"What's the world going to look like in 2075 if we continue to invest in corporations?"
A conversation with Tiffany Brown & Kate Poole of Chordata Capital
Sometime around summer/fall 2020 I noticed the word anti-capitalism shift from niche corners to wider internet meme-fodder. Like a lot of concepts and phrases that pick up steam in the wider halls of the internet, the more the phrase was thrown around the more the meaning became…fuzzy? muddled?
I saw “anti-capitalist” slapped on all sorts of nouns and concepts, and in quite a few of those instances would sort of scratch my head with a “huh….?” Was sliding scale pricing on a mastermind group teaching people to build a 6 figure business really anti-capitalist?1
To be clear, the word gained steam under a broader sort of awareness around economics and justice (a good thing!) and so if I, a cranky old radical, sound a little salty, that’s not my intention.
I’m introducing my conversation with Tiffany Brown and Kate Poole—partners in Chordata Capital, an anti-capitalist wealth advisory firm—by bringing up this linguistic slipperiness because I think it’s worth digging into what transforms “capital” from a neutral-ish substance into an -ism that intensifies inequality and injustice.
Kate and Tiffany work at one of the roots of what turns capital into an ism: the system which facilitates people with vast sums of wealth to continue making lots of money on their money. They work with high net worth individuals, particularly those with inherited wealth, to shift money out of Wall Street and extractive investments and into community-driven spaces that center racial and economic justice. In a sense, they’re working to transmute capital out of the ism and back to a substance that supports communities.
They are, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò wrote in his book Elite Capture, building a “worldmaking project, aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, rather than the mere critique of ones we already have.”
I spoke with Kate Poole and Tiffany Brown, co-founders of Chordata Capital, about their work transforming wealth management through a lens of racial and economic justice. Our conversation explores how to build new economic infrastructure grounded in solidarity, relationship, and repair2. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Chordata is an anti-capitalist wealth management firm, I'd love to start by hearing about how these seemingly contradictory terms— anti-capitalism and wealth management— have come together in your practice. What does that actually look like in practice?
Kate Poole: We come into this work of investment advising and wealth management from organizing spaces, centering racial and economic justice. We've always been anti-capitalist people. It's a little bit different, both of our paths into the work, but that commitment for us means a commitment to wealth redistribution rather than wealth hoarding and wealth accumulation. It means centering feminist practices, shifting wealth and power away from investors to workers.
Tiffany Brown: I entered this space by way of donor organizing from my early twenties. One of my dear friends when I was 24 inherited millions of dollars. I remember having conversations with her, grappling with how money just made money off of itself without any kind of productive labor. One year she was like, "My money just grew by $700,000 and I did nothing." She actually donated all that capital for movement leaders to distribute collectively.
Talking about philanthropy, at some point it emerged that foundations maybe only really give away 5%. Then there's this question of what happens with the other 95% [of the money]. As we started to look at the realm of investing, we realized it was like the wild west—just devoid of any kind of values to govern that space. When we launched Chordata Capital, we had knowledge of what you could call direct placements or manual placements—investing outside of the stock market into different loan funds and cooperative loan funds. We had a commitment to bring the same value set that people embrace around giving in these donor spaces and apply it to an investment thesis.
KP: I come into this work from an ownership class, a wealthy family. I got connected to Tiffany back in 2013 through Resource Generation—I was a constituent and she was the retreat director. I had been part of Occupy Wall Street and anti-capitalist learning, local currency work, community land trust work. The framework I was thinking about was moving money off Wall Street into small businesses and supporting local economy and local production. Going to that Resource Generation conference, I got a lot of information around the repair work and reparations and decolonization needed to address the historical harm and violence that has built wealth for some in this country at the expense of others.
I've heard you both talk about your work as a spiritual practice. Would you speak about what you mean by that and how spiritual practice grounds your work?
