How can communities, foundations and other investors co-develop financial instruments that radically redistribute wealth and assets more equitably?
Big Society Capital
Mathew Lawrence
Common Wealth
Geraud de Ville de Goyet
Barking + Dagenham Giving
Susan Sakash
Project Officer, Cooperation New Orleans Loan Fund
Gilda Haas
LA Co-op Lab and Board of The Seed Commons
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In the 1980s, across the UK and US, political leaders championed the idea of ‘shareholder democracy’. Successive public institutions were privatised; this was celebrated, alongside the liberalisation of financial markets, as a new way of distributing wealth and ownership across the population, and giving all of us a say in the shaping of the priorities of these institutions, and therefore our wider economic wellbeing.
In this enabling environment, the asset management industry has enjoyed explosive growth. Recent decades have seen a concentration of wealth, as capital has increasingly become concentrated in the hands of the few, and a destructive focus on ‘maximising shareholder value’ has crowded out other possible priorities.
But what if capital was not compounded or stockpiled to serve a few? What if it flowed and circulated freely to serve the collective commons? Gopal Dayaneni recently stated, “The transition of philanthropy has to do with being able to turn the inward flow of investment and continued acrument and return that wealth to communities - an endowment for the commons.”
There are also a growing number of innovations and experiments around new kinds of financial instruments, that are designed to move wealth back into communities and the commons. These innovations are the focus of this panel, and include, for example: