Theme: Eco-nomics
Thursday, April 6th
4:45 pm: Democratizing our Economy and Building the “Next System”
Presented in collaboration with the Democracy Collaborative
Imagine a world in which workers in construction, nursing and home care, farming, social work, teaching, etc., and all the rest of us—we, the people—are the ones who make the key decisions about how to allocate resources in our communities, not wealthy CEOs, massive corporations, or corrupt politicians. This session will delve into what a truly democratic, decentralized/localized economy would look like and closely examine examples of such initiatives already operating around the world that point to a “next system” radically different in fundamental ways from the failed systems of the past and present and capable of delivering superior social, economic and ecological outcomes. With: Laura Flanders, host/Executive Producer of The Laura Flanders Show, author of Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, Inspirational Political Change in America; Hilary Abell, Co-founder and Chief Policy & Impact Officer at Project Equity; Akaya Windwood, Lead Advisor at Third Act.
April 6th | 4:45 pm to 6:00 pm | Magnes Museum
Panelists
Laura Flanders
Host and Executive Producer | The Laura Flanders Show
Laura Flanders, one of the pre-eminent progressive journalists and media figures in the country, is the host and Executive Producer of the nationally syndicated The Laura Flanders Show, which airs on nearly 300 PBS stations nationwide (and online, on radio, and as a podcast). She is an Izzy-Award winning independent journalist, a bestselling author (including of: Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, Inspirational Political Change in America and Bushwomen) and a recipient of the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center.
Akaya Windwood
Lead Advisor | Third Act
Akaya Windwood, founder of the New Universal Wisdom and Leadership Institute, on the faculty of the Just Economy Institute, “Lead Advisor” at the activist group Third Act, and former President of Rockwood Leadership Institute (for ten years), also directs the Thriving Roots Fund. A longtime “transformation facilitator,” Akaya has won slews of awards for her activism and visionary leadership and is the author of: Leading with Joy: Practices for Uncertain Times.
Hilary Abell
Co-founder, Chief Policy & Impact Officer | Project Equity
Hilary Abell is co-founder (with Alison Lingane in 2014) and Chief Policy & Impact Officer with Project Equity, has been an employee ownership practitioner, thought leader, and advocate since 2003. With a mission to foster economic resiliency in low-income communities, Project Equity raises awareness about broad-based employee ownership (EO), helps successful businesses transition to employee ownership, and develops policies and partnerships to advance EO. Recent highlights include seeing client companies in low-wage industries share more than $1M in profit with their worker-owners and helping pass the California Employee Ownership Act. Hilary’s publications include Worker Cooperatives: Pathways to Scale, The Case for Employee Ownership and California Cooperatives. Hilary has been a fellow with Echoing Green, Common Future, and the Institute for the Study of EO at Rutgers University. She and her co-founder received the 2022 Heinz Award for the Economy
Friday, April 7th
3:00 pm: Money Flowing Like Water: The Restorative Capital (R)evolution
Presented in collaboration with Full Spectrum Capital Partners
As the breakdown of systems rooted in myths of separation, supremacy and scarcity quickens, humanity is rising, in partnership with the rest of the natural world, to ways of life that seek to bring humans back into balanced and reciprocal mutuality with each other and the natural world. Part of this is a quiet revolution underway in the financial system. New visionary “capital stewards” engaged in reparations work, asset transfers, philanthropy, impact investing and “restorative finance” are finding ways to make capital flow like water and become a healing medicine that starts to repair the harms of our collapsing extractive economy. Join us for a dialogue with some leaders in the “full spectrum” and “integrated capital” worlds who will share how the transformations in their own lives and communities have opened up new pathways to support money to flow with the spirit of water. Hosted by: Taj James, founder, Movement Strategy Center and Full Spectrum Capital. With: Damien Goodmon, CEO of Downtown Crenshaw Rising; Dr. Stephanie Gripne, founder and Director of the Impact Finance Center; Joseph Cureton, Chief Coordinating Officer of Obran Cooperative and ObranCaptial; Chad Dyer, Trustee of Future Allies Foundation and Good Life Pledge Capital Steward.
April 7th | 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm | Crystal Ballroom, Hotel Shattuck Plaza
Panelists
Taj James
Co-Founder and Curator | Full Spectrum Labs
Taj James, co-founder and Curator at Full Spectrum Labs, a Principal with Full Spectrum Capital Partners, and co-founder and a Senior Advisor at Movement Strategy Center, is a father, poet, strategist, designer, and philanthropic and capital advisor. Taj seeks in his work to connect community stewards with capital stewards in order to bring financial value into alignment with sacred values in ways that build community wealth.
Joseph Cureton
Chief Coordinating Officer and Co-Founder | Obran Cooperative
Joseph Cureton, Chief Coordinating Officer and co-founder of Obran Cooperative, the first worker-owned conglomerate corporation, focuses on corporate strategy, capital formation and transactional support for the Cooperative’s mergers and acquisitions practice. A serial entrepreneur (with additional backgrounds in software design and culinary arts), his work seeks to build pathways to a solidarity economy, centering on the challenges faced by modern workers.
Stephanie Gripne
Founder and CEO | Impact Finance Center
Stephanie Gripne, Ph.D., founder/CEO of Impact Finance Center, is the creative force behind several social enterprises designed to accelerate the Impact Investing Movement and move $1T into a number of social ventures that do well by doing good. Lauded by Forbes as “the Steve Jobs of impact investing,” Stephanie is continuously identifying, educating, and activating philanthropists and investors who want to become impact investors, and has, in just five years, helped generate 260 direct impact investments totaling some $260M.
Chad Dyer
Partner | Full Spectrum Capital
Chad Dyer is a Partner at Full Spectrum Capital where he focuses on accelerating Just Transition using the Good Life Pledge framework. He also serves as advisor to Adasina, Anthropocene Ventures, Bronze, The People’s Ecosystem, and circular fashion social enterprise Suay Sew Shop.
Damien Goodmon
CEO | Downtown Crenshaw Rising
Damien Goodmon is the CEO of Downtown Crenshaw Rising and the architect of the Liberty Ecosystem. Raising over $34 million in philanthropy and $90 million in commitments from impact investors and debt partners, the attempt to acquire the Crenshaw Mall is the most successful capital raise for a community-owned real estate project in American history. Based in the Crenshaw community of L.A., the Liberty Ecosystem's mission is to liberate marginalized communities by building a community-driven, people-centered, environmentally-sustainable local economy.
4:45 pm: Practicing Regenerative Finance: How Community Loan Funds, Shared Governance and Reinvestment Support Local Solutions to the Climate Crisis
Presented in collaboration with the Climate Justice Alliance
Community loan funds are creating new possibilities for funding local solutions to the climate crisis, while also addressing a long history of institutional disinvestment in traditionally disenfranchised communities. Four grassroots organizers on the frontlines will speak to the ways that reinvestment campaigns are calling on philanthropy to invest in these local funds, redefine traditional conceptions of risk and return, and center stewarding wealth in ways that generate healing rather than harm. With: Gopal Dayaneni, co-founder, Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project; Loren White Jr., Community Development Coordinator at the Indigenous Environmental Network; Lupe Romero Elicea, Co-Director for the Climate Justice Our Power Loan Fund; Briana Sidney, Cooperation Richmond.
April 7th | 4:45 pm to 6:00 pm | Golden Bear Room, Hotel Shattuck Plaza
Panelists
Gopal Dayaneni
Co-Founder | Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project
Gopal Dayaneni, who has been organizing and campaigning for social, economic, environmental and racial justice since the late 1980s, is a co-founder of Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project, dedicated to the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture and to a Just Transition away from profit and pollution and towards healthy, resilient, life-affirming local economies. Movement Generation (MG) is a founding member of the Climate Justice Alliance. Gopal, currently a member of MG's Planning Committee and board, continues to work closely with the organization on diverse projects and also supports movement-building through his work with several other organizations, including The Climate Justice Alliance, ETCgroup, NDN Collective, the Center for Story-based Strategy and People’s Solar Energy Fund.
Loren White, Jr.
Community Development Coordinator | Indigenous Environmental Network
Loren White, Jr., who has been working on environmental and economic justice for nearly 20 years, recently joined the Indigenous Environmental Network as its Community Development Coordinator. Since 2018 he has been working with Indigenous frontline communities to help design and develop, manage and maintain the collaborative Regenerative Community Loan Fund, as well as assisting in bringing to fruition a number of other projects rooted in principles of sustainability, equity, and “Just Transition.”
Lupe Romero Elicea
Co-Director | Climate Justice Alliance’s Just Transition Revolving Loan Fund & Incubator
Guadalupe “Lupe” Romero Elicea, Co-Director of the Climate Justice Alliance’s Reinvest in Our Power initiative, migrated from Mexico to the Bay Area at 17 and became involved with the Immigrant and Chicanx student movements. Guadalupe later became a worker-owner of Spectrum Apparel printing and co-founded its political arm, Printers United, with the goal of creating screen printing for art, revolutionary propaganda and social movement support.
Briana Sidney
| Cooperation Richmond
Briana Sidney jumped into the world of cooperatives at 19. She became a worker-owner at Mandela Grocery Cooperative for 5 years. In her time there she fell in love with cooperatives. She joined the Cooperation Richmond team to help the Richmond community establish ownership over their local businesses.
