To my sista, Aretha Franklin: Thank you for being my musical bridge over troubled waters. You will be missed.
Did you feel at an early age that you knew what you were destined to be?
I did. But my role-to-be didn’t have a name like “teacher,” “doctor,” “engineer,” and certainly not “venture capitalist.” Those were jobs; I’m talking about a calling.
For my calling there was no formal training or degree to which I could aspire, no credential confirmed by a framed parchment on the wall, that would convey what I was destined to become. Yet my path was set early. Not by what I learned from teachers, coaches, parents and peers, but rather by what I heard and saw. And by what others heard, yet said nothing; and saw, yet did nothing.
I came to realize at an young age that my calling was to help span the gulf between the poles of action and inaction; justice and injustice; equity and inequity. To create bridges. To be a Bridger.
Sometimes We Imagine Bridges That Don’t Exist
My introduction to the need for Bridgers was harsh. It was when I first realized that in the eyes of some, being Black made me different and unworthy. My earliest recollection of a profound injustice occurred when I was barely in school, during a family vacation by car from Dayton, Ohio to Disneyland in Anaheim. Among the many places we stopped during our journey was Little Rock, Arkansas. Only intending to be there long enough to stretch our legs and cool off, having been confined to an un-airconditioned car for hours, my parents, two sisters, and I went for a walk. Along the way, I saw an outdoor water fountain and made a beeline to it to satisfy my thirst. Just as I was about to take a drink, my mother snatched me away with a mixture of fear and love. Once spirited far enough away, my mother collected herself and told me the fountain was labeled “Whites Only” and because I was Black, I could not drink there.
Could not drink water because I was Black? How could that be? What place had we entered into where invisible moats of racial injustice surrounded water fountains? It was a rude awakening. It made me wonder, “What else am I not allowed to do because I’m Black?”
Some Bridges Have Tolls
Years of my youth passed without me trying to find out. To be safe from the outer world’s indignities, I had simply retreated into the comfortable refuge of the middle-class Black community in which I lived. Then, I didn’t care that the bridge that connected my community to the outer world was a toll bridge.
In a defining moment, I learned that the exit toll could be very high, measured not in dollars and cents but rather stymied lives and thwarted talent. This moment occurred during my senior year in high school, which was attended by a 99% Black student body and taught by a 99% Black teaching staff. Its athletic teams were also coached by a 100% Black coaching staff who were among the best in our nine high school city, black or white. Yet for years they languished in their coaching positions, unable to advance despite their record of achievement.
Ben Waterman, my varsity basketball coach, finally had enough. He was a proud man, ruggedly independent, a scholar of the game. His brow was wrinkled, but he was still tough as nails. His bellowing voice was beyond fierce. More than once as a junior starter on his Varsity team he had called me out to everyone within shouting distance. “Ol’ dumb Dugger done done it again!” — a critique deserved, given my repeated mistakes on the court, but also a projection of his own personal frustration with his long journey to become just a high school coach when he was capable of so much more.
At our first practice my senior year, he put aside his pride, sat us down together and for a moment was uncharacteristically quiet and vulnerable before he spoke. “You’ve been told that its not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. Forget that. This year when you play this game, it will be more than a game. We will win, when nobody expects us to, no matter what cards we have been dealt. We will win because I don’t want to be a high school coach the rest of my life and you are my ticket out of here!”
Build Me a Bridge — A New One
The locker room was quiet. The young men who sat together that day did not hear their coach request something selfish for himself. We heard a plea for justice we could take part in fulfilling. An invitation to assemble a bridge — a new bridge — to a place too long denied.
We accepted. We worked our butts off and we won. City Champions, then on to the Ohio state regionals for the first time ever. The bridge was halfway built. The next year his team went to the state finals. Done. The following school year he was freshman coach at Ohio State. One bridge completed, one mission accomplished.
My role in this bridge building was small. But it was pivotal in my life. Sitting in the locker room that memorable day with my teammates, I thought, “I’ll do this for coach Waterman.” But what I came to realize was that I was helping myself too. By addressing his injustice, I was stepping into my calling. I was teaching myself to see the fine line between desperation and mission. To hear the inaudible cry of the quiet and the humbled pleading of the loud. To overcome the inertia of silence that breeds injustice when it comes from the powers that be. To achieve my highest professional success and greatest personal satisfaction by building bridges for others.
My Win-Win Calling
So my calling has been to help myself by helping others, by building bridges connecting disparate communities to find their common interest and shared benefits. I chose the pathway of finance to do most of my bridge building, using capital as the resource for connecting founders of color to the mainstream of American business, helping them to overcome the persistent inequities of opportunity, privilege, and wealth. With each of their successes, I in turn come one step closer to the American ideal I want to realize for myself and my children.
I have not been alone. Whether it is in finance or dozens of other fields, bridge builders have been hard at work, often invisibly, raising our sights, tearing down obsolete old one-way toll bridges and erecting new rapid transit lines, bike lanes, and multiuse spans, all for the purpose of making our nation truer to its awesome founding aspirations.
Do You See What I See?
Today the need for Bridgers is the greatest in our lifetime. So much so that we all collectively face a defining moment: our nation is pulling itself apart.
Even as we rapidly become a multicultural nation, we are even more rapidly concentrating privilege, wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer. Can we build bridges fast enough to cross the chasms we have opened, to escape drowning in the troubled waters we have churned up? Can the powerful among us, who know that these inequities persist despite their best intentions to address them, humble themselves enough to recognize that the solutions lie outside themselves and ask, just as coach Waterman did, for help?
Let’s Win Together
The bridge building that needs to occur now is not what most of us think. Beginning with the earliest days of the civil rights movement, we have been spending decades building bridges leading out of communities of color, both literally and figuratively. Yet today there is another challenge. Building bridges back to them. Our next generation of talented creatives, innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders — in short, the promise of America’s best version of itself — resides there. So long as they and their brilliance are restricted to stay isolated there, unrecognized and untapped, we all lose.
Our challenge is great, but there are existing Bridgers all around us who are experienced, up to the task, and have been preparing for years to provide the new leadership that we desperately need.
You may not be a Bridger, and perhaps you feel helplessly frustrated or even alarmed by the rising water. Maybe you or your organization feel stymied by inability to access talent, investable opportunities, new and compelling ideas. So ask. You’ll be helping yourself in more ways than you may know.
We at Reinventure are committed Bridgers eager to play our part — with you. We are poised to connect mainstream capital to the untapped opportunity represented by founders who are of color and who are women — for you. We’ve done it before, and we know just how to do it again.
Join us. Let’s build some bridges together.
While there’s no such thing as a guarantee in investing and no one can reliably predict the future, Ed’s prior track record provides direct evidence that it is indeed possible to consistently invest for both financial returns and social value creation. If you are an accredited investor and would like to learn more about investments that can promote systems change by supporting high-value companies led by women and/or people of color, please contact us to start that conversation.
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