KP: The work around repair is spiritual in the sense that when we come into our lives and into this world, we have an opportunity to work for justice. For people with wealth, part of that work needs to include [asking], where does the wealth that you have access to come from, and what does repair look like? How can you be using your wealth and your power to shift the economy into one that works for everyone and not just for rich people?
Work around racial justice and reconciliation and repair is also an essential part of this work. I've been really grateful to work across class and race with Tiffany and for us to dream together into what an economy that works for everyone looks like. I know that as a white wealthy person, I don't have the answers around what needs to be done or what that repair is going to look like. It's only through collaboration and through this work in the ecosystem that we can actually come up with strategies that work.
TB: In my anti-racist work, I realized that in any conversation about race, white people would often shut down and there was no way to move forward. I discovered this work called Be Present that does work across difference—know yourself outside the distress of oppression, listen to others in a clear and present state, and build effective alliances. As I was engaging in donor organizing work, another aha moment was that the American dream wasn't working for anyone. I was aware as a black woman, having studied the civil rights movement, that the American dream doesn't work for many marginalized identities, but then in the donor organizing space, seeing that there were so many white people with wealth that were feeling mired with guilt and isolation.
The way this feels like spiritual work for me is: what is it to work across class and race towards this shared vision? Racism has been both dehumanizing for Black people and also dehumanizing for anybody who participates in it. It's been powerful to slow down these moments and figure out what it is to build a practice rooted in both our shared humanity and the hope that we could foster this environment where folks from different backgrounds building the solidarity economy can work with radical wealthy folks who also have a different vision.
“We know our economy works for the rich and hurts everyone else. Investing in the Solidarity Economy, or simply put, investing directly in communities, creates space for communities to decide how to share resources and build the cooperatives, businesses, projects, jobs and organizations that they want and need.
If you are a wealthy person and want to restructure the economy to redistribute wealth and power more equitably, the most strategic thing to do is divest entirely from the stock market and invest in the Solidarity Economy.” — via Chordata Capital’s Zine
It sounds like you both are practicing ideas of bridge and relationship-building within your own partnership and with clients and partners simultaneously your own firm is as important as a place of practice as your work with clients. What have been your growth edges together? How do you reground in your relationship as partners in the practice?
KP: Something that's been really supportive for our partnership is we came in not really knowing each other that deeply but with a very spirit-led sense that this was the work we were meant to be doing together. Chordata is the phylum of animals that have a backbone, and it's been helpful to ground in what is our backbone. We have this commitment to racial and economic justice, this commitment to shared risk and interdependence, and a commitment to bringing our whole selves to the work.
Something that's been really challenging is we're in finance, which is a really bleak industry where basically all the default assumptions go against our core commitments and values. It's been challenging to question all the default assumptions around how we'd structure our business, how we would share resources, how we would structure client portfolios, how we would fee on them, the speed at which things would work.
That's been something that we've done a good job navigating, but as constantly a growth edge around what is mainstream, or even what is “socially responsible investment” doing? I put that in scare quotes - what is this world of supposedly values aligned impact investing doing or saying? Are they saying you can still make a market rate return and have the kind of impact you want to have on the world? Well, that's not something that we believe in. So then in our work with clients, how do we be clear about our own understanding of where wealth comes from and what the role of a wealthy investor is in building an economy that works for everyone? That's part of the growth edge of our business.
TB: There was this way that Resource Generation had been in the news, of rich people doing something different—it was this really sexy story. When different press opportunities would come up for us, it was really easy to center this narrative about the radical act of Kate as an inheritor making this choice to get into finance and disrupt it, and then she brought along her friend Tiffany. It was this invisiblizing narrative that didn't feel like it was just by accident— it was something that we became brutally aware of as our work become more public. A growth edge has been how Kate and I navigate that and position ourselves and tell our story in a way that visibilizes the risk that I took and the background that I have, while still acknowledging the beauty of the radical act of Kate to be for justice and redistribution.
