographer Jessica Barron and her colleague Marion Johnson to discuss how women of color have mobilized themselves to protect and expand the rights to vote, and in the process turned themselves into key players in the future of democratic rule.

Traditional due-diligence and risk-assessment frameworks in the asset management industry have led to a system in which white, male asset managers control 98.7% of the investment industry’s $69 trillion in assets under management. Enter Due Diligence 2.0, a new framework aimed at catalyzing the movement of capital to BIPOC managers.

Monique gets the scoop on Due Diligence 2.0 from the team that helped craft it: Rachel Robasciotti, Founder and CEO of Adasina Social Capital; Brent Kessel, Founder and CEO of Abacus Wealth Partners; Tracy Gray, Founder and Managing Partner of the 22 Fund; and, Erika Seth Davies, Founder of the Racial Equity Asset Lab. 

Carmen, the CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, joins Monique Aiken.

Playwright, labor activist, and historian Gene Bruskin joins Monique to discuss his musical The Moment Was Now, and the parallels between The Reconstruction period and today.

Melissa Bradley founded 1863 Ventures to accelerate and invest in Black and Brown founders and to demonstrate entrepreneurship as a viable pathway. For the inaugural episode of The Reconstruction, she joins Monique Aiken to discuss how historical awareness guides 1863's investment thesis, how the investing community has reacted to the BLM Movement, and much more. 

Introducing: a new interview series from ImpactAlpha, hosted by Monique Aiken, focused on moving capital towards justice.