As a matter of practice, and as an attempt at metal hygiene, I generally try to stay off email and digital media on weekends. Since I often end the week with unread messages and content, that means the new week begins with a backward glance over the previous few days.
This morning as I caught up on the backlog of news and posts from my favorite sources, this exchange on Milton Brasher-Cunningham’s Don’t Eat Alone blog leapt out to me:
It’s only Thursday night and it has already been a long week.
I feel fairly safe saying I think I speak for a majority of people and not just for the way things feel at our house. As I said last night, life is hard right now… Ginger said, “I need someone to write something hopeful.”
“I’ve been writing something hopeful,” I replied.
“Have you been reading your blog posts?” she said with a laugh.
We both laughed. And I started thinking about what hopeful thing I could say tonight, which made me start thinking about recipes.
As an ordained minister and professional chef (among his many other professional roles and identities), Milton openly wrestles with life’s sorrows, horrors, and terrors, and crafts meaning through sermons, poetry, meals, and music.
As a reader and writer, and specifically as a practicing impact investor, I resonate with both sides of this exchange: Milton’s assertion that he has been writing something hopeful, and Ginger’s gentle dig to the contrary.
What is hopeful?
Merriam-Webster offers this definition:
adjective
1 having qualities which inspire hope
hopeful signs of economic recovery
2 full of hope, inclined to hope
noun
ASPIRANT
Olympic hopefuls
Who or what inspires hope?
Milton and Ginger are both people who are inclined to hope. I think the difference between Milton’s and Ginger’s comments in the above anecdote illuminates a distinction between qualities and signs.
Like Milton and Ginger, my Reinventure colleagues are all inclined to hope — that is, notwithstanding all that each person on our team has experienced of outrageous fortune’s slings and arrows, they all continue practicing, embodying, and sharing hopefulness in uniquely individual ways.
In preparation for our semi-annual Reinventure team retreat last week, Yuritzi tasked each of us to identify three songs that represent our lives. Out of the dozens that crowded to be included in my list, I chose Bill Withers’ Lovely Day, The Style Council’s Walls Come Tumbling Down, and Midnight Oil’s Sometimes. For me these three songs — and many others in my life soundtrack — convey the kind of quality of hope that Milton persistently writes about. Each is an assertion of choice: choosing to act on the conviction that we are not bound by grim circumstance.
Consider:
“When I wake up in the morning, love
And the sunlight hurts my eyes
And something without warning, love
Bears heavy on my mind
…
When the day that lies ahead of me
Seems impossible to face
When someone else instead of me
Always seems to know the way
Then I look at you
And the world’s alright with me
Just one look at you
And I know it’s gonna be
A lovely day (lovely day, lovely day, lovely day, lovely day)
(Lovely day, lovely day, lovely day, lovely day)
A lovely day (lovely day, lovely day, lovely day, lovely day)
(Lovely day, lovely day, lovely day, lovely day)”
“You don’t have to take this crap
You don’t have to sit back and relax
You can actually try changing it
I know we’ve always been taught to rely
Upon those in authority
But you never know until you try
How things just might be
If we came together so strongly
Are you gonna try to make this work
Or spend your days down in the dirt
You see things can change
Yes and walls can come tumbling down
Governments crack and systems fall
‘Cause unity is powerful
Lights go out, walls come tumbling down
Yes they do, yes they do, yes they do, yes they do, hey)”
“I know, I know that the cannibals wear smart suits and ties
And I know they arm wrestle on the altar
And I say, don’t leave your heart in a hard place
…
Sometimes you’re beaten to the call, sometimes
Sometimes you’re taken to the wall
Sometimes you’re shaken to the core, sometimes
Sometimes the face is gonna fall, but you don’t give in”
For me — and based on these songs’ global popularity, for many others as well — these expressions of defiance are profoundly heartening because they deny the last word to either despots or despair. On the contrary, they emphatically and persistently assert that better is not merely a theoretical potential, it is in our power to achieve.
For regular doses of this quality of hopefulness I look to Ellen McGirt’s RaceAhead newsletter, Jemelle Bouie’s newsletter, and First Dog on the Moon’s political cartoons, among many others.
At the same time, even the most adamantly defiant among us look for a sign once in a while to affirm our conviction that better really is possible, to encourage us in our resolve and hearten us in pursuit of that better.
This summer as global climate change has gathered momentum and human events have maintained or accelerated a relentless cadence of atrocities, signs for hopefulness have seemed increasingly rare and fleeting. I feel Ginger’s need for more of them, and find myself seeking them out both for my own sustenance and to share with others who are also in need of nourishment.
Some examples of signs that inspire hope and renew my hopefulness include the growth of Adasina Social Capital; the extraordinary communities of practice cohered by Browning the Green Space, Black and Brown Founders, Racial Justice Investing, IDiF, and others; and also the growing profusion of truly excellent speculative fiction / science fiction / fantasy novels — particularly coming from Tordotcom and Orbit — framed around credible, realistically drawn characters and societies adhering to a higher set of principles than our present global social norms of dysfunction and brutality.