That's a really good segue to something I wanted to talk about, which is how you frame and think about risk. The way we usually talk about risk in the financial sense is about rewards for investors and always about the people who have power and how that power gets amplified. You talk about one of your backbones being to embed risk and accountability and frame it very differently and more holistically.
KP: Part of our Theory of Change is that there are lots of investors who have a commitment to racial and economic justice, and we think it's a strategic role for those investors to be taking a lot more risk supporting a solidarity economy. We look at the risk of continuing to accumulate and hoard wealth, the risk of continuing to grow the racial wealth divide, and the risk of not investing in anything that's supporting our planet or our communities. If we're going to invest in, say, a beautiful Palestinian-led food business in the Bay Area, we think about the kind of risk that entrepreneur is taking versus the risks our clients might be taking in investing 2% of their total portfolio. We're thinking about how we can change the power dynamic from the given venture capital arrangement into one that's sharing risk more fairly. Often with folks, we're encouraging them to do 0% low interest, long-term loans that aren't collateralized.
TB: Another piece I saw when I started in socially responsible investing was seeing that the risk-return profile for accredited investors— those who have over a million dollars outside of their home ownership—they were able to place their capital in these higher risk investments that by design give a higher rate of return. Just thinking that our economic system is teeing it up where players who have so much more are able to get more and more return was a rude awakening.
I remember learning about Ujima Project in Boston, and it was the first time I had experienced an investment really turn it on its head and offer a higher return to working class folks. That was a cool moment of seeing that there's this old paradigm of investing that's going to keep the wealth gap growing, unless we have these kinds of systemic interventions that question what people are entitled to.
I recall an image from one of your comics, Kate, of individuals hauling their individual buckets of water through the system versus building pipeline and infrastructure. I think about that all the time. Even in my practice, working with folks who aren't necessarily wealthy but are resourced, they have a hard time thinking beyond that individual frame. When we start to imagine what else could be different, there's almost this we hit, where we get stuck worrying about our individual safety and needs: will I have enough for retirement for example. How do you think about and work within that tension between individual needs and shifting resources to serve community?
TB: Well, with wealth management being really focused on client service and centering the investor, the way that manifested originally for me was asking, "What do you want to invest in, individual human?" If they really loved food and farming, let's design a portfolio based on their individual theory of change.
When Kate and I built our business, we realized that individual theories of change don't shift anything—maybe it makes you feel good because you're investing in what you believe in, but it's divorced from a collective action approach, which is what we came from in the donor organizing sphere.
We think of ourselves as doing this work not just as Kate and me, but with our comrades in the solidarity economy. Practically what that looks like is, instead of maybe a $50,000 investment in East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, it would be a $2 million investment because we're representing our base of 40 different clients. That makes such a huge impact to these places where we invest.
KP: Something that's been really sweet about thinking about not just shifting wealth, but shifting power is that we are seeing in the ecosystem so much more community-controlled funds and community-controlled real estate projects. We went to the Right to the City member assembly, and they were lifting up all these stories of tenant takeovers—both the political organizing that can win legislation for tenants' first right of refusal if an apartment building is coming up for sale, but also the economic organizing that makes that capital available for tenant organizers and renters to be able to make that purchase.
The tension does really exist within these community-controlled real estate projects around individual wealth building versus collective wealth building. Like we were just at Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston—in building a real estate project like that, part of the tension is if someone buys the building for $100,000, what can they sell it for? Is it capped? How do you keep that real estate affordable over the long term? If you have this commitment to keep it affordable, that's going to limit the individual or family's capacity to build wealth.
I'm thinking about how in my work, and it sounds similar in yours, my advisory practice, Wanderwell as a business, become a microcosm for the work itself. You're not outside of these tensions either.
TB: My mom rented her whole life and one of my biggest goals was to buy a house because I want to be okay, and I want to make sure that's a home where I could ideally have space to take care of my mother. She already got priced out of Marin, which is where I'm from, and moved up here in the North Bay. So in the big life goal of acquiring a home, which really Kate and I did together by generating surplus in our business—figuring out savvy ways to meet this core objective.
The value set that Kate and I have and our work are pre-institutional—we're not a cooperative, we're not a collective, but we have this value set that feels like the emergence of this third way. We're really bridging a lot. It feels really important to walk this path very intentionally.
KP: The reason we started Chordata is because we do believe that this work of investing in the solidarity economy is a key piece of how to support communities in having economic self determination. The preference or the dream we're working towards in the world is that instead of being dependent on philanthropy or these other systems where wealthy people are deciding how resources are allocated, communities have the capital they need to have wealth generating businesses and the surplus that at the community level can be distributed.
Our country has really failed to build safety for people and in fact has made it extremely dangerous and hard for working class people to access housing or healthcare. So this piece Tiffany was naming around the balance of figuring out how to get the resources you need to navigate our existing economic system while still investing in the economic system we want to be living in - it's got to be a balance.
What kinds of blocks or challenges do you see people frequently come up against in building a different understanding of their wealth and resources?
KP: The big one is this way that people are taught they're entitled to market rate returns; that investing in the stock market is like a neutral thing to do and not bad—you can just grow your money year to year and then figure out how much is enough from there. Something that really brought Tiffany and I together to do this work is we don't believe that investing in corporations is good or values neutral. We think it's bad. Corporations are the thing that's harming our planet and our communities and our government and our collective capacity to have what we need.
For me, a lot of this work is helping people understand that when you're invested in this current extractive economy, that money is coming from extraction from real people, from the environment, from all over the world. [ Our work is] getting people to shift into more of an understanding of money and investment where they're thinking about what they want their capital to be doing in the world and helping them unlearn some of those assumptions around what they should be entitled to for investing.
TB: With more traditional financial planning, I remember in one of our cohorts, someone shared that their advisor had done a financial plan model saying, "You have 1.5 million now, and if you invest with us, you could die at 98 with 16 million." And that's considered a smart financial planning model. I love when Kate asks, "And what's the world going to look like in 2075 if we continue to invest in corporations?" It's nice to throw a wrench in the system and ask some of those fundamental questions: Number one, do you need to die with 16 million, and at what cost?
I have one more question for both of you: What's one thing that's energizing you or giving you hope right now?
TB: I went to North Carolina recently and got to tour one of our first investments in that region through Invest Appalachia. I got to see their first loans to the Kautaba Collective to purchase this building in Old Fort. Then the next day, I went to check out the Industrial Commons and learn about all this incredible organizing work that they've been doing.
It was such a cool mental exercise to be like - okay, I'm in a new place and there's a history here of the textile industry leaving because of NAFTA. And then the way that across class and race, these communities have been organizing to bring industry back. I got so lit up and it's something that I feel really grateful for with our business. It's very relationship heavy and very storytelling heavy too, because we're not just investing people's money, but we're also trying to paint a picture of how investing can be different. To connect with these beautiful projects and realize that in our work, in our role as investors we're really operating as proxies for our clients' radical belief systems. [The trip] reminded me again of my sense of purpose and what a lovely gift to be able to do this job that Kate and I are so uniquely positioned to do.
KP: When we were in Boston last week, we had dinner with Nia Evans, who runs the Ujima Fund, and we were talking about how crucial arts and culture work is to building a solidarity economy. So many of the people we work with, including Tiffany and myself, are artists—everyone's like an incredible DJ or an amazing chef or painter or dancer. Something that gives me hope is that this economic power building work is so tied to the cultural work. The solidarity economy is such a beautiful, arts-infused world that we're building together.
No, no it’s not.
I recommend also listening to my recent interview with Jessica Norwood on building an anti-racist and reparative economy that centers and loves Black people; these conversations are part of a wider dialogue of how to shift resources and restructure the economy.