⚡Speakers
Good morning! Hope everyone had a great weekend. If you missed Friday’s recap and community highlights, you can find it here.
Announcing our speakers
Tomorrow Today
🎟️ Thursday, December 5: Intro to Unconventional Activism
Only 10 spots remaining.
Password: tomorrow139
Change cannot be achieved alone, only together. In that spirit, we are kicking off community events at our space in New York City. Eat some food and learn from seasoned unconventional activists who have started and have been part of mission-driven companies to accelerate change. Here are our speaker:
Anjali Chandrashekar
Anjali is the founder of Picture It, a global social project that uses artivism to raise funds and awareness for various health, humanitarian, and environmental causes. Her projects have been featured by the UN, and she presented had the opportunity to feature her work at the Word Economic Forum at Davos in 2011. Anjali also works as an innovation strategy consultant at Doblin.
Karen Mac
Karen is a Business Development Associate at Acumen, an impact investment fund that invests in social enterprises that serve low-income communities in developing countries around the world. Before Acumen, Karen worked at the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship and has also spent time supporting female artisans in Bolivia and improving sanitation usage in India.
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Let’s get into it!
ESG funds aren’t real
There’s a knee-slapping WSJ story about how “Eight of the ten biggest US sustainable funds are invested in oil-and-gas companies, which are regularly slammed by environmental activists.” Shocking? BlackRock Inc. explains:
A BlackRock spokesperson said the firm has designed its sustainable funds to offer investors similar risk and returns that they would achieve in broad market indexes while including the highest ESG-rated companies in each sector.
Let me repeat. “The highest ESG-rated companies in each sector.” One more time! “The highest ESG-rated companies in each sector.” If there’s an entire group that is not environmentally conscious, then you just invest in the ones that aren’t acting as bad.
I still don’t get it. What BlackRock is basically saying is if you excluded an entire sector that’s not good for the environment, then you wouldn’t own the same stocks as the overall market. This could mean your fund would underperform if fossil-fuel companies did well. You wouldn’t want that, would you?
So is the fund really ESG? Depends on your definition. It seems that the goal for many funds is not to build a fund of environmentally conscious companies, but rather the goal is to track the market, while having “ESG” in the name. Why? well the ones that focus on index tracking outcompete the ones that focus on environmental, social, and governance issues alone. That’s not in performance, but demand for the actual fund. So really, the existence of these artificial ESG funds is a mix of investor demands and marketing.
We’ve said it before and we’ll keep saying it. The US needs better overall standards when it comes to all things related to social impact. Whether that’s the metrics that measure positive and negative change over time, databases that centralize that information for analysis, or the companies we label as environmentally friendly, we need consensus.
Xinjiang Papers
Continuation of our conversation on China.
Last week, we mentioned how the New York Times published the Xinjiang Papers. They’re 400 pages of leaked documents that expose China’s internment camps for Uighur Muslims. It’s terribly alarming and we’re going to do a deeper dive occasionally to give updates and explore what is happening. In addition, if we can figure out any ways to help or do anything about this human rights crisis, we’ll also include them here.
A virus. The language around how China describes Islam is awful. They use words such as “virus,” an “infection,” an addictive “drug” and the kicker is that the language comes from the top. President Xi Jinping has been describing the people and the faith in these ways since 2014.
More tomorrow. We’ll continue with some background and ways to help. If you’ve heard of any unique ways to do so, please send them here.
Short takes
More toilets! Bill gates unveils new toilet. What makes it special? It transforms waste into fertilizer and doesn’t require water or sewers.
114,000 students in NYC are homeless. Here’s two that share their life experiences. [More to come here on how you can help]
Uber stripped of it’s London license. The city refused to give the company a new permit over safety and security concerns. However, it can still operate while appealing the decision.
Michael Bloomberg for 2020. The billionaire and former NYC mayor announced his candidacy.
HK’s protest movement won at the polls. Pro-demo candidates, many with ties to the protests, captured a majority of the district council seats. There was a historic turnout.
Tomorrow Today
🎟️ Thursday, December 5: Intro to Unconventional Activism
Change cannot be achieved alone, only together. In that spirit, we are kicking off community events at our space in New York City. Eat some food and learn from seasoned unconventional activists who have started mission-driven companies to accelerate change. Stayed tuned for speaker announcement and the menu. Get excited!
Only 10 spots remaining.
Password: tomorrow139
Igniting Tomorrow
💰 $100k-$250k Pre-Seed Funding
UPDATE: We’ve already had multiple people reach out and share their ideas. It gets us super excited to learn more about the projects and companies everyone is working on. Please keep reaching out. We’ll be releasing more information around this in the upcoming year.
Many of you are either already working on a number of world-changing things or have ideas bursting out of you everyday. Our goal is to see unconventional activists like you succeed. Let us help connect you into the space and access the financing you need to get started. If you’d like to share your ideas (or know a friend working on something exciting), please reply to this email!
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