Saturday, April 8th
Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers CEO and Founder
The energy transition race is on. Fossils fuels have peaked. What do we need to get renewables to prevail as fast as possible, and can we make that victory good for everyone? The 2020s will be the decisive decade in the climate justice fight. Where and how we create the new energy economy, who gets to lead it, who owns it and who works in it now matter more than ever. We must prepare for a large pulse of eco-industrial activity the likes of which the world has never known. As we race to the finish line of the transition away from fossil fuels, visionary “green” entrepreneur and founder of New Energy Nexus Danny Kennedy will present a plan to build out the full 3D potential of clean energy—not just distributed energy, but decentralized in ownership and democratized in control. Highly decentralized global grassroots entrepreneurship is central, as the pathfinding work of New Energy Nexus is demonstrating.
April 8th | 9:56 am to 10:15 am | Zellerbach Hall
Introduced by
Kenny Ausubel
CEO and Founder | Bioneers
Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder (in 1990) of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.
Keynote
Danny Kennedy
CEO | New Energy Nexus
Danny Kennedy, with a long background in eco activism, has become one of the nation’s leading figures in clean-technology entrepreneurship and the capitalization of the transition to a “green” economy. Co-founder of the solar energy company, Sungevity, and the clean energy incubator Powerhouse, Kennedy supports the clean technology and energy fields in myriad ways. In addition to leading roles with Third Derivative (a joint venture with the Rocky Mountain Institute) and the California Clean Energy Fund, Kennedy is currently CEO of New Energy Nexus, a global nonprofit providing funds, accelerators, and networks to drive clean energy innovation and adoption.
California’s $48 billion Climate Commitment in 2022 plus the Federal IRA represent a once in a lifetime opportunity to onshore the supply chains and build the infrastructure needed to transform our economy to carbon neutrality, while creating jobs and justice for the 100%. How can California and tribal nations such as the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians partner for an equitable clean energy future rooted in a circular regenerative economy? What would it look like to have the original landowners at the helm of a place-based industrial strategy to onshore an advanced battery and EV manufacturing supply chain to Inland Southern California? With: Jesus Arguelles, Economic Development Director of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians; Rebecca Lee, New Energy Nexus; Bryan Vega, New Energy Nexus. Hosted by: Danny Kennedy, CEO, New Energy Nexus.
April 8th | 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm | Freight & Salvage
Panelists
Danny Kennedy
CEO | New Energy Nexus
Danny Kennedy, with a long background in eco activism, has become one of the nation’s leading figures in clean-technology entrepreneurship and the capitalization of the transition to a “green” economy. Co-founder of the solar energy company, Sungevity, and the clean energy incubator Powerhouse, Kennedy supports the clean technology and energy fields in myriad ways. In addition to leading roles with Third Derivative (a joint venture with the Rocky Mountain Institute) and the California Clean Energy Fund, Kennedy is currently CEO of New Energy Nexus, a global nonprofit providing funds, accelerators, and networks to drive clean energy innovation and adoption.
Rebecca Lee
Managing Director of California | New Energy Nexus
Rebecca Lee is the Managing Director of California at New Energy Nexus, a global non-profit organization working to accelerate a just and equitable clean energy future by supporting diverse clean energy entrepreneurs with funds, accelerators, and networks. Previously, she led the regulatory team at Sungevity, a residential solar developer and more recently, was a Senior Fellow at Gridworks where she facilitated workshops with diverse stakeholders to develop collaborative frameworks to advance equity and accelerate decarbonization. Rebecca was also lead author and researcher for "Advancing High Road Labor Standards in Transportation Electrification."
Bryan Vega
Program Associate | New Energy Nexus
Bryan Vega, a Program Associate with New Energy Nexus (a groundbreaking clean energy nonprofit seeking to "create an abundant world with a 100% clean energy economy for 100% of the population in the shortest time possible time"), is working on the ground on the “Lithium Valley” project in the Salton Sea area. Raised in both the Valle of Mexicali in Mexico and California's Imperial Valley, Bryan, who has an academic background in political science and ethnic studies, is an experienced community organizer and civil rights activist.
Jesus Arguelles
Economic Development Director | Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians
Jesus Arguelles, the Director of Economic Development for the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians (TMDCI), is dedicated to accelerating the transition of TMDCI's sovereign tribal economy into an inclusive and equitable regional engine of strategic economic development. He works on: tribal-focused community planning and infrastructure development; environmental sustainability; cultural and natural assets preservation and enhancement; sovereign and circular entrepreneurship; social equity and justice practices; business portfolio diversification in “green," added value industries; financial literacy and fitness; and wealth-building and intergenerational transference.
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