Breaking down borders for diversity and impact: seven conversations from the Aspen Action Forum
Last month, I travelled to Aspen, Colorado for the 2019 Resnick Aspen Action Forum. The theme was “Borders Within and Around Us,” and 500 people from more than 40 countries gathered to contemplate the real and perceived boundaries that limit our impact, and what we can do to expand our focus and identify new opportunities for collaboration.
I had the opportunity to run a workshop on “Investing For Opportunity: Closing The Diversity Gap in Entrepreneurship” with Kenyan activist and investor Ory Okolloh, the Director of Investments at Omidyar Network, and Kim Polese, the Founder and Chairwoman of CrowdSmart. But as befits the border-breaking theme of the Forum, I found that conversations connected to gender-smart investing came up everywhere I went.
Here are seven stories of conversations that particularly impacted me, and which highlight the diversity and innovation happening in the gender-smart investing movement. I hope they inspire you to think about unexpected opportunities for collaboration in your own work, and how you can break down borders to grow your own impact.
1. Diversity in nature and investing.
To kick off the Forum, about sixty of us went on a beautiful walk in the mountains with a nature guide. While we were there, we contemplated the value of diversity in the forest ecosystem and how this mirrored the value of diversity in humankind. Aspen had just experienced a once-in-300-years avalanche season, and there were fallen trees everywhere. At first glance, it looked like carnage, but our guide emphasized how powerful the destruction was for biodiversity and the ecosystem. It made me think of my friend Katherine Collins, whose book The Nature of Investing shows how the investment industry can learn from biomimicry and the natural world.
2. How do we bridge the gap between our values and our investment practice?
On the bus to the walk, I happened to sit next to the CFO of a major institution. At least 50% of their constituents are women, and their employee base are passionate about diversity and inclusion, but the organization does not currently incorporate a gender lens in their endowment investments or pension plans — like many organizations, there was a border between their beliefs, their programming, and their investment practice. We talked about how she, and others like her, could start this conversation, and who to start it with: from educating trustees and investment managers about the opportunity and imperative of more diverse endowment investments; to examining their pension plan to make sure it better reflects the successful gender balance of their workforce; to networking with peers in other organizations on the same issues.
3. Challenging perceptions about who and what is fundable in California’s Central Valley.
One of the participants at my workshop, Carrie Norton, told us about the fund she is working on to serve immigrant women working in food and agriculture in California’s Central Valley. California produces the vast majority of many fruits and vegetables grown in the United States — including 95 percent of garlic, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots — with an agriculture industry dominated by women and immigrants. Yet because they don’t fit the stereotype of the classic “entrepreneur,” these women business owners are very under-resourced. If we can increase capital and support to these women business owners, it will improve the stability of both their families and the California food system, but we don’t necessarily currently have the right investment systems and structures in place. Carrie is currently researching the needs of these businesses to identify the kind of capital the women need, who the logical funders are, and the appropriate structure of the fund.
4. Using cognitive diversity to broaden the investment pool.
Also at our workshop, designated “conversation starter” Kim Polese shared how her investment platform CrowdSmart has taken bias — including gender bias — out of the funding process by combining world-class AI with a global community of 2000 experts to make investment decisions. Their secret sauce is the diversity of knowledge and perspectives they draw upon. For example, when deciding to invest in Cocoon Cam, a baby monitor designed to reduce the incidence of sudden infant death syndrome, they turned to a NICU nurse and a health tech expert, alongside classic business growth experts, to rationally evaluate the business on its own merits. CrowdSmart’s cognitive diversity puts the focus on what you know rather than who you know, and as a result, 40% of the businesses CrowdSmart has invested in have been either founded or co-founded by women.
5. Using a gender lens to fight trafficking in the fishing industry.
So many of the most meaningful discussions at Aspen take place outside the official plenaries and seminars, and one late night, I found myself in a conversation with a Republican ex-legislator who was passionate about fishing and the outdoors. He told me that the particular subset of fishing he was passionate about was a $2 billion industry, but that too many companies in the space were indirectly involved in the slavery and trafficking that plagues international fishing supply chains. So he teamed up with a Nepal-based entrepreneur to create the first global brand in his subsector that would make its mark on the industry by having an entirely slavery-free value chain, with an exceptional focus on women. It was exciting for me to learn about a group of men who were committed to building a business on this basis, using a gender lens to disrupt an industry in a not-obviously gendered product arena.
6. Connecting artists and social impact investors.
If you want to change perceptions around gender and equality when it comes to women, media and culture have such a huge role to play. At Aspen, we were lucky to see a performance of Borders, the play about the Syrian civil war by British playwright Henry Naylor that took the Edinburgh Fringe by storm in 2017. Like much of Naylor’s work, Borders had a strong focus on women’s experiences, and I talked with Naylor about his strong social impact stories about women, and the challenge of funding. Our conversation reminded me of discussions I’ve had with my friend Laura Callanan, whose Upstart Co-Labconnects investors with the creative economy, amplifying the power of art as a critical tool for social change.
7. Sometimes, a well-placed border can help us make more impact.
We spent a lot of time at the Forum talking about where borders are useful and where they’re not. It’s easy to focus on the ways that borders limit us, but there are places where they are helpful too. At their best, borders can sharpen our focus, helping us identify what’s important and spot opportunities that too often get lost in the status quo. It makes sense, for example, to create women-only funds if funds that are theoretically open to everyone systematically under-represent or exclude women founders and women-focused businesses.
Borders aren’t inherently a bad thing. But we should be consciously thinking about where to build them up and where to break them down, and for what reasons. The world of gender-smart investing is a ripe place for this critical thinking to happen.
