Are you using your change-making power?
One of the sentiments I hear expressed from family, friends, and my social media feeds, is a sense of helplessness around the state of our society, our climate, our democracy – institutions and a planet that seem to be disintegrating in front of our eyes.
I, too, often feel overwhelmed and rendered powerless by the onslaught of crises we face. Systemic racism, climate change, misogyny, LGBTQ+ discrimination, a housing crisis, lack of adequate funding for health care and child care. A disproportionate distribution of wealth and power perpetuated by racially oppressive and extractive economic, financial and political systems. Some days, I have a sinking feeling that we are moving further and further away from realizing a vision of shared prosperity and a thriving planet.
An exercise that gives me hope is to analyze the ways in which I hold power to enact change and to evaluate how I am using this power.
What are the resources at my disposal – time, energy, money – and am I fully engaging these resources in alignment with my values?
We often talk about using our power to make change through things like reducing our carbon footprint by eating less meat and driving electric vehicles, voting for thoughtful leaders and changemakers, and volunteering our time to groups doing important work.
And on the financial side, we think about gifting to non-profits and political movements who are doing the work on the ground, or being thoughtful about how we spend our money, spending locally from values-aligned retailers.
All of these are important ways we can exert influence.
But it’s less often that I hear people refer to their investment dollars as a source of their change-making power.
This puzzles me, as I’d argue this is where people with financial resources can have the most impact – just based on size on these respective buckets alone. Impact per dollar may be higher on the gifting side, but the sheer amount of dollars on the investment side represents a lot of untapped potential.
Take this scenario: A person with a $5 million dollar investment portfolio is gifting to non-profits and political movements at $50k/year and spending $200k/year. What is happening with the remaining $4.75 million? Why would we isolate our potential impact to our gifting and spending budgets? What if we could activate the power of all of our resources for change? And what if the benefits of well-intentioned gifting and spending are offset by the harms caused in an traditional investment portfolio (a blog post for another day).
Investing the same way we did 20+ years ago no longer makes sense with a planet in climate emergency and a society based on an extractive economy that has produced vast inequalities in wealth and income. If we believe that change is an imperative, then we must consider all resources at our disposal to make progress in this direction.
The cognitive dissonance between our personal values and our financial lives is a missed opportunity to make progress on these critical issues.
At Humanize Wealth, we believe we are at the crossroads of a massive opportunity for using wealth, and its associated power, to drive positive social and environmental outcomes. We encourage our clients to use all levers of power available to them. The core of how we help is rooted in purposeful planning and an investment strategy that is an expression of hope – a direction of resources not just away from harmful things, but towards investments that actively express desired outcomes.
In our next blog post we’ll be sharing a framework that outlines the tools available to investors who want to use their power to make change. We’ll also highlight the themes we are excited about and how we run them through an investment portfolio and gifting strategy. Stay tuned!
