by John Katovich, Cutting Edge Capital
Foundations, Families and Funds can play a very important role in helping to redirect capitalism toward a more fair and just application, while also finding the right social enterprises to support.
By playing a more comprehensive role in the creation and support of Community Capital Markets, these funding sources can build impact into a systemic approach. In addition to investments they make into the social enterprises either directly or through other intermediaries, they can also facilitate opportunities for the 90% of households that are prevented from participating in the private capital markets by investing in the structures that form alternative capital markets open to everyone.
We are better informed today than ever before about the rapidly expanding wealth and income gaps. Many recent studies show the top 10% of U.S. households now have over 75% of all the wealth in America. The next 24% of American households make up almost all the rest of all the wealth, leaving the bottom 40% with 0% wealth, and the bottom 60% with a whopping 3%! And the gap is growing fast, not shrinking, which portends many new challenges to our society.
Clearly we need to think about whether the current approaches are working, and if not, shift the paradigm.
As economists like Thomas Piketty have thoughtfully surmised, this growing gap will not improve without either government intervention or opportunities similar to what the wealthy have had - i.e. the same chances to invest and to begin to grow some wealth of their own. For anyone out there who follows the current dysfunctional state of our government, I would not hold out much hope for the first option anytime soon.
Regardless of the causes, our current state of affairs seems to point toward us having to right this very serious problem ourselves, and right it we must.
In the U.S., our government actually limits 90% of households from having any access to the private capital markets, leaving their investment options only in either the public capital markets, or alternatives that I've written about here, via Direct Public Offerings, or perhaps through the new state and federal crowdfunding options.
The irony is that, in the interests of protecting the 90%, only the very wealthy 10% continue growing their wealth. They have access to opportunities that far surpass anything found in the public capital markets. The 10%-er's may also use the public capital markets to hedge, speculate, or even arbitrage if they like, but their real wealth generation comes mostly from those private markets. But neither of these kinds of markets helps us to form the systemic structure we need to build healthier communities.
Which leads me back to how Foundations, Families and Funds can help.
The list of impact investors is growing every day, and we will all continue to work toward better identification of who is truly acting as a social enterprise, e.g. companies building business models to tackle some of the most difficult and seemingly intractable social and environmental problems, including climate change, poverty, water, energy and real estate, etc.
I refer to the entrepreneurs above as our new community of social enterprises, which includes those with a clearly defined mission, who are focusing on achieving impact at scale for all stakeholders (workers, customers, community, environment), but who also understand the importance of connecting via deep impact into their local populations. These kinds of entrepreneurs place a high degree of importance on the generation of mission aligned revenues (from clients or others whose mission is aligned), and tracking/publicly reporting on their impact on a regular basis (transparency).
It's encouraging to know that many investing organizations are now looking to make real impact via their investments by seeking out these entrepreneurs, even if we're still in the nascent stages of trying to square that with the goal of getting back "market rate returns." Leslie Christian just posted a great blog on this conflict here.
However, supporting those entrepreneurs with an investment is only one of two key components we need to have a healthy Community Capital Market. Focus also needs to be provided to the 90% of households so they can participate as well, even if half or more of them currently have no wealth to employ as investments into a market. These households need opportunity, which they are now starting to see with the alternative investment vehicles mentioned above, but even more important, they need experience, education and understanding in terms of what it means to be an impact investor - one that may not need those "market based returns," whatever that means.
We need a whole system approach in place for community investors and community entrepreneurs to be able to find each other, which is what a Community Capital Market can be.
10 years ago, my good friend Don Shaffer (now at RSF Social Finance) and I embarked on a project to develop Local Stock Exchanges. I wrote about the need for these in several publications and even took a position at the Boston Stock Exchange to mirror a national exchange at a local level. But looking back, there is one critical element I got wrong. We don't need to replicate the public capital markets with a lively secondary trading component that fosters speculation and arbitrage (using the need for liquidity to justify the madness they have become). We need a much more simple system in place that allows for the efficient transfer of individual's savings into socially responsible companies, allowing for modest healthy returns, and some reasonable offerings of an exit if necessary. We need to power it with the right tools, education and mentors to help guide the ones that have not had access until now. We also need to reconsider what a capital market needs to be today, and not fall for the trap of manic returns and unlimited growth.
Foundations, Families and Funds can get behind this new kind of capital market by funding the system that can facilitate the Impact we need, and if they desire, they can also play a member-based role in how we operate it - much like exchanges used to be structured, before they turned into the same shareholder primacy driven entities that list on them today.