Dana Lanza, Confluence Philanthropy
As we planned for the Fourth Annual Advisors Forum, scheduled six weeks after President Biden’s inauguration, we knew that our members would be ready to decompress and “Reset” after exactly a year of the pandemic. We structured this year’s event to offer a member-only space for an honest exploration of the challenges confronted and those that remain on the horizon.
Even as the pandemic appears to wane with the promise of mass vaccination, complex challenges remain, such as the climate crisis, the challenge of true democracy, increasing ...
Jetta Wong, Clean Energy Innovation Project at ITIF
It was an honor to speak at Confluence Philanthropy’s Climate Solutions Summit this month. Particularly intriguing was the collaborative nature of the event, and the sharing of new ideas on how to engage each other and important parts of the US innovation system to further the development of new clean energy technologies. Confluence is a compelling organization, and the ideas and activities of its members should be shared broadly so others may learn and adopt its transformative investment practices. Sharing successes and supporting new ideas ...
Sarah DeNicola, Confluence Philanthropy
The opening plenary during the Racial Equity themed second day of the 2021 Advisors Forum focused on how to support BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) investment managers and was moderated by Larry Lawrence, Executive Director of MSCI ESG Research. Lawrence opened the session by centering discussion about how just 1.3% of money is managed by women or racially diverse managers. He then engaged panelists John Barker, Managing Director of Investments at the Kresge Foundation and Shuaib Siddiqui, Surdna Foundation Director of Impact ...
Nicole Sawran, Pivotal Ventures
The year 2020 was remarkable for women in public office. Record numbers of women ran for and won seats in Congress and in state legislatures. The first woman was elected Vice President. And she also happens to be the first Black woman and first South Asian woman elected Vice President.
But despite this progress, women—and women of color, in particular—are still underrepresented as candidates and office-holders at every level of public office in the United States. In the 2020 election cycle, women were only about a fourth of all ...
Greg Neichin, Ceniarth
While much of Confluence Philanthropy’s 2021 Climate Solutions Summit centered on the mammoth challenges of climate change mitigation, with conversation focused on topics such as the Paris Accord and China’s Climate Policy, we at Ceniarth were happy to have the opportunity to lead an off-the-beaten-path breakout session about climate justice and energy access.
We were a small group of six in attendance, a sparse gathering, perhaps indicative of the fact that most impact investor interest in climate change still remains focused more on ...
Edie Farwell, Confluence Philanthropy
At the 2021 Climate Solutions Summit there was no shortage of consensus that this current window of opportunity is our best chance to address climate change. COP 26 is on the near horizon, and the Biden-Harris Administration and China both recently sent signals they are very much on board to effect change. As investors, we must move immediately and ambitiously to move capital if we are to avert climate disaster.
In a discussion on embracing the Paris Accord, moderator Aimée Christensen started off explaining that it will take $150 ...
Shilpa Patel, ClimateWorks Foundation
We’ve just wrapped up the Confluence Climate Solutions Summit. The day was heavily devoted to “net-zero” – a much bandied term that seems to pop up everywhere these days, from country commitments to corporate targets to industry campaigns. Our break-out session tried to make sense of what this means for the impact investment community and philanthropy more broadly.
What exactly is net-zero?
In a sentence: Net-zero is a balancing of produced emissions with negative emissions. To be consistent with a 1.5⁰C warming scenario, we ...
Stacey Faella, The Woodcock Foundation
On the opening day of Confluence’s Advisors Forum, Democracy Day, we had the privilege of hearing from keynote speaker Desmond Meade, President and Executive Director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. Desmond’s successful leadership is anchored in his proximity to the issues on which he leads. We heard his incredible story of overcoming hardship, from homelessness, addiction, and felony convictions, to becoming a leading advocate on behalf of those around him who were impacted by the criminal justice system. As he shared, in 2016, ...
Jasmine Rashid, Candide Group
It was an honor to share space at Confluence this year with my friend and colleague Tanay Tatum-Edwards, Founder and CEO of FreeCap, and to be joined by a number of asset managers and philanthropic leaders who came in asking not just how do we comprehensively divest from the prison industrial complex,but what next? I personally love to spend time collectively imagining the “what next,” which so many of us are actively building through our actions and capital investments today.
We began the session with one question: “How many people ...
Mark Spalding, The Ocean Foundation
We believe that climate change will transform economies and markets, and that firms producing climate mitigation or adaption solutions will outperform the broader markets over the long run.
Thus, we are all climate investors now. What does this mean? It means this is no time for patience. Act now. Don’t wait. We do not need more data. Do it for your future, for your children’s future, and certainly for all future generations.
It also means that you can still stick to your existing themes and areas of interest. Don’t stray from ...
Alexandria Murnan, Travois
I was honored to be invited to the Confluence Philanthropy Advisors Forum to lead the discussion for the session "Investing in Affordable Housing with a Racial Equity Lens." I direct the affordable housing team at Travois, a Certified B Corporation focused exclusively on promoting housing and economic development for American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian communities, and I am grateful for the opportunity to elevate the story of tribal communities.
Since the “inception” of this country, racism has systemically impacted the ...
Danny Kennedy, New Energy Nexus
This must be about the most important time to get our “practice” of fund management and investment right from the point of view of people and the planet as there has ever been. If this isn’t “the moment we’ve been waiting for”, then when the hell will it be!? And I’m thrilled because at Confluence’s Climate Solutions Summit, for the first time, we contemplated an important major change agent: China.
“China” is often looked at as a big monolith given its government structure and culture. But that’s about as informed as understanding the ...
Sonia Kowal, Zevin Asset Management
I recently had the privilege of interviewing Jeff Orlowski, the director of the documentary The Social Dilemma, which tracks the fall of our information age to the disinformation age and examines the role of social media companies in eroding our social fabric. The situation is akin to a horror movie but one where we have the power to choose the ending.
The business model of social media companies seeks clicks and eyeball time by keeping people angry, anxious, and emotionally piqued. It also relies on vast data accumulation and a loss ...
Dan Chu, Sierra Club Foundation
We are facing the greatest challenges to humanity in our lifetimes from the combined pandemic and climate crises. These two existential threats are tearing apart the fabric of our society and exposing deep inequities and injustice.
These two crises impact all of us, but with particularly devastating impacts on communities that are most economically and environmentally stressed. The Sierra Club Foundation is deeply and urgently committed to addressing such systemic racism. Having already divested from fossil fuels, we are proactively ...
Nili Gilbert, David Rockefeller Fund
Bridging Leadership
Peggy Dulany, Founder and Chair at Synergos and I were honored to come together in a fireside chat for Confluence Philanthropy’s Reset 2021: Climate Summit to discuss a topic that is top of mind for many leaders today. How can we limit global warming to 1.5°C, and stave off the worst effects of climate change?
It was so special to combine Peggy’s perspective as a renowned philanthropist and activist, with my own perspective as a mainstream investor. Together with several other leaders, Peggy and I recently ...
Justin Florence, Protect Democracy
I was grateful to lead a breakout session on “Building a Stronger, More Inclusive Democracy: Tackling Voter Suppression, Advocating for Voter Policy Reform, and Supporting Fair Elections” during Confluence’s RESET2021 summit. We discussed how American democracy is threatened by converging strands of authoritarianism. At a global level, democracy is in retreat at the hands of a new wave of autocratic strongmen. Here in the U.S., there’s a resurgence of violent white supremacism -- which for decades used authoritarian tactics to dominate many ...