We have in our possession ample evidence that better is already being attained. Full stop. That bears repeating: we have all the evidence we need to diagnose and excise the pathologies of our existing financial norms and standards, and to do better.
Moreover, the simple fact that systemic transformation of the financial realms is readily conceivable means that structural change is indeed attainable, even if it isn’t easy. There are models we can build on.
It’s not hopeless. And we don’t have to wait for a perfect solution or for someone else’s permission to participate in creating better. We can all invest for better right now, as we continue to seek out more innovators and ways to rehabilitate our capital from an instrument of mass destruction to a tool of positive transformation. We can improve as we go.
The choice is ours every day, with each investment, selection, sourcing, and hiring / promotion decision. That’s something hopeful.
Both / and
The bumblebee in the image here represents both a quality and sign of hopefulness.
As bees and other pollinators are dying off from the results of pollution, agricultural toxins, and other avoidable assaults, I am heartened to see bees visiting the flowers in my yard and neighborhood. They are not gone yet, and maybe our efforts to provide more nectar-rich, pesticide-free food sources for them might even contribute to staving off wholesale population collapse.
This bee in particular makes me smile, flying about in apparent oblivion to the existential threat — moreover while looking like a plump hamster or Boh mouse from Spirited Away rather than a creature of the air.
Go.
Even when we are practiced at celebrating and savoring moments of joy and defiance with the people and things around us, the most obstinate quality of hopefulness can get worn thin.
Like Milton and Ginger and Bill Withers and everyone you have ever known, your hope can grow threadbare from inner and outer wear and tear. Those who benefit most from the world as it is — and sadly, many of those who suffer most from the world as it is — will do everything in their power to beat down the quality of hopefulness, to deride and discredit the abundant signs attesting the system we have is neither inevitable nor optimal nor immutable nor invincible.
It can be grindingly exhausting to hold fast to the awareness that sanity is not statistical, and to persist in opposing the hegemonic dogma of might makes right — including for those of us working to reform the financial realms under late stage capitalism.
This is why it is vital to connect with peers, colleagues, and allies, to share both qualities and signs of hopefulness, and to replenish your hope.
Hopefulness is a renewable resource, even if we don’t understand how it regenerates when we choose to act in spite of our own discouragement. The final song reference for this post, The Innocence Mission’s Go relates the paradox beautifully:
“Georgia, it grew in the night when you thought it was tired
And how can it always recover and come
And want to whirl you around with your eyes closed
No matter how you say: I won’t go, go, go
Georgia, we follow along, it goes pretty far
You go ahead, I’m going to wait in the car
Instead of run with my feet when they won’t go
Okay I will, but I don’t know, go and go, go
And you would think now hope would be tired, but it’s alright
And you would think now hope would be tired, but it’s alright
And you would think tired, ragged, and oil-brown, but it’s alright
And I know it seems useless
I know how it always turns out
Georgia, since everything’s possible we will still go, go, go
And you would think now hope would be tired, but it’s alright
And you would think now hope would be tired, but it’s alright
It’s alright
It’s alright
It’s alright”
As all these writers and musicians and practitioners of investing for better — and many others — remind us, things can change when we go together, when we choose to act on hope even when it is tired and ragged and defiled. Even then, when it seems useless, everything is possible. History and fiction alike are rife with moments when an act taken in threadbare or even desperate hope has been the catalyst to convert the seemingly impossible into the inevitable. You may even find personal examples of this truth in your own experience.
Unity is powerful
Here at Reinventure Capital our investment strategy and practices are framed by both quality and readily visible signs of hopefulness.
We invest where the venture capital community denies by both word and deed that genius, opportunity, innovation, or financial value exist: we invest exclusively in US-based companies led and controlled by BIPOC and/or female founders at breakeven and poised to grow profitably.
We hold a firm conviction based on our experience and mountains of publicly available signs that this investment strategy can and will contribute to meaningful system change, to forming the lever and fulcrum that transform the purportedly impossible into the inevitable.
It is challenging and draining work going against the vigorous, even aggressive denial of the financial realms. Yet we are also renewed and inspired by the examples of our fellow investors and founders who are building positively impactful investment practices and enterprises that generate equitable wealth, opportunity, and change. We are heartened and renewed by joining in community with them, working together to escort the change that is possible into being.
For us, you are something hopeful.
How might we come together in hope to repurpose capital for better? Please contact us to discover how we might support and amplify each other. And as always, please share your quality and signs of hopefulness, so we and others can renew each other and go together.
***
Image credit: József Szabó / Unsplash
*While there’s no such thing as a guarantee in investing and no one can reliably predict the future, Ed’s prior track record delivering 32% IRR to investors provides direct evidence that it is indeed possible to consistently invest for both financial returns and system change. If you are an accredited investor and would like to learn more about investments that can advance social, racial, and gender equity by supporting high-value companies led by people of color and/or women, please contact us to start that conversation.